Inside the Mind of a High School Hurdler…Presuming He Has One

As regards crashing or flaming out or exploding or in some other way participating in a disastrous collision with the earth, you had to put a little thought into it as a runner if you competed in any of the typical sprint events at a track meet, but it was more the rule than the exception if you ran hurdles.

Collisions, nasty impacts, headlong destructive smash-ups with the hurdle itself, flat-on-your-face trips, and face-down slides along cinder or asphalt tracks, followed by a limb-tangling, skin-shredding, lung-and-stomach-emptying exchange of views with the hard surface of the track was so much the commonplace that a casual observer not knowing the event would have guessed that the falls were the whole point. “Nice fall!” they might say. “I give it a 9.2!”

A runner in an ordinary event had to put a little thought into a tumble because first, there was in all the other races no real reason or first cause, or motive power or prime mover to fall – all terms that I learned in philosophy class and which is the entirety of what I remember from that class – in other words, there was nothing in your way.

You could say a lot of nasty things about the 440 or the mile or the 880; what you couldn’t say was that there was anything in front of the average runner as he stared forward, save for a chalked lane and an inexpressibly long distance to the finish line.

It is hard under these circumstances to put together a convincing accident.

This however, upon a bit of consideration, does not mean that it couldn’t be done.

There were certain times when a runner in order to express himself fully, or excuse himself from the proceedings entirely, or pursue another area of endeavor altogether, had to put a little theater into some supposedly calamitous event or other in order that he could get on with his busy day in a location as far from this damnable outdoor high school track as was conceivable.

On these occasions the most likely suspect to call upon was a sprained, strained, pulled, torn, tight, charleyhorsed, or cramped muscle.

That muscle may be in the calf, the rump, the thigh, the hamstring, the ankle, the arch of the foot, or in an entirely new muscle yet unknown to science.

Whichever muscle disaster had landed upon the runner however, the performance immediately afterwards had a classic sameness.

You – which is another way of saying I – you would out of nowhere, at the evident peak of your effort, suddenly ‘pull up’ lame, like a brave thoroughbred undone by an injury, and as the other runners receded ahead of you in the distance, would slow to a one-legged type of skip or jump, and then slow further to a limping walk.

I don’t suppose I would be surprised at all to see in some recently unearthed ancient frieze an image of a runner, one among many, limping bravely half a lap behind the others with a pained expression on his face.

These things play out through the centuries following certain rigid rules of the dramatic arts.

You know, though, I wish there had been invented a way, unobvious to the crowd in the grandstands over on the other side of the track, to somehow mark or otherwise designate exactly upon which leg the injury had befallen. Perhaps you want to be carrying a magic marker or a piece of colored chalk.

After all, the observers may not know much, but they can tell which leg you’re hopping healthily on and which you are favoring.  It’s the type of thing you want to have clear in your mind.

Failing that, it can make for some awkward conversations in the locker room afterwards with the coach.

Coach: OK, hop up here, let me see this calf/hamstring/thigh/ankle/arch of your foot/some muscle not yet named by science. Which side is it on?

Me: (with a dawning horror.) Hmm, which side do you think it is on?

Coach: Look, I’m not the injured one here. Which side?

Me: (with hopeless bravado). Come on now, look at me! Which side would you imagine?

Coach:  (grimly) I’m imagining all sorts of things about now. Which side?

Me:  Pain’s a funny thing, don’t you think? The way it sometimes migrates from one side of the body to the other? Some say it’s really a mental construct as much as anything else.

Coach: Remember I saw the whole thing. I know exactly which leg you grabbed as if you were injured.

Me:  You do? Well that solves the whole thing. That one. The one you saw. That’s the one.

Coach: Which one?

Me: (guessing wildly.) The right one, the right one, the right one, the right one, oh, God, please help me here!!!

Coach: I saw you grab your left calf. You gave every indication of ‘suffering’ your ‘injury’ in your left calf.

Me: Oh, I meant your right, which would be my left. Your left is my right, you know. You do realize that don’t you? It all depends on which way you are facing. Funny business when you think about it. I was just trying to help you out.

Well, and the conversation goes on from there.

This as I say might be a scene that plays out among runners in ordinary events.

When it comes to hurdles however there is little danger of misplacing which side of you is injured, or rather, it is a moot point. All of you is injured. Vertically top to bottom, horizontally left to right; after a good robust fall in these events there is little of you that is not injured.

After they scoop you from the track the coach or trainer or medic may start anywhere on your body and have confidence that he won’t soon run out of injuries to work with.

Well, it’s that kind of event.

I forget exactly how many hurdles are involved in any of the lengths – the 110, the 220, the 330 or the 440 – since the mind, in its kindness, veils certain memories deep in the unconscious, but I would guess upwards of 85 on an ordinary day and in excess of 122 on special occasions.

How high are they? That’s an interesting question, and I thank you for asking it.

You want to be clear in your mind on these matters and dwell upon it a bit, since we all tend to exaggerate a bit in looking back, but I would say the low hurdles stood at about the height of a standing full-grown cow, and the high hurdles were just shy of a single story’s height in one of today’s modern office buildings.

The intermediates were naturally about halfway in between.

In any event, as you crouch down in your starting blocks looking ahead to the row of barriers in front of you which, for some insane reason known only to you, you intend to run towards as fast as you can and then jump over and then repeat well, repeatedly, it is clear to you in the secret recesses of your soul that you are going to collide, blow up, explode, tumble, tangle, hit, smash into a certain number of these tall fences before you reach the finish line you see down there ahead of you about seven miles away.

Such an activity, the impulse to do it at all, engenders a certain breed of thinking, a certain approach to life.

You come to consider that life is a noble but ultimately absurd endeavor, and you give some thought to the possibility that we are all just scraps of protoplasm floating through a mindless void.

While these may not be what you would call actually comforting thoughts, they are surely better than to dwell upon the fact that you are here – here in the starting blocks, here facing these thickets of hurdles – of your own free will for some godforsaken reason or another.

The answer to that – what in the world are you doing here, what in the world, my friend? – is lost in the mists of time, but it probably had to do with some sort of showing off, or some proving of yourself.

Even the hardest heart is wrung with pity when reflecting upon a young idiot like that.

Well, I say a certain approach to life comes to inhabit your thinking after a certain number of times, I would call this approach similar to that of the great Stoic philosophers, Seneca and that whole crew.

They too had come to expect little from the experience, from life I mean, and prided themselves on their blasé response to even the most dramatic of disasters.

“Volcano, you say? Molten lava in the streets? Oh. Ah. Well, yes, these things happen.”

Such utterances are not too far from the types of things that one says to oneself down there in the starting blocks.

Or maybe, as you ‘run’ down the length of the track and ‘leap’ over hurdle after hurdle, crashing dramatically over three out of every four and then picking yourself up and beginning to run again and then crashing over the next one because you don’t have near enough momentum to get you up and over, everybody knows that, perhaps I say, the way to think about it is as some mythic replaying or other demonstrative of Man’s Futility or Man’s Brainless Insaneness to Himself.

I have to think that when these myths were being dreamt up, the image of Sisyphus strenuously rolling that boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down right at the very top, comes in a distant second to the sight of a young man crashing into hurdle after hurdle.

It’s a topic more for the likes of Dante, and raises the question of whether the hurdles are themselves evil…but I think not, any more than the white whale or a volcano is evil. They just do what they do.

You want to be fair to Sisyphus and all such champions of epic futility, but I’ll bet his knees are in quite a bit better shape these many years later than mine are.