This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. You remember that. It was a moment in history – not like Kennedy or the planes flying into the World Trade Center – not up at that level. This was something lower, more like Ben Johnson, back when his eyes were that thick, yellow colour and he tested positive in Seoul after breaking the world record in the hundred. You might not know exactly where you were standing or exactly what you were doing when you first heard about Tyson or about Ben, but when the news came down, I bet it stuck with you. When Tyson bit off Holyfield’s ear, that cut right through the everyday clutter. All the papers and the television news shows ran the exact same pictures of Tyson standing there in his black trunks with the blood in his mouth. It seemed like everything else that happened that day had to be related back to this moment, back to Mike and what he had done. You have to remember, this was before Tyson got the tattoo on his face, and the rematch with Holyfield was supposed to be his big comeback, a chance to go straight and be legitimate again. Nobody thinks about that now. Now, the only thing you see when you look back is Mike moving in for the kill, the way his cheek brushes up almost intimately against Evander’s face just before he breaks all the way through and gives in to his rawest impulse. Then the tendons in his neck bulge out and his eyes pop wide open and his teeth come grinding down.
Burner and I were stuck in another hotel room, watching the sports highlights churn it around and around, the same thirty-second clip of the fight. It was like watching the dryer roll clothes. Cameras showed it from different angles and at different speeds and there were lots of close-ups of Evander’s mangled head and the chunk of flesh lying there in the middle of the ring. Commentators took turns explaining what was happening and what it all meant.
The cleaning lady had already come and gone and now we had two perfectly made double beds, a fresh set of towels, and seven empty hours before it would be time for us to go. We just sat there, side by side, beds three feet apart, perched on top of our tight blankets like a pair of castaways on matching rafts drifting in the same current. Mike kept coming at us through the screen. You know how it gets. If you look at the same pictures long enough even the worst things start to feel too familiar, even boring. I turned the TV off but the leftover buzz hanging in the air still hurt my eyes.
“Enough?” I asked, though I knew there’d be no response.
Burner didn’t say anything. His eyes were kind of glossed over and he just sat there staring straight into the same dark place where the picture used to be. He’d been fading in and out for the last few hours.
If I have learned one thing through all this, it’s that you have to let people do what they’re going to do. Everybody gets ready in his own way. Some guys play their music loud, some say their prayers, and some can’t keep anything down and they’re always running to the toilet. Burner wasn’t like that. He liked to keep it quiet in the morning, to just sit around and watch mindless TV so he could wander off in his mind and come back any time he liked. One minute, he could be sitting there, running his mouth off about nothing, and then for no reason he’d zone out and go way down into himself and stay there perfectly silent for long stretches, staring off to the side like he was trying to remember the name of someone he should really know.
It didn’t bother me. Over the years, Burner and I had been in plenty of hotel rooms together, and by now we had our act down. I didn’t mind the way he folded his clothes into perfect squares and put them into the hotel dresser drawers even when we were staying a single night, and I don’t think he cared about the way I dumped my bag into a pile in the corner and pulled out the things I needed. You have to let people do what they do. When you get right down to it, even the craziest ritual and the wildest superstition are based on somebody’s version of real solid logic.
After fifteen minutes of nothing, Burner said, “I’m not going to wear underwear.”
He was all bright and edgy now, and his eyes started jumping around the room. He licked his top lip every few seconds with just the tip of his tongue darting out.
“No, not going to wear underwear.”
He nodded his head this second time, as if, at last, some big decision had finally been made and he was satisfied with the result.
I didn’t say anything. When he was this far down, Burner didn’t need anybody to keep up the other end of the conversation.
“You feel faster without underwear, you know. But I only do it once or twice a year. Only for the big ones.”
That was it. A second later he was gone again, back below the surface, off to the side.
I turned away from him and punched a slightly bigger dent into my pillow so there’d be more room for my head. I knew there was no chance, but I still closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The alarm on the table said it was 12:17 and no matter what you do you can’t trick those early afternoon numbers. Every red minute was going to leak out of that clock like water coming through the ceiling, building up nice and slow before releasing even one heavy drop. I waited, and I am sure I counted to sixty-five, but when I looked back 12:18 still hadn’t come down. I flopped over onto my back and looked at the little stalagmites in the stucco. I thought about those little silver star-shaped things that are supposed to go off if there’s a fire.
