Beginning

When I was in high school, I was a runner, a sprinter, mostly, because I found I could more readily tolerate brief bursts of all-out effort, followed by moments in which my heartbeat returned to normal and my breathing became easy. I found the distance competition simply too punishing.

Oh, I ran distances. That was part of the training. I competed some in the distance events, too, but I relished the explosion out of the starting blocks and the swift crunch-crunch-crunch of spikes digging into the cindered track, the lean into the tape at the end of the sprint, the sudden halt, the quick recovery.

I lived to run - to sprint.

Little wonder that I dreamed about running. I still do, sometimes, but the result of that, now, is that I often wake up with leg cramps.

This poem is the result of one of my dreams of running a lonely, nighttime race, then finding my track coach there at the finish line, as he so often had been.

"Beginning" received the First Place award in a Sports Poem contest sponsored by The Listening Eye, literary magazine on the Geauga Campus of Kent State University.

The poem:

BEGINNING

No crowd had leaned

forward and no shouts

had floated to my ears

except the faint few

from a group of friends

in the highest seats,

but on I ran through

a starlit, ominous

night, my crunching

footsteps echoing,

not knowing whether

the race was entering

the gun lap, barely

beginning; suddenly

ahead there loomed

the finish-line tape,

beyond which I aimed,

thrusting through

the way I was taught,

staggering to a halt,

blue stars bursting

in my oxygen-starved

brain, long-dead Coach

beside me, saying,

"I knew you could."

© 2000

***

Today's word: staggering

Afterthoughts ... in response to your comments:

Strange, isn't it, Featheredpines, what dreams are visited upon us? I used to dream of running ... and leaping over streams or other hurdles ... I'd usually wake up at that point ... with another set of leg cramps. But (knock on wood) that hasn't happened for awhile ...