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" was honored with 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