I’ll tell you what I was wearing: my lucky Pogues T-shirt for the warm-up, a ratty Detroit Tigers baseball cap, the same pair of unwashed shorts that had worked okay for me last week, and a pair of black track pants that weren’t made of cotton, but some kind of space-age, breathable, moisture-wicking material. On my left foot, I had one expensive running shoe that Adidas had given me for free. Its partner was on the floor beside the bed and I had about a dozen other pairs still wrapped in tissue paper and sitting in their boxes at home. My right foot was bare because I had just finished icing it for the third time this morning. The wet zip-lock bag of shrunken hotel ice cubes was slumped at the end of my bed, melting, and my messed-up Achilles was still bright red from the cold. I could just start to feel the throb coming back into it.
I meshed my fingers together on my chest and tried to make them go up and down as slowly as possible. It was coming and we were waiting for it. The goal now was to do absolutely nothing and let time flow right over us. It would have been impossible to do less and still be alive. I felt like one of the bodies laid out in a funeral home, waiting for the guests to arrive. You couldn’t put these things off forever. Eventually it had to end. In a couple of hours, some guy dressed all in white would say “Take your marks.” Then, one second later, there’d be the gun.
I don’t know how much time passed before Burner hopped off his bed like he was in some big rush. He went around our room cranking open all the taps until we had all five of them running full-blast. There were two in the outside sink, the one by the big mirror with all the lights around it, two in the bathroom sink, and one big one for the tub. Burner had them all going at once. Water running down the drain was supposed to be a very soothing sound that helped you focus and visualize everything more clearly. This was all part of thinking like a champion. At least that’s what the sports psychology guys said, and Burner thought they were right on.
At first there was a lot of steam and we had our own little cloud forming up around the ceiling, but after a while, after we’d used up all the hot water for the entire hotel, the mist cleared and there was only the shhhhhhh sound of the water draining away. It was actually kind of nice. You could just try and put yourself inside that sound and it would carry you some place else, maybe all the way to the ocean.
When Burner surfaced for the last time, when he came back for good, he looked over at me and said, “Do you know what your problem is?”
I took a breath and waited for it.
“You can’t see,” he said. “You don’t have vision. If you want to do this right, you need to be able to see how it’s going to happen before it actually happens. You have to be in there, in the race, a hundred times in your head before you really do it.”
I nodded because I had to. This season, unlike all the others, Burner was in the position to give advice and I was in the position to have to take it. For the last three years I had beat him from Vancouver to Halifax and back a hundred times and in all that time I had never said a thing about it. He’d never even been close. But this year – the year of the trials, the year when they picked the team for the World Championships and they were finally going to fund all the spots – this was the year when Burner finally had it all put together at the right time and I couldn’t get anything going. For the last eight weeks, in eight different races in eight different cities, he’d come flying by me in the last one-fifty and there was nothing I could do about it.
I don’t know where it came from or how he did it, but Burner had it all figured out. For the last year, he’d been on this crazy diet where it seemed like he only ate green vegetables – just broccoli and spinach and Brussels sprouts all the time. And he hadn’t had a drop of alcohol or a cup of coffee in months. He said he had gone all the way over to the straight edge and that he would never allow another bad substance to get into his body again. He broke up with his girlfriend and quit going out, even to see a movie. He drank this special decaffeinated green tea and he shaved his head right down to the bare nut. I think he weighed something down around 130. He practised some watered-down version of Buddhist mysticism, and he was interested in yoga and always reading these books with titles like Going for Gold!: Success the Kenyan Way, or Unlocking Your Inner Champion. Whatever he was doing, it was working. Out of all that mess, he had found some little kernel of truth and now he was putting it into action.
“The secret is to think about nothing,” he said. “Just let it all hang out. Mind blank and balls to the wall. That’s all there is. Keep it simple, stupid. Be dumb. Just run.”
It’s hard to tell anybody what it’s really like. Most people have seen too many of those CBC profiles that run during the Olympics, the ones with the special theme music and the torch and all those fuzzy, soft camera shots that make everyone look so young and radiantly healthy. I used to think – everybody used to think – they were going to make one of those little movies about me, but I know now it’s never going to happen. It’s timing. Everything is timing. I was down when I needed to be up. If we were both at our best, if Burner and I were both going at it at the top of our games, he would lose. We both knew this. My best times were ahead of his, but I was far from my best now. There were even high-school kids coming up from behind now, and they were charging hard. I don’t really know what I was waiting for in that room. I might cut the top five, maybe, but I knew I wouldn’t be close enough to be in the photograph when the first guy crossed the line. It wasn’t really competition anymore. For me, this was straight autopilot stuff, going through the motions and following my own ritual right through to the end.
