A Little Early Holiday Cheer

This was served up by my good friend Steve Riley.  As he put it, this is what happens when Bob Dylan serves too much eggnog at his Christmas party.

In case you missed it, Dylan has put out a CD of Christmas tunes, all in the name of charity.

On the Run - Fall 1972

Getting ready for cross country going into my junior year was a study in some serious training.  I did a lot of my running with Kent McDonald.  He was a great training partner who while being a vastly superior runner never rubbed it in my face.  I can remember meeting at Lawrence High and hitting the roads around the country side coming back with our bare chests covered with all manner of insect.  I also managed one 100 mile week during the summer.  All I can remember about it is that it was pure torture.

I had high hopes going into the fall.  Our first race was at Wamego on a rolling golf course.  I took out like a shot and was probably 20 yards ahead at 880 yards.  By the mile I was only five yards up on Ed Anderson from Shawnee Mission West.  It didn't take long before Ed rolled by me followed by another kid.  I finished third and felt well satisfied.   I shouldn't have because the bad habit of going out too hard would plague me the rest of the season.

Following that Saturday we went to Emporia for a Monday meet.  I was incredibly frustrated because we arrived 15 minutes before the start of the varsity race.  With no proper warm up I felt completely out of sync and ended up 11th.  It didn't get any better the following week at Shawnee Mission East.  The course was at the high school and is one of the worst you could imagine running.  I went out too hard leading at 400 meters and was slowly but surely swallowed up by other runners.  I have a difficult time remembering where I finished but it was barely in the top 20.

We traveled to Topeka for the Seaman Invitational.  It was run in a rutted, God forsaken, cow pasture with live cattle roaming the course just north of Topeka.  Besides the crappy footing the course featured a massive gulley that you had to jump down and climb out of.  I went out like madman and this time held it together.  I probably felt as good as I had all season and won by a pretty healthy margin over some up and coming runners from Topeka West and Hayden's Dennis Weber.

It was pretty much downhill from there.  For some bizarre reason I decided to run a hard time trial the day before our home invitational.  I screamed through two miles at 10 minutes over the course.  The next day I was flat as a pancake after the first mile (go figure) and ended up drifting back to 11th place.  League wasn't much better.  I was somewhere just inside the top 20.

The clincher was regionals.  I went out hard as usual but was really hanging onto the leaders with about a half mile to go.  I was in seventh place but I knew there were about four runners from South right on my tail because their abrasive coach Verlyn Schmidt was chasing us around the course screaming at the top of his lungs.  Just as we were coming up to the final turn to the long finish Schmidt unloaded, "Get Rinkenbaugh, get that dog faced bastard."  It hit me like a ton of bricks.  His tirade worked because I tightened up and immediately began slowing down.  I ended up 17th.  I was crushed.

It goes to show what a mental train wreck I was when it came to racing throughout high school.  When I was in the zone I was a damn good runner.  But all too often I let stupid things upset me and destroy my focus.

The Force is Strong

Sitting in the press box at Naples High School last night I could feel the tug, the irresistible feeling that there's a great story out there to be told.  I could see it across the field standing tall on the other side of the street at the Orion Bank building, strangely lit up on a Friday night.

I could see people moving around the offices where they were working to put a troubled bank back together.  The football game was a good one to cover but my eyes kept wandering back to the tall building across the way.  I wanted to be over there finding out what was going on.  About two hours before kickoff the FDIC had swooped in and seized the bank.

What I was doing covering a high school football game seemed insignificant when in front of me a drama that spoke volumes about the economic disaster that has crippled Southwest Florida was playing itself out.  I try to convey to my friends and family how bad things are here.  I think only people in Nevada, Arizona, and California can relate to the catastrophic nature of the economic implosion.

Our economy was built on the back of housing.  An orgy of building houses, strip malls and business parks lured a lot of people to the area.  Now it's stopped dead and it will take at least three to five years to unwind all of the foreclosed homes and properties.  It's grim.  Not Jimmy Carter, oil embargo, malaise grim, but it's damn close. 

On the Run - Spring 1972

Forgive me my self indulgence but this is going to be a long one because I want to remember and share as much as I can about the events of that spring.

Joy would best describe how I feel about my sophomore year of track.  While cross country had been kind of a haze I came out of that daze of fall leaves and cold biting winds awakened by the rebirth that is spring.  I knew I was in decent shape when I time trialed a 4:52 mile indoors at Allen Field House before the start of practice.

Our first meet in late March was at Shawnee Mission North.  It was a cold and breezy day and the track felt crunchy when I lined up to run the mile.  Jim Scott, one of the state's best milers was there and my teammate Glen Lemesany was hoping to give him a real race.  I don't remember much of the race.  I think Glen was second or third and I was fourth or five.  I ran 4:48.  I doubled back in the Medley Relay running a 2:12 880.  I was completely out of my league running the half.

