This week is Trinity League finals for track and field. Frosh-soph and JV race Tuesday. Varsity on Friday. I may have been enormously busy over the last four months, or maybe just distracted, but the end of the season is coming way too fast. May will bring the section and championship races but the majority of my runners will be done by Friday.
Left unsaid is that cross-country training starts in mid-June, a few weeks of easy miles and team building before July's Mammoth Camp, start of school in August, then the season itself. I am definitely more of a cross-country guy, and have already been running stats to see what we need to do to play on the big stage at the State Meet and Nike Cross Nationals in November.
But I've changed the way I've coached over the last twenty years. The focus is on the daily process. Results can't be the goal. It's how you get there that matters. Then the results take care of themselves.
Which is why I'm a little discombobulated track is coming to an end. What bothers me is the six-weeks between seasons.
The process of designing workouts and showing up at 6 a.m. for our twice-weekly doubles is almost meditative. It puts my day in sharp focus. The runners make me laugh. I will drift when the season ends, a void in my day. I'll sleep a little longer without that 5 a.m. alarm and I won't have to cut my afternoon run short to make it to p.m. practice on time. But the extra three hours in my day will be a vacuum. is there an opportunity in that in-between?
The obvious thought is to work more. I've got a book on deadline. But a couple extra hours of writing isn't the answer. I call it work but it's not. Taking Midway comes out May 20, and I'm aware that the publication date of a book is as much a finish line as the State Meet. But in both cases it's the process that makes it fun. With coaching, it's the alarms and the hours spent wondering how much threshold work and race pace work a week might require. With writing, it's wondering what words or characters will make a story bigger and more enchanting. When I'm done with a book I'm as lost as I'll be when track season ends.
The London trip with Callie last week was the rare time I left the team mid-season. Fares were great and there was research that needed doing. We walked across the Tower Bridge's glass floor, visited our favorite paintings at the National Gallery, located the finish line for the 1908 Olympics. (It's worth noting that the bridge's glass floor doesn't cover the whole upper level. Just a section about thirty feet long. Wood and steel on each side, then that section of glass showing a long drop into the Thames — a void, a challenge, an in-between.)
At Waterstone's I picked up a copy of Paul Theroux's new book of short stories. An editor friend had just stoked my creative fires by sending the Springsteen Nebraska bio, Deliver Me From Nowhere. I should have saved them for the coming in-between break, but I finished one in a night and the other is halfway done. They got me out of my head, pulling me away from track and deadlines.
So that's the update for the week. It's been a year since I made the decision on Malta to go solo again. As you readers know, this time has not been without a few frights. But this process of coaching and writing is a most enjoyable salvation. I have one of those rare jobs where the work is more fun than the vacations. That short trip to London reminded me there's a big world out there, waiting to be explored. The in-between times don't need to be a period of drift, but a short break requiring their own special process. Those six-week of inactivity present a chance for a magic all their own, no different than the euphoria of walking across that glass.