“What about Bourque?” I said.
This was the last part for Burner. I’d say the name of a guy who was going to be there with us and he would describe the guy’s weaknesses. Burner needed to do this, needed to know exactly why the others could not win. There were maybe ten people like us in the whole country, and no more than five or six who had a real shot at making the team, but Burner needed to hate all of them. That was how he worked. I couldn’t care less, but I did my part. I kept my eyes on the sprinklers and didn’t even look at him. I just released the words into the air. I let Bourque’s name float away.
“Bourque? What is Bourque? A 3:39, 3:40 guy at the top end of his dreams. We won’t even see him. Too slow. Period. We won’t even see him.”
“Dawson is supposed to be here,” I said. He was the next guy on the list. “He ran 3:37.5 at NC’S last month.”
“Got no guts,” Burner sort of snorted it. “Dawson needs everything to be perfect. He needs a rabbit and a perfectly even pace and he needs there to be sunshine and no wind. He can run, no doubt, but he can’t race. If you shake him up and throw any kind of hurt into him, he’ll just fold. Guy’s got tons of talent, but he’s a coward. You know that, Mikey. Everybody knows that about Dawson. Even Dawson knows it, deep down. If somebody puts in a 57 second 400 in the middle of it, Dawson will be out the back end and he’ll cry when it’s over. He will actually cry. You will see the tears running down his face.”
“Marcotte will take it out hard right from the gun,” I said. “He’ll open in 56 and then just try and hold on. He’s crazy and he will never quit. There’s no limit to how much that guy can hurt.”
“But he can’t hold it. You know how it’ll be. Just like last week and the week before. It’ll be exactly the same. Marcotte will blow his load too soon and we’ll come sailing by with 300 to go. If we close in 42, he’ll have nothing in the tank. He’ll collapse and fall over at the finish line and somebody will have to carry him away.”
That’s how we talked most of the time. The numbers meant more than the words and the smaller numbers meant more than the bigger ones. It was like we belonged to our own little country and we had this secret language that almost nobody else understood. Almost nobody can tell you the real difference between 3:36 and 3:39. Almost nobody understands that there’s something in there, something important and significant, just waiting to be released out of that space between the six and the nine. Put it this way: if you ever wanted to cross over that gap, if you ever wanted to see what it was like on the other side, you would need to change your entire life and get rid of almost everything else. You have to make choices: you can’t run and be an astronaut. Can’t run and have a full-time job. Can’t run and have a girlfriend who doesn’t run. When I stopped going to church or coming home for holidays, my mother used to worry that I was losing my balance, but I never met a balanced guy who ever got anything done. There’s nothing new about this stuff. You have to sign the same deal if you want to be good – I mean truly good – at anything. Burner and I, and all those other guys, we understood this. We knew all about it. Every pure specialist is the same way so either you know what I am talking about or you do not.
“In the end, it’s going to come back to Graham,” I said. I’d been saving his name for last.
“Graham,” Burner repeated it back to me. “Graham, Graham, Graham, Graham.”
It sounded almost like a spell or a voodoo curse, but what else could you say? We both knew there was no easy answer for Graham.
When we were kids in high school, back when we first joined the club and started training together, Burner and I used to race the freight trains through the old Michigan central railway tunnel. It was one of those impossible, dangerous things that only invincible high-school kids even try: running in the dark, all the way from Detroit to Windsor, underneath the river. When I think back to it now, I still get kind of quaky and I can’t believe we got away untouched. It didn’t work out like that for everyone. Just a few years ago, a kid in the tunnel got sucked under one of those big red CP freighters, and when they found him his left arm and his left leg had been cut right off. Somehow he lived, and everybody thought there must have been some kind of divine intervention. The doctors managed to reattach his arm and I think he got a state-of-the-art prosthetic leg paid for by the War-amps. The papers tried to turn it into a feel-good piece, but all I could think about was how hard it must have been for that kid to go through the rest of his life with that story stuck to him and with the consequences of it so clear to everybody else.
