The Journey Prize Stories 21 (14 page)

That's how it should always be. The stands should always be full of parents who don't know anything – people who can't tell the difference between what is really good and what is really bad – but they're there anyway, clapping and shouting their children's names, telling them to “go” and “go.” You see why it's so nice. The lanes are crowded with kids clunking their way home to the finish line and trying so hard. They go sailing way over the high jump bar – it looks so easy and they come down on the other side, rolling softly into those big, blue, fluffy mats. It's sunny and everybody's laughing and everything is still new.

All that disappears when you get serious. At the very top end – and, when you come down to it, Burner and I were still far from the
real
top end – it's completely different. Everything starts to matter too much and too many things can go wrong and everybody knows the difference between what is really good and what is really bad. It comes back to the numbers. At the top end, we count it all up and measure it out and then we print the results so everybody can see. The guys I raced against were the mathematical totals of what they had done so far. That was it. Nobody cared about your goal or about what you planned to do in the future. It might take two full years of training to drop a single second or just a couple tenths off your personal best but you couldn't complain. We
were all in the same boat. For us, every little bit less was a little bit more.

Really, it's the opposite of healthy. People will do anything to make those numbers go down. Some of them gobble big spoonfuls of straight baking soda before a race, even though they know it gives you this brutal, bloody diarrhea an hour later. That's nothing. It's even legal. They can't ban you for baking soda, but I know guys who cross over, guys juiced up on
EPO
and guys who just disappear for a year and then come back like superstars. They say they've been training at altitude on some mountain in Utah, but everybody knows they've been through the lab, getting their transfusions and playing around with their red blood cell count. Burner and I never did that, but we used to go to this vet, a guy who worked on the racehorses out at the track. If you came at night and brought him straight cash, he'd give you a bottle of
DMSO
and a couple of these giant horse pills that you were supposed to chop up into little chunks. It sounds bad, but this was all perfectly legal too. His stuff was nothing more than super-powerful aspirin delivered in massive doses. We'd go see him and he'd say, “Now you're going to have a big dinner and a full stomach before you touch this stuff, right?” and we'd lie and he'd give us what we wanted. As if he couldn't tell that none of us ever ate a full meal. I used to pop anti-inflammatories like they were candy love hearts, going through a handful of naproxen every day.

Even the dangerous cortisone injections in those big needles, the ones they fire right into that band of tough connective tissue at the bottom of your foot, I've had those. They say you're only supposed to take three of those in your whole
life – that's all a regular person can handle – but the year before the trials, I got six in five months. I just kept going to different doctors, in different crowded clinics, guys who didn't know where I'd been two weeks earlier. It was the same thing every time. They'd go through their whole spiel again, and I'd pretend to pay close attention as they explained it all out.

“You can only get three of these,” they'd say, “just three, you understand?”

I'd look and nod my head seriously and sometimes I'd even write the number down for them, a big loopy three on one of their little pads and I'd underline it. Then I'd hop right up onto their tissue-covered table, rip off my sock, stick out my fucked-up foot, and brace myself for number 4 or number 5 or whatever came next.

It always got bad before the biggest competitions like this one, or before the Olympic trials or if there was a big trip to China on the line or carding money. You'd get stuck with this feeling like when you're blowing up a balloon and you know you're almost at the limit and you're not sure if you should give it that little extra puff because there might still be room for a last bit of air, or it all might just explode in your face.

Burner and I started our warm-up jog about an hour before the race was scheduled to go. It took me a while to get started, and for those first few minutes I hobbled along doing the old-man shuffle until my body came back to me and my Achilles remembered what it was supposed to do. Burner was smooth right from the beginning. While I jerked up and down, fighting against the parts of myself that didn't want to do this anymore, he kind of hovered beside me flat and easy. We were
like two people at the airport. He floated and seemed to move along without any effort – like one of those well-pressed, put-together guys who zooms past on the moving sidewalk – and I was like the slob with too many carry-on bags, huffing and puffing and dropping things, hauling all this extra stuff and just hoping to find the right gate. Even my breathing was heavier than it should have been.

We made a big loop out and around the stadium, winding our way up and down the quiet little side streets, past houses full of people who couldn't care less about what was happening just down the road. Burner and I had probably run thousands of miles together, but I was pretty sure these would be the last ones. I'd been thinking about it for a while, but I decided it there, during that last little warm-up jog. I think all those houses where nobody cared kind of forced themselves into my head.

“This is going to be it for me,” I told him, after about fifteen minutes.

“What do you mean ‘it'?”

“This is it. The last real ball-buster race for me. I think it's over. Time to get on with everything else.”

It was easier than I thought it would be. All you had to do was say it. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt better and calmer, but Burner didn't take it the same way.

“What?” he said, and he looked at me with this kind of confused sneer.

“Come on, Mikey. What else is there for you to do? You can't be finished. You've got lots more in the tank. You can't be one of those guys who gives it up and sits on the couch for a year eating chips and dip. You'll never be the guy in the fun
run, the guy with a walkman, the loser who wants to win his age group. You can't just turn it off like that.”

I felt bad for springing this on him at such a bad time. It hadn't been part of my big plan, but it's hard to hide it when something that used to be important suddenly isn't important anymore. I felt like I was kind of abandoning him, dumping him out there in the middle of those empty houses, and it was difficult and sad and correct all at the same time. Like when my mother and father finally broke up: difficult and sad, yes, but correct too, the right thing to do. Burner should have seen this coming from me. He could read the results sheets as well as I could, and he knew where my name fitted in.

“I've gone as far as I can,” I told him. “You know you can't do this if you don't have the feel for it.”

