Track Weather

It’s been a few weeks of “serious” essays on Sunday. But today, it’s back to the on going “Sunday Story” series.

Ohio

It’s March in Ohio.  Today we started the morning at twenty degrees.  Tomorrow we will end the day in the seventies.  What else is there to say?  I was a track athlete for six years, and a track coach for forty.  Even now in my “old age”, I’m still out on the track as a track official. (The scary part of that is I’m one of the “younger” officials!). 

So I still check the daily forecast, to see what is ahead for my day, or evening, out on the track.  Here’s some stories about Track and Field, Ohio, and the weather.

Princeton Relays

I ran for Wyoming High School in the north suburbs of Cincinnati, and one of the “huge” meets of the year was the Princeton Relays at nearby Princeton High School.  Wyoming was a smaller sized school, but at Princeton we were up against the biggest schools in the state.  So our little sprint squad was excited to get the chance to go against the best.

Excited, that is, until we woke up on that Saturday morning, scraped the ice off of our cars, and drove to catch the frozen bus in front of the school.  Just like this morning, it was in the twenties, but back in the 1970’s track meets were never cancelled except for lightning (and sometimes not even then).  So we went to the crowded Princeton campus, where dozens of teams were in little huddled refugee groups trying to keep warm.

The Wyoming sprint squad were no fools – we hid out in the heated restroom while we waited for our chance to hit the track.  Back then, there were no “high-tech” running tights or shirts to  maintain warmth.  We were track athletes in our track uniforms; thin blue nylon jerseys with a diagonal white stripe with “Wyoming” on it.  And thin-thin blue shorts, hitting somewhere around the upper thigh, barely covering what needed to be covered; though it was so cold it really didn’t matter.  

Frozen Radiator

I remember standing on the backstretch, the second man on the 880 relay, when I realized that my ¼ inch track spikes weren’t penetrating the “all-weather” track surface. It felt more like concrete than an expensive rubber-asphalt blend.  It was frozen, and so was I, and there seemed to be no way to warm-up enough to even find a normal stride length.  But that didn’t stop the gun from going off, or our lead-off runner from flying down the backstretch. 

I did my job, moving the baton around the turn and passing guys up the front stretch to deliver to our third man.  It was a solid exchange, keeping up our velocity, and he sped off around the curve.  We held our own against the “big guys”, not winning, but placing in the top six in the state-class meet.  Then it was back into the restroom to wait for the 440 relay. 

How cold was it?  When we got back to Wyoming High School, my car radiator was frozen. 

Return to Princeton 

When I was coaching in the 1980’s I took my Watkins High School teams back down to Princeton for a few years.  Watkins was a little bigger than Wyoming, but we still were up against “the big boys” when we showed up as unknowns at Princeton High School.  The first year we went, we won the slow heat of every sprint race, placing overall in the top three, but never getting to challenge the “big guys” in the fast heat.  The legendary coach of Cleveland John Adams, Claude Holland, found me on the backstretch towards the end of the meet, and gave me a word of advice.  “Coach, you’ve got a great little team, but you’ve got to learn to lie better!”  

He was right.  We were in the “slow” heats because I entered our relays in the times we had run, not what we “hoped” to do.  But since all of the other coaches were “enhancing” their entry times, we got left in the slow heats, unable to directly compete against the best.  I learned my lesson, thanks to Coach Holland, and realized that if you wanted to compete, you had to be part of the “liars’ club”. 

Road Trip

Our last year at Princeton was a “road trip”.  I took twenty-six kids, and put them all in my parents’ house in Wyoming the night before.  It was a giant sleepover, with kids sprawled out all over the recreation room floor (the seniors got the beds upstairs).  And the next morning we all got up for a light breakfast, and found four inches of snow on the ground.

We drove over to Princeton, and the competing school coaches walked around the track.  There weren’t lanes, or even a distinction between the track and the field – just snow.  One of us used that famous track line, “…sometimes we run in this, sometimes we don’t”, but the forecast was for several more inches, and we decided it was best to let this meet go.

I was still a young coach, and my next move was a bad decision.  We had twenty-six kids, now disappointed about the cancelled meet, but definitely all starving.  Bob Evans Restaurant was just down the street, so we decided to get breakfast before we started back up the road to home.

It snowed three more inches during the meal.  The two hour trip home took six, with almost zero visibility on I-71.  When we finally made it back to Watkins, we had to push the kids cars out of a foot of snow in the parking lot.  We were lucky to make it home, safely.  

That was Saturday.  Sunday, it started to warm up, and I was out shoveling the runways at the track.  We had a dual meet against nearby Granville on Tuesday. By then it was in the sixties. Welcome to Track in Ohio.

The Sunday Story Series

Author: Marty Dahlman

I'm Marty Dahlman. After forty years of teaching and coaching track and cross country, I've finally retired!!! I've also spent a lot of time in politics, working campaigns from local school elections to Presidential campaigns.