Burner and I used to race the trains at night from the American side, under the river, and up through the other opening into the CP railyard, over by Wellington Avenue, where all the tracks bundle up and braid together. At that time, before the planes flew into the World Trade Center, there weren’t any real border guards or customs officers or police posted on the rail tunnel. They just had fences. On the American side you had to climb over and on the Canadian side someone had already snipped a hole through the links and you could just walk. The train tunnel is twice as long as the one they use for the cars, and I think we had it paced out at around two and a half miles or about fifteen minutes of hard blasting through the dark, trying not to trip over the switches or the broken ties or the ten thousand rats that live down there.
We’d drive Burner’s car over to the American side, we’d hop the fence, and then we’d just watch and wait for about fifteen minutes, trying to estimate how long it would be before the next train set out. We always went one guy at a time because there wasn’t enough space between the side of the track and the wall of the tunnel and you couldn’t risk getting tangled up. It was pitch black in there so we took these little flashlights that we wouldn’t turn on until we were inside and even then you could only get a quick look at where you were and where you were headed. Once, I remember that Burner tried to tape one of those lights to his head so he could be like a miner and see everything more clearly, but he said that the light wouldn’t stay where he needed it and that he had to rip it off after only a few steps.
When you think about what could have happened but didn’t, it makes you wonder why we weren’t more strategic or careful. We should have timed everything right down to the second, but back then it seemed so easy. We’d crouch down in the shadows beside the tunnel and then if everything looked OK, we’d shake hands and say something like “See you on the other side.” Then the guy going second, the guy left behind, would count it down – three, two, one, go – and that would be it. The first guy would just take off.
We were always good runners, but 90 per cent of racing the trains is just learning to deal with straight fear and the sensation you get from that hot surge of adrenaline flowing through you. It was all about going forward and just trying to stay up on your feet. If you did go down and you felt your leg brush against that damp fur of a rat or caught your arm on some chunk of metal or got scraped up against the exposed wall of the tunnel, there was no time to even think about it. You just got up as quickly as you could, and even though you could feel your pulse beating through an open cut and you might have wrenched your ankle pretty bad, you still had to go on as if everything was working perfectly according to plan.
It wasn’t really racing at all. There’s no way to actually win in a contest like that and you could never go head-to-head with the trains. This was more about just trying to stay ahead and that’s something completely different. When they set off and they’re just chugging out of the gate, those trains look slow and heavy and it seems like it should be easy to stay out front, especially when you’re working with such a big head start. It doesn’t work like that though. The trains pick up their momentum on the way down into the tunnel. They used to say that once you were in there running, if you ever heard the train coming up from behind, or if you even just caught the sound of that first echo, then that meant you had something like three minutes before it caught up and pulled you under. The other thing they always talked about was the light. They said that if the light ever touched you, if that big glare of the freighter ever landed right on you, then that was supposed to be the end. By that time the rig would be going too fast and even if he saw you the engineer wouldn’t have time to shut everything down and stop. That’s what happened to the kid who lost his arm and leg. By the time they radioed and got the paramedics and the stretchers all the way down there, the kid nearly bled to death in the dark. Then they had to go searching for his missing limbs and I guess they found one on the track and the other one, I think it was the leg, caught up underneath the train. Even after all that, he somehow pulled through.
Nothing ever happened to me. I must have run the tunnel half a dozen times, but I never heard or saw the train, and the only thing that ever pushed me along was the need to get out. It just kept you going faster than you thought you could go and it kept you rolling right up until you felt the ground leaning up again, climbing out. In the dark, just that little shift in the angle of the earth under your feet would be enough to tell you that you were getting closer and you’d probably make it.
The worst time was the last time. It was my turn to go first and when I came through I was so messed up I knew I would never do it again. As soon as I made it out, I kind of collapsed off to the side, just one step beyond the tunnel. I must have fallen two or three times in there and I had a bad, pretty nasty gash oozing down the front of my shin. I don’t know why, but when I got out, I started throwing up and I couldn’t make it stop. I thought I might pass out because I couldn’t get a clean breath and my stomach was kind of convulsing and dry-heaving. My vision went all blurry and I couldn’t see anything.
I was lying there in the scrub grass beside the tunnel, kind of curled up in the fetal position when I heard it – that long slow regular blast of the train. Usually Burner and I left a five-minute gap between the first guy and the next guy and I was sure that much time had already passed. When I heard the horn again, I knew I’d been waiting too long. There was nothing I could do so I just pulled myself up and tried to peek around the corner of the concrete as best I could. I kept staring down into the dark and I was shaking and shivering now because I was so scared and the sweat was turning cold on my skin. I wasn’t sure if I should try and find some official person and tell them to radio in and watch for Burner, but there was no one around. I was actually hoping that he’d been caught on the other side, or that he’d chickened out, or come to his senses. I didn’t want to think about the other possibility but it still came flashing into my head. For one second I imagined how even at top speed, there would still have to be this one moment, just before the full impact, when Burner would feel only the beginning of it, just that slight little nudge of cold metal pressing up against his skin.
