This is another “Sunday Story” from “the good old days”. But this is not about backpacking, or even dogs! This is a coaching story.
Rookie Lessons
In high school, I wrestled, and I swam. But where I really found my place was on the track. I was a sprinter, pretty fast actually, and I found success and satisfaction on the Track Team. It started at Van Buren Junior High School in Kettering just south of Dayton, Ohio, and I learned a lot of lessons that first year. I learned that eating cornflakes before Spring Break practice was a horrible idea. And the next lesson came immediately. I learned that no one dies from throwing up, at least not on the track. All you do is pick yourself up and finish practice. Don’t step in the cornflakes.
Another lesson: no matter how good a strategy it might appear to be, diving to complete a sprint relay exchange is just a bad concept. I was second man in the 4×220 relay (back then, we ran yard not meters). I was coming fast, and my teammate receiving the baton was worried that I’d overrun him. So he took off way, way, too soon. I found one more gear to try to reach him, and the baton was only inches from his hand. But I couldn’t get there – so I dived.
Eating Cinders
The baton struck his hand, but he didn’t close in time. I went down on the track at full speed. Today, that action would result in “road rash”; layers of skin scraped off by the rubberized surface. But back then we weren’t running on “all-weather” tracks. We were running on packed cinders, charcoal ash pressed into a track surface. So when I hit, shoulder first, then rolled on my back, not only a couple of layers of skin were gone, but were replaced with layers of those cinders. The fall hurt, but I did get to hear for the first time, the crowd go “ahhhhh” as they watched me go down.
My next experience was with a spray-on medication called “cinder suds”. It hit the raw wound, stung like crazy and then bubbled. That was so the Coach (we didn’t have trainers for track) could start scrubbing the cinders out of the wound with gauze pads. Coach and I “bonded” in my pain. Later the teams I coached missed out on that particular “bonding” experience, though they did learn a therapeutic technique called “contrasting” involving buckets of ice and warm water. That “bonded” us together too.
It actually took several years for all the cinders to migrate out of my shoulder. And I got a lot more serious about exchanges!!
Old Man Races
I got hurt a couple of other times as an athlete. The last was when I was far past my prime, running a sprint race in the “over fifty” age group at a summer meet in Yellow Springs. I was trying to find my “sprint” shape of old, and was racing those other “old” guys. One of them, sporting a USA Track Team speed-suit, made sure I knew he was going to win. You’ve either got to be really good to pull off a speed-suit in the “over fifty” group, or you’re just too cocky.
So when we came off of the turn in the 200 (meters now) and he was right beside me, I knew what to do. I lifted, relaxed, and for a few steps, found a rhythm I hadn’t felt for two decades. The technique still worked, and I moved past “speed-suit guy” — and then my calf muscle dissolved. I took the next step, and when my now non-functioning foot hit the track again, I followed it straight into the surface. Damn – I had that dude beat!! But I did get a final chance to hear the “ahhhhh’s” one more time. The next problem: how was I going to get home with might right calf completely locked? I crossed over and used my left foot for the gas and brake. Good thing I didn’t drive the Jeep with the clutch.
It took a few weeks on crutches, and a lot of time riding a stationary bike to get back to normal life. Fitting, that my “athletic” career ended about the same way it began: in a 200, going down on the front stretch to the chorus of “ahhhhh’s”.
Learning Pole Vault
But my best (or worst) track injury was as a coach. And it happened far away, on the campus of Slippery Rock University in Northwestern Pennsylvania.
I was a sprinter, but I coached every event in track and field during my career. I had state qualifiers as distance runners, long and high jumpers, throwers and hurdlers, as well as sprinters. But my “reputation” came as a pole vault coach. That was only because I couldn’t find an expert, and had to learn the event myself so I could help my kids.
The way I learned was to go to the places the kids went to learn. So I started at the Indiana Track and Field Camp, working with a national level coach named Marshall Goss. That week, I had the honor of watching Fourth of July fireworks between Bronze and Gold Olympic Medalists, a pole vaulter and a 400-meter runner.
I then took some of my athletes and went to the then-premier vaulting camp in the country – the MF Pole Vault Camp at the University of Rhode Island. The coach there was Bill Falk, a man who looked a lot like Mr. McGoo (that’s definitely a dated reference) and had an enormous wealth of vault knowledge. Bill was always willing to share – something I found in most great vault coaches. I learned a lot, and my kids got to eat lobster for the first time! (The deal was, I paid for the lobster, and if they didn’t like it, they could get a burger and I’d eat their dinner. I had two).
