50 Years

I ran my first race 50 years ago this week.  It was the Wamego Cross Country Invitational.  At the time it was the biggest meet in the state of Kansas due largely to the fact that the state meet was run on the golf course there.

I wasn't good enough to play basketball.  I knew I wanted nothing to do with the contact offered up by football.  That left me thinking that maybe I could be like Jim Ryun.  

I  spent the summer of 1970 learning how to become a runner.  That was thanks in large part to my neighbor Greg Morgenson.  Even though Greg was going to be a junior at Abilene High School, he allowed this mere freshman to join him on our near daily runs.

Looking back now our training was laughable but it was something.  We would run a mile out, take a short rest and then head back.  I think we stretched it out to four miles once or twice but generally it was just a couple of miles.  Every couple of weeks we would run one mile time trial up and down the block.

During that summer Greg got a copy of The Long Green Line from the high school cross country coach, Robert Chatham.  I devoured the book.  I began to realize that cross country could be fun even though it would require a lot of work.

The summer of training put me into a good position heading into the start of team training.  I remember a few workouts from my short six weeks with the team.  Chatham loved one workout in particular.  It was called easy/hard.  We would run 20 220's on the golf course.  We would go down in :45 and rest :45 seconds and then try and run under :35 with another :45 second rest.  About halfway through the workout we would start doing everything we could to prolong the recovery.

The other thing I remember about doing interval training on the golf course was I would take water breaks which were strictly frowned upon by coach.  It was unheard of back then to take water during a workout because it was believed it would cause cramping.  

By the time we ran our two mile time trial I was in a position to make varsity which made at least one upper class man angry.  He was asked to leave the team.  I managed to finish seventh in just under 12 minutes on a fairly hilly course.  The question is whether Coach Chatham would dare run a freshman at the first meet of the season on a team that was considered one of the best in the state.

I think Chatham realized that other than the top five on the team, I was the only other athlete who had spent the summer training.  I suspect that's why I was allowed to run varsity, which meant the world to me at the first meet of the season.

It was a very emotional time in my life.  My mother had revealed to me just before the start of school that she planned to move the family back to Lawrence.  She was divorcing my stepfather.  I was all for the move.  I was growing tired living in a small town where everybody knew everybody else's business.

The fact that I was showing success in athletics had given me pause to wonder if I shouldn't stay behind for the first semester so I could finish out the cross country season.  I could stay with my grandmother and continue running for Abilene.  I know by the time I reached my decision my coach and teammates were hoping I would stay, but in the end I wanted to stick with my mom.

So here I was heading on the bus to Wamego on a wet, miserable, late summer day.  We arrived at the golf course where the meet was run to find out it was a no go.  The golfers didn't want us to spoil their pristine grass and we were directed to the site of an abandoned nuclear silo on the other side of the highway from the country club.

We were out on a massive pasture that was a rain soaked mud bog that had cattle roaming on it.  I tried to do a short warm up and completely trashed my shoes with mud.  I was grateful that I had brought my spikes with me and not knowing any better decided to race in them.

I remember seeing the Lawrence High team there because my old childhood friend Kirk Duncan was running for the Lions.  I remember not being sure what to make of the mass of humanity gathered on the pasture.  There were at least 30 teams on hand to run the two races, divided up into large school and small school divisions.  We were a small school.

The start of the race was a massive mud slog.  I remember spitting on a kid as we charged across the first quarter mile.  Some kids lost their shoes in the muck. I remember hitting the mile mark and feeling like I wanted to die.  Most of all I remember the last 300 yards where I caught one of my teammates and passed several runners with my sprint to the finish.  I was 38th overall out of 100 plus runners.  I was the top freshman in the race.  We finished 3rd as a team and I believe our top varsity runner Dennis Cole had come in third.  Greg was somewhere in the top ten as well.

As soon as the race was over the day turned sunny and pleasant.  I remember the team stopped in Junction City on the way home and we enjoyed lunch at McDonald's.  It was a rare treat back in the day.

Our next meet was supposed to be on Tuesday, a dual affair with Salina Sacred Heart.  I knew it would be my last with the team as I had decided to leave the following weekend for Lawrence.  That Tuesday was cold with freezing rain.  Yes, it was still September but that's the way weather was back then.  The meet was canceled and my running career as an Abilene Cowboy was over.

I moved to Lawrence.  I was thrust back into junior high where there was no cross country.  I tried to go workout with the Lawrence High team but I felt unwelcome and the way the school was scheduled I would always be 15 minutes late for practice.  I knew I wouldn't be eligible to run but I wanted to keep training.  

Somehow I got to know enough Lawrence High runners that I managed to snag a ride with a few of them to the state meet in Wamego.  Lawrence High got stomped but Abilene lived up to its potential and finished third in its division.  I had earned a varsity letter by running the one race for Abilene but Coach Chatham wasn't happy with my decision to leave the team.  So I was denied the letter.  I felt bad about it but I understood his reasoning.