“Come on,” he said, “you're kidding me.”

He reached over without breaking stride and gave me a little shot in the arm like he was trying to wake me up and bring me back to the real world.

“Give your head a shake,” he said. “Think about next year. You'll heal up and be back good as new.”

We turned the corner and I could see the stadium coming back to us, getting bigger all the time. The stiffness was gone from my legs and I was rolling now, back to my old self, purring along. I felt fine, better than I had in months. The taper was giving something back to me too. But I was sure about this.

“Sorry, buddy,” I kidded him. “You're going to have to find somebody else to kick down in the last hundred.”

“Stop it,” Burner said. He was looking at me hard. His lips pressed together and his mouth made a tight straight line across the middle of his face.

“Seriously. Stop it. You can't quit now. You and I do this together. That's our deal.”

“No,” I said, “it's not.” I thought he already knew about this part of it. “We have never done this together. It's one of those things that can't be done together. In the end we have to be by ourselves.”

I didn't want it to sound as bad as it did.

“Think about it,” I was smiling now, trying to show him that everything would be fine. “Think about it. When you come around that turn today, you'll be alone, and when you head down the stretch by yourself you are going to surprise a lot of people.”

“Fuck you, Mikey,” he said. “I don't need a cheerleader.”

His face was a little flushed and he turned on me quickly.

“You're just covering your own ass. In about twenty minutes, I'm going to rip you apart and you can't stand it. You can't stand to lose to me and now you're making excuses. Fuck you and your retirement party.”

I wanted to laugh it off and make it slide away, but before I could even get to him, before I could say anything, he took off. Burner put his head down and shifted gears. In ten seconds, he had pulled away and opened up a gap that couldn't be closed. I had to save everything I had left and I couldn't go chasing after him so I let him go. It was just jitters, just nerves. That's what I told myself. After it was over, everything would be fine again.

When we got back to the field we split for good. He grabbed his spikes and his bag and went under the bleachers by himself. The last fifteen minutes are the most important. You want everything to feel easy. I put him out of my mind
and lay on my back for a while, feeling the air coming in and going out of my body. I pulled my knees up close to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I held it all in like that for about fifteen seconds before letting everything go as slowly as possible. I rolled over on my stomach and did a few easy push-ups, and when I got back on my feet, I put my hands flat against the wall and tried to get my calves and my goddamn Achilles to go out as far as they could. I didn't want to push it because you can only take as much as your body can give you on the day. I took off my socks and put on the ugly fluorescent spikes I'd been wearing all season. They were another Adidas freebie and I was expected to wear them, but I didn't like them much. It had taken months to break them in, and the red blood stains were still there around the toe and heel from all the broken blisters I had to go through before my feet finally hardened up in the right places.

When the announcer's voice called us out, I took off my sweats and did a couple of short sprints down the back stretch, trying to keep it all quick and smooth and under control. All the rest of the guys were there too, and we did our usual nervous hellos and our cautious smiles as we passed one another. When they called us to the line, I came up behind Burner and put my hand on his back, just kind of gently, so he'd know I was there.

“Have a good one, buddy, you little psycho,” I said, and I smiled at him. The officials made us stand there, side by side, each of us in our pre-selected spot along the curved white start line while the announcer read out our names and listed all our best times and our biggest wins. He said this was shaping up to be one of the best 1500 metre finals of the last
decade. When the voice got to my name, he said I had the fastest personal best in this group and he named all the different times I'd made the national team. He said Burner was always dangerous and that he had put together a great season and was rounding into top form at the right time. Then the rest of them each got their turns and their compliments, Marcotte and Graham and Bourque and the others.

Burner stood still through all of this and didn't even acknowledge his own name. Instead, he closed his eyes and made this big production out of rolling his head all the way around in a big circle. He went very slowly – first down, with his chin touching his chest, and then way over to the side and then straight up and back again. I could hear the bones in his neck crackling as he made the loop. He kept his mouth wide open, and when he looked up it seemed almost like he was waiting to catch a snowflake or a raindrop on his tongue. They called us to our marks and we crouched down, bending our knees just a bit and holding our arms away from our bodies. When they fired the gun, you could see the smoke before you heard the bang.

The announcer's voice took over after that and he described everything that happened to us. We were bunched up around the first turn so I made a little move and went into second place, just trying to stay out of trouble. Even as it was happening, the voice said, “There goes Michael Campbell, moving into second place, staying out of trouble.” It was like being inside and outside of yourself at the same time. I kept bumping back and forth with Marcotte and Bourque, trying to settle myself down and find a clear place on the outside of lane one. All the time the big voice kept going, describing how we
looked and calling out the splits and telling the crowd what kind of pace we were on and our projected finishing times. I couldn't see Burner, but I knew he was close by because I heard the voice say something like “Jamie Burns is safely tucked in at fifth or sixth place.” I remember this only because the announcer used Burner's real name and it sounded so strange to me.

The pace was fine, not too fast, not too slow, and after a lap and a half there were still lots of people close enough to the lead and feeling good. The problem with feeling good in a 1500 is that you know it can't last and that eventually, sometime in the next ninety seconds, everything you have left has got to come draining out of you, either in a great explosive rush at the end or some painful slow trickle. The kickers would've been happy to let it go slow and leave it all to some blazing last one-fifty, but the rest of us didn't want that to happen. As we went through 800, most of the serious guys were looking around, waiting and watching to see who would make the first move. After about thirty seconds, Dawson decided it would have to be him. He threw in this big surge coming off the turn and broke the whole thing open, dividing the race up between those who could go with him and those who could not.