Advanced Studies
But where I really earned my pole vault “advanced degree” was at the Slippery Rock Pole Vault Camps. There I met another “guru”, Mark Hannay. Like me, Mark was a high school teacher and was the part-time vault coach for the university. Mark developed an entire theory of vault, with each piece fitting in a whole process. He called it the “summation of forces”, and it was understandable physics that made a lot of sense.
I went with the kids to “the Rock” for a couple years, and then Mark asked me to come work the camp as a coach. For the next few years I spent a couple of weeks each summer in that environment. There were hundreds of vaults a day, and breakfast, lunch, dinner and far into the night talking with other amazing coaches about pole vaulting, and everything else. It was in those weeks that I really gained my understanding of the event.
Pit Coach
I was a “pit coach”. That meant that I had my group of kids to work with for the entire week, following Mark’s progression. They always got better, even though their improvement was tempered by the wear on their legs as the week went on. It was part of my “pit coach” job to make sure my group was “safe”.
So I was standing next to the runway, near the pit, when a kid named John had a disaster (I do remember his last name, but I won’t share it here). Everything he did was bad: he slowed down instead of speeding up, he was too far away from the pit when he jumped, and he committed to a vault that wasn’t going to get him to the mats. I stepped up. There’s no “catching him” – that’s really not a thing in pole vault. I was going to push him into the pit. But as I stepped in, he (rightfully) swung his takeoff leg back, trying to create more energy. Unfortunately he was wearing track spikes, and instead of pushing off of the runway, his takeoff foot pushed directly into my face.
John went up, then landed hard on the ground on the edge of the pit. I stood on the runway, my face in my hands. The SRU trainer ran to John, as he sat in a heap. “Are you OK?” she asked. “Yeah, I’m OK, but you better check on him”, pointing to me.
So, you know things aren’t very good when the trainer looks at you, and goes pale. I stepped forward to catch her, she looked like she was going to pass out. To her credit, she quickly pulled herself together, and moved to me. My face was covered in blood, and I had a jagged tear stretching from my forehead above my nose across and onto my eyelid. It didn’t really hurt, but it was clear that this was more than a couple of “steri-strips” fix.
Asics Symbol
The trainers got me bandaged up, and Mark and the other coaches had a discussion about which local hospital was the best for getting sewed back up. The debate was between hospitals in Grove City or Butler, and the final consensus was go to Butler. So we drove twenty miles, and I checked into the Emergency department.
I think I was the only patient in the Butler ER that night. I remember being in a big group exam room, just me and the doc, who gave me “the good news” and “the bad news”. The good news: my eye was fine, and he thought he could sew things up without a whole lot of scarring. He said “The cut isn’t a straight line – it’s curved. That’s good – a straight line scar is really obvious, this will eventually blend into the lines in your face.” I guess that made me feel better – at the moment I felt like I had a Klingon forehead-thing going.
He also said he had a “special German” suture kit, with finer needles to make smaller punctures. That way, there would be less damage as well. And that was all the good news.
The “bad news”: if he numbed the cut up, then the wound edges would go soft. They wouldn’t be “clean” and that would increase the scar. So he asked me to “hang on”: he would work as quickly as possible, but no painkiller.
It wasn’t as bad as I anticipated. If you’ve ever had stitches, the worst part is the needle of Novocain finding the nerves to numb things up. So instead of that one shot, there was the piercing of the curved “German” suture needle, in and out. It hurt, and he put a lot of sutures in, again to reduce the scarring. But the Doc was a man of his word, and it went pretty quick.
Earn the Lines
I arrived back to the SRU dorms, and my “pit-group kids” all came to see how bad it was. The last they saw me was just blood, so they were pleased that I “made it” and was back on dorm duty. I didn’t miss a shift on the pit, spotting kids in the next morning’s session. John was incredibly apologetic: I was just pleased he was OK too.
The Doc was right: the scarring isn’t too obvious. If you look carefully there’s kind of an “Asics symbol” in the middle of my forehead. But as I got older, it has been mostly subsumed by the natural lines created by forty years of Watkins Track and Cross Country.
Out of all that, we developed the “Watkins Rules” of pole vaulting. The number one rule was and always will be:
LAND IN THE BIG BLACK AND GOLD THING (the mat).
But the number two rule: DON’T HURT THE COACH!!!