I wasn't fast enough to run at the state indoor.  I remember going and watching but a lot of those memories are a fog lost in the cavernous Ahearn Field House in Manhattan.   The aforementioned Jim Scott won the 5A mile and thanks to Jim's prompting I remember Tom Honer barely winning a tightly bunched 880.

Winter didn't want to let go that spring.  We ran in cool conditions at Shawnee Mission Northwest in a triangle with Shawnee Mission South.  Two things stand out from that meet.  South's coach Verlyn Schmidt berating Mitch Powlas, one of his best runners, throughout the two mile.  Powlas won but he left the team the following meet.  I ran a PR in the mile, 4:43, but more importantly beat Glen in the two mile running 10:21.  It didn't go over very well with my senior teammate.

A trip to Pittsburg State reaped two more minor PR's but I was more focused on running at the Kansas Relays.  I would run the 1320 in the Distance Medley on Friday followed by a crack at the mile steeplechase on Saturday.  The DMR was a complete bust.  I felt flat and ran flat.  The steeple was a disaster.  I had the advantage of practicing at Memorial Stadium.  Kent McDonald offered one bit of sage advice.  "Whatever ever you do," Kent said, "don't land with both feet in the water jump."

The gun goes off we make the first lap and head to the first water jump and I did exactly what Kent had warned about.  It was crowded and I was flustered and I hit the pit with both feet, and promptly fell on my face.  My spikes slipped right off the slick tartan and I went from fifth place back to dead last.  I spent the rest of the race slowly working my way back up.  With a lap to go I was within striking distance of getting back to fifth and as I sprinted around the final bend preparing to pass Yael Abouhalkah over the next to last barrier... Yael shifted out into my lane sending me sprawling over the barrier.  I quickly got back on my feet and finished an embarrassed 8th.  

I was at my wits end.  My workouts told me I should be running much faster.  The disasterous steeple left me wondering if I was cut out for track.  I finally took to heart something coach Steve Sublett had been telling me for six months, run heel-toe, stop running on your toes.  My idiot of a junior high coach had really brainwashed me and my disappointing efforts at the Relays put me in a frame of mind to listen.

Our next meet were the Shawnee Mission North Relays.   It was one of those rare spring evenings where the temperature was perfect and there was no wind.  North does something that most meets don't... run the two mile before the mile.  I was getting a shot to run eight laps fresh and I intended to do the unthinkable, lower my PR by 20 seconds and break 10 minutes.  I was going to do it running heel to toe.

I spent my entire 30 minute warm up staring down Larry Grecian from Topeka West.  I knew he would break 10 and I wanted to be on his ass the entire way.  I'm sure he thought something was wrong with me but I didn't care. 

The track at North was the best cinder track I have ever run on.  It was rolled and had a crisp schene to it that most cinder tracks never offered.  It was fast and my spikes felt great digging into the track when the gun went off.  Grecian settled into fourth place and I sat right behind him.  I remember going through the mile 4:54 and thinking wow, that's fast.  Somewhere after the mile I pulled past Grecian and continued to run freely.  I know somebody past me in the last mile but I remember flying over the last lap in 63 seconds.  I had run 9:49.5.  Heel to toe had work and I was ecstatic.

Glen Lemesany wanted nothing to do with me and was shooting darts in my direction.  He was running the open mile and had only one thing to say to me, "It was a fluke."  About ten minutes after the race my head was pounding and I was close to dry heaving.  I ran an uninspired opening leg of the two mile relay in 2:08 an hour later.  I was spent and I successfully put my team into a major hole it would never recover from with my poor effort.  But I wasn't discouraged, I was a sub-10 minute two miler.

I talked the coaches into letting me run just the two mile the following week at the Sunflower League Meet.  I wanted to prove the week before hadn't been a fluke.  It was a miserable rainy day.  The meet was run in conjunction with a dual meet that Kansas was holding with Southern Illinois.  I ran a scared race.  I played it safe and never really put in a full effort for fear of blowing it.  I honestly think I could have given Charlie Gray (who later won state) a real run for the money if I had tried but as it was he beat me by a good six second and I ended up in fifth in 9:54.9.  I wasn't even tired.  I had managed to beat Stan Vernon, a junior from Topeka High who later went on to be a standout at Oklahoma and a first rate runner on the American road running scene in its infancy.  I had managed to prove that the North meet wasn't a fluke.

