The Nature of the Race

I’m not sure I ever saw Glenn Cunningham run, even on tape. In those days, the only possibility would have been MovieTone News at a theater, and I didn’t get to go to those very often. [1] However, when I was in junior high, what we called “Departmental” in Oakland City, I thrilled to Glenn’s exploits as he sought to break the four-minute mile barrier, even though he had been severely crippled as a child.

So, in high school, I ran track. I was too slow even for the mile, though, so I went out for the two-mile race. It wasn’t hard to make the team; nobody else wanted to run that far.

We didn’t really have coaches. We were expected to train on our own. Alva Cato, a childhood friend of my father, was an excellent basketball coach [2], and Delbert Disler was an excellent football coach. They were not much interested in track, though. They went with us to meets, but even then they didn’t really coach. Mostly they stood around and talked to each other.

I assumed that the two-mile run was so long and arduous all I had to do was jog along and everyone else would wear down. That didn’t turn out to be the case. Other runners went out fast and kept going at it. I fell farther and farther behind, waiting for them to falter and come back to me. Along about the sixth of eight laps, I was really way behind. As I approached the curve where Mr. Cato and Mr. Disler were standing and chatting, Mr. Disler took a step toward the track and called out, “You’d better run a little faster, Johney.”

I think that’s the only track coaching I ever had. It was good coaching, though. It told me exactly what I needed to know. The other runners weren’t going to come back to me. I was going to have to catch up to them. Mr. Disler explained in that one phrase that I had misunderstood the nature of the race.

Often we lose just because we don’t understand the nature of the race.

And also with you,
JRMcF

[1] Later, however, I did see Cunningham’s fellow-Kansan and KU runner Jim Ryun break the 880 record in Terre Haute while I was campus minister of The Wesley Foundation at Indiana State U and Rose Polytechnic, now Rose-Hulman. When a man with a stop-watch sat down beside me before the race started, I didn’t know it was Ryun’s coach. I found that out when he became quite excited, to say the least, when he clicked the stop-watch at the end of the race.

[2] Alva’s son, Gene, was in my sister’s class and was one of the few Indiana high school basketball players to lead two different counties in scoring for a season, having led Warrick County in his junior year, when Alva coached at Lynnville, and Gibson County in his senior year. He later became commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Assn. and presided over the break-up of Indiana’s famous “one size fits all” state high school basketball tourney [See “Hoosiers”!] into several “size” tourneys.