Greg and I remained friends.  In fact, the following year he was the one who had to leave Abilene with his family for a move to Lincoln, Nebraska where he would become a state champion in the mile.  Greg and I would run one last cross country meet together in Kansas City before he left for Nebraska at Swope Park.  I got smoked but managed a top 30 finish.  Greg was somewhere in the top ten.  Not a bad finish for a small town runner against the big city boys.

So I have been a competitive runner for 50 years.  During that time I learned that I didn't want to train hard enough to be another Jim Ryun.  But I also learned that I loved running just enough to always stick with it, through tough times, tough jobs and a lot of tough travel around this wonderful country.  It's allowed me to meet and get to know my heroes.  It's given me more than I've ever deserved.

Jan Johnson

Whew... where to begin?  Most of the time when you purchase a self-published book you expect to read a lot of vanity garbage and I always steer clear of that.  But I had to buy Jan Johnson's awkwardly titled, "The High Flyer and the Cultural Revolution Journal of the Osage Orange, Pt. 1."  It's a head scratching title

Jan Johnson was a world class pole vaulter in the early 1970's.  He set a world record in the vault and ended up with the Olympic bronze medal at the 1972 Munich games which probably should have been silver but that's a whole different story.

I purchased the book because my path had crossed with Jan's while he was at the University of Kansas.  He was a friend of a friend.  I remember he was niceguy and I have stamped on my brain his record setting 17' 7" jump for a world record at the NCAA Championships which landed the Jayhawks second place at nationals.

I didn't expect much, just a lot of silly stories and insight into track at Kansas.  What I got was so much more.  Jan serves up a seascape of growing up on the south side of industrial Chicago.  It's full of the grit and grim of the 1960's.  He sees the world as a color blind youth growing up in a integrated world and ends up as a top notch track and field athlete at Bloom High School.

Johnson wasn't just a national class pole vaulter as a prep.  He was a top flight sprinter and a fine long jumper.  I suspect if he wasn't so in love with the pole vault he would have been a world class decathlete.

Jan's parents wanted their son to go to nearby Indiana or Ohio State.  He settled on Kansas because assistant coach John Mitchell had established himself as a first class vaulting coach.  Plus, Kansas was in the midst of its heyday as a national track and field power under Bob Timmons and besides, who wouldn't want to go to college with the great Jim Ryun?

What makes the story telling so great is that Jan kept a journal.  He detailed everything that was going on in his life, from competition to life on campus.  He came to Lawrence and discovered a community embroiled by the politics of the Vietnam War and racial unrest.  Johnson was shocked by the racism he encountered in a supposedly liberal college town, things he had never seen in the hallways of Bloom.

I saw what he saw.  I lived through part of what he lived.  His book also reawakened old feelings I had about Kansas coach Bob Timmons.  Timmy was a no-nonsense ex-Marine who expected his athletes to be clean cut and well dressed.  Johnson was held out of two key competitions early in his career at Kansas because his hair was too long.  

But what I wanted to know was why Jan left Kansas after two years of competition and transferred to Alabama?  At the time none of it made any sense.  A rising distance star Brian McElroy also left K.U. at the same time.  The rumors surrounding their departure centered on a trip to the Caribbean and some college drinking high jinks.  Johnson writes about it but whether he revealed all of the gory details of that night out is still unclear.

What is clear is that Johnson was run off the K.U. track team because he wanted to stand up for the rights of athletes.  He writes about a previously unknown trip he took to California with activist Jack Scott at the beginning of his junior year.  That trip stirred up a hornets nest.  But it made it clear that Timmons and Athletic Director Wade Stinson couldn't cope or deal with the changing cultural standards that was part of the world.  That includes outright racism on the part of the athletics administration and NCAA violations that could have sunk the track and field program had they been known at the time.

Jan's book made me mad at Coach Timmons all over again.  Yes, I too was kicked off the team at Kansas and I felt the circumstances behind my dismissal left a lot to be desired.  The book brought new life to old grievances that I had harbored against Timmy for many years and had finally come to terms with in the early 1990's.  

But Jan brought me back around in the way he ended a book.  He shared a letter from Timmy that he received after leaving for Alabama.  In it Timmons apologizes for what happened at Kansas.  The apology reminded me why I had made my own personal peace with coach.

This book, while a little ragged in its editing, is a great read.  The next edition promises to be filled with stories of Jan's adventures with Steve Prefontaine.  Yes, they were great friends.

Jan's contribution to the pole vault, in terms of competition, coaching and safety measures, makes him a giant in the sport.  Heck, even his daughter Chelsea was a world class vaulter.  Give the book a read or if you want, I'll share my copy!