We had only a day to recover because on Monday we hosted the Lawrence Night Relays.  I remember telling Glen in the school cafeteria the afternoon before the meet I wanted to run a qualifier for state indoor in the mile.  He looked at me with contempt and said, "No way."  Glen had been running really well that spring breaking 4:30 in the mile.  My best was 4:42.

The weather was perfect and I remember some kid from Leavenworth went out like a banshee and Glen and I were right on his tail.  We hit the 440 in 63... way too fast.  I hung on behind Glen as we went around the upstart but we were both later passed by a human bowling ball from Manhattan.  I later found out it was Mike Motley, a sophomore just like me.  He ran 4:29, I ran 4:33.0.  I had run a PR by nine second and streaked past the state indoor qualifying time by three seconds.  By now Glen was having to admit that I could run and that what I had done over the last ten days wasn't a fluke.

All the hard racing caught up with me six days later at Regionals.  On the bus ride over to Shawnee Mission South I noticed that I was getting a sore throat.  By the time I stepped to the starting line that chilly Saturday afternoon I was feverish.  I hung on as best I could running 10:19 and finishing fourth, one spot shy of qualifying.  When I got home I was running a fever of 101.  Glen qualified in the mile which he deserved, but I would have loved one more shot at running eight laps in Wichita.

On the Run - 1971

Spring of 1971 meant my first real season of track at South Junior High.  We had no track, just a dirt path around a football field.  My coach was an idiot.  I ran the 880.  It was the long event we could compete at but it didn't stop the coach from threatening me if I didn't take up another event.  He didn't like the idea of wasting space for an athlete who could only compete in one event.

Our training program was at best a joke.  I'm amazed that I ran as well as I did considering the lack of work we did.  Our first meet was at Hayden High School on the worst track I've ever competed on.  It was a like a slab of highway asphalt with giant cracks and ruts.  The coach told me to go out like a mad man and hit the 400 in 60 seconds.  What I didn't know is that he was trying to set the race up teammate Clay Kappelman to win.

I did as I was told and roared through the 400 and hung on for dear life and won in 2:18.  I could tell Clay was devastated.  I was happy and surprised.  Much to my regret it was a lousy race tactic that I struggled the rest of my life to overcome.  

Clay finally beat me by the fourth meet of the season.  It was the only invitational we ran all year.  It was the first time I competed against a runner I grew to know well from Ottawa.  Jerry Peffly is the best runner to ever come out of Ottawa.  Jerry was a great guy and a great runner.  He took several state titles his junior and senior years of high school.   He crushed us in the 880 that day.  I think Clay was second or third and I finished fifth.

I finally got a chance to run a mile in the fifth meet of the season.  I ran 5:12.1 and won.  At the time it was the Junior High record for Lawrence.  It lasted all of one year.

At the end of spring I ran an AAU regional meet and dropped my PR down to 4:56.  I remember two things from that race.  I got beat by a 440 runner from our school who decided to try his hand at the mile.  He ran 4:52.  Randy Wales never ran another race which is unfortunate because he was a great natural talent.  The other thing is I remember the kid who won the race.  His name was Steve Shaad and he was from Bonner Springs.  Steve, Jerry Peffly, and another stud named Terry Glenn would form a distance running power trio would be the Class 3A version of "Cream."

I trained through the summer running the occasional track meet.  I remember two summer races in particular.  A trip out to the tiny western Kansas town of  LaCrosse for a 10 mile race.  It was the first time I met Jim Hershberger. Google his name, he's quite a legend.  I ran 65 minutes, nothing special, except for Hershberger's comment about me running on my toes.  The other race was a one hour run at Haskell.  Larry Grecian from Topeka West won it going about a lap past 10 miles.  I was third, a couple of  laps short of ten, and went home with my first trophy.

My sophomore year of cross country is mostly snatches of memory.  I didn't like running on grass and hills.  I was a rhythm runner more suited to track racing.  I was usually the third man on our team and finished in the upper half to third of most meets.  I won two medals that fall, a seventh at Seaman and a tenth at the Lawrence Invitational.  Nothing really stands out except for the teams at Shawnee Mission South and Shawnee Mission West.  Both teams were really, really good.  West had Joe Wommack and a junior who is now a great columnist for the Kansas City Star, Yael Abouhalkah.   South had two seniors leading the way, Mitch Powlas and Charlie Gray.  Charlie went on to become a running legend in Kansas City.  Remarkably neither team won state that year.  As for my Lawrence High Lions, we weren't even close to qualifying for state.  I couldn't wait for the spring and track.

On the Run - 1970

A suggestion came in my email the other day from a runner who used to whip my backside with ease.  He wants me to detail my high school experience in track and cross country because I was fortunate to compete against some outstanding athletes.  As I've blogged before I first went out for track in the 8th grade but it didn't amount to much.

My running career took shape in the fall of 1970 at Abilene High School.  I had probably averaged 20 miles a week training with Greg Morgenson.  I had also been inspired by Joe Newton's book "The Long Green Mile."  Our cross country coach Robert Chatham had loaned it to me before the season started.

The summer work paid off because I made varsity as the sixth man.  Our first meet was at Wamego where rainy conditions forced us off the golf course and onto a nearby cow pasture.  The footing was treacherous but I managed to finish 38th out of 100 or so runners.  I finished as the first freshman in the field.

I remember seeing Kent McDonald (a future national class steeplechaser) standing around injured with his Lawrence High teammates.  I also remember seeing Randy Smith crush the field in the big class race.  There was a lot hushed talk among my older peers on the team about Smith.  I had no idea who he was.  Smith ended up winning the AAU national championship five years later.  Kent was second in that race.

It was my only cross country race my freshman year.  Snow claimed the second meet of the season and that was that.  I moved back to Lawrence and entered South Junior High where the gym teacher promptly asked me if I wanted to play football.  I almost made the mistake of laughing in his face.  I could have stayed in Abilene with my grandmother and finished out the season but I had grown to hate life in a small town where everyone knew your business.  I wanted the anonymity of a city and Lawrence offered that.

I went to one Lawrence High practice.  It was a real pain getting from South over to the high school.  I felt unwelcomed and unwanted.  At the time LHS didn't allow freshman to compete so I didn't return.  Instead I concentrated on getting ready for track.

I did go to the state cross country meet that fall.  I watched Lawrence get dead last in the 5A race.  My former team, the Abilene Cowboys finished on the podium taking third in the 3A race.  I didn't have any regrets.  I was just happy that they had taken a trophy.

That same moron of a gym teacher told me if I was going to run on his track team, I had better learn to run on my toes.  I spent the winter learning how to do just that.  I did a lot of training on the old dirt track of Allen Field House.  I got to watch some great KU athletes up close and became close to one assistant coach in particular, Harvey Greer.  He called me Cosmos because he thought I was a space cadet.  I became something of a mascot for the high jumpers and hurdlers.  The distance runners were never around.  It was a great way to spend the my first winter back in Lawrence.

Where There's Smoke

The signs started percolating along the horizon of college athletics about two decades ago.  Minor sports like cross country, track and wrestling started disappearing from various campuses.  The common denominator was that they were men's sports.  The critics howled that Title 9, a federal law aimed at giving women an equal playing field when it came to athletics, was forcing athletic departments to make difficult budget decisions.

The problem has only gotten worse in recent years.  Athletic directors target men's sports with a vengeance in order to keep costs down and to stay in line with the scholarship quotas demanded by Title 9.  I've always found this issue a bit of a red herring.  I believe we're beginning to see just how troubled the ponzi scheme that is college athletics.

One just shrugs their shoulders when Cal Berkley talks about cutting sports because of the financial crisis.  They're just a bunch of goofy liberals, right?  But when Stanford, a private institution with very rich alums begins talking about it, there's more than just smoke.  I hate the thought of colleges cutting athletic programs.  I hate thinking about it even more so at the high school level.  But it's time for everyone to wake up and face the fact that money needs to go to improve our system of education, not to help keep a Division I powerhouse afloat.

I look at the Big 12 conference and its a veritable arms race.  The amount of money going into new stadiums, indoor training centers, and practice facilities is staggering.  The salaries of the coaches are obscene.  And regardless of how much the alumni give to their favorite team, most of these schools are subsidized in one way or the other through student fees and other state handouts.

I shudder when I see a Florida high school football team traveling to California to play another team.  WTF?!?  I wonder if it's really necessary for a JUCO team to travel halfway across the country for a contest when there are plenty of opportunities to get competition in their own neck of the woods?  I'm not suggesting that we gore the sacred cows of DI football and basketball but couldn't the gridiron boys get by with just 60 scholarships and an even dozen for the hoops team and about half the number of coaches?

We all know the priorities at most colleges regarding athletics is out of whack and it looks like the high schools are climbing on board thanks to ESPN.  I'm praying that the budget squeeze starts kicking some sense into college and high school administrators when it comes to athletics.  I don't want to see anymore track programs shutdown or swim teams sent out to sea, but that's where we're headed.

We need some sanity.  But it's not going to happen when athletic directors by and large are the tail wagging the dog.  College presidents lack the guts or the ability to reign it in and the howls of the alumni would be so nightmarish that I don't blame them.

The smoke is there folks, let's fire doesn't gut your favorite Olympic sport.