When I heard the sound of his feet banging on the gravel, coming closer, I thought I must have been making it up. I couldn’t see anything, but I stood in the opening and waved my light around anyway, shouting his name. For a second I thought I could just make him out in the distance, maybe a hundred yards away, but then the sound of the train blast rose up again and the whole rig came rolling around the last corner of the tunnel. I saw the big round light and it touched me and filled up the whole space, illuminating everything. I put my hand up like you do when you’re trying to block out the sun and I saw him. Burner was there, charging toward me, the only dark space in front of the light. He had this long line of spit hanging out of his mouth like a dog and the look on his face wasn’t fear, but something more like rage. The gap kept closing and it seemed to me like the big light was almost pushing him out. I emptied out my lungs yelling up against that bigger noise. I said, “Come on, come on,” and I waved my whole arm in a big circle, as if I could scoop out the space between us and reel him in.
In the end, it wasn’t as close as it seemed. Burner came up and around the corner and he kind of ran me over as I tried to catch him. We had about ten or fifteen seconds to spare before the train came roaring through and that was enough time for us to take off and scramble through the hole in the fence. We knew they’d be making their calls and trying to track us down, so we spent the next half hour running and hiding behind a few dumpsters and trying to make our way back to my car. We never had any time to talk about it until later that night when it became, like everything else in our pasts, a kind of joke. We called it “The night when Burner pulled a train out of his ass.”
But that’s the image I keep of him – Burner running in the light and getting away. That’s the one I keep. For those few seconds, he was like one of those fugitives trying to break out of prison and they just couldn’t catch him. The train kept coming down on him like some massive predator and he shouldn’t have had a chance, but he was like that one stupid gazelle on the nature show, the one who somehow gets away even though the cheetahs or lions or hyenas should already be feasting. Burner was one of those fine-limbed lucky bastards, but he was still here and his life, like mine, kept rolling along, filling in all this extra time.
We got our stuff together and left the hotel at around four o’clock with our bags slung over our shoulders. We took a shuttle bus, one of those big coaches with dark tinted windows that ferried the athletes back and forth. On the day of any big race, those buses are tough places, crowded with all kinds of people who just want to be alone. The big-shouldered sprinters are the worst. You don’t want to be anywhere near them in the last hours. For them it’s going to be over in ten seconds, good or bad, so they don’t have room to negotiate. You’ve seen them – some of those hundred-metre guys are built up like superheroes, or like those stone statues that are supposed to represent the perfect human form, but when the race gets close, everyone of them is scared. As Burner and I squeezed our way down the aisle, we passed this big black guy sitting by himself, completely cut off from everything else. He had the dark glasses on and the big headphones so that nothing could get in or out and he just kept rocking back and forth, slow and silent and always on the beat so you could almost see the music he was listening to. He looked like one of those oriental monks, swaying and praying and perfectly out of it.
Burner was at the jumpy stage now and he was nearly shaking because we were on our way and it seemed like things had already started. We dumped ourselves into an unoccupied row and right away he started drumming his hands on the seat in front of us.
“I am feeling it, feeling it,” he said, almost singing, and he had this big goofy grin on his face. It was impossible for him to be still even for a second and he kept drumming along on the seat, hands blurring.
“It’s the big one today, boys,” he shouted, revving it up.
“Got to bring everything you got.” Again, way too loud.
“No tomorrow.”
The clichés dribbled out of him, but this wasn’t the place for it. There were too many other people around and they all had their own things to take care of. After about a minute, the tall, long-haired javelin guy who’d been sitting in front of us got up and turned around like an angry bear up on his hind legs.
“You touch this chair again,” he said, and he put his finger directly on the spot where Burner had been banging away on the back of the headrest. “You touch this chair again, and I swear to God, I will twist that skinny piece of shit neck right off your skinny piece of shit body.”
You could tell this guy wasn’t one of those macho bodybuilder, roid-raging throwers. He just wanted his quiet and needed his time like everybody else. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but most of the throwers are like that, quiet and turned in. They try to make it look easy and some of them can spin a discus on their pinky finger like it’s as light as a basketball, but if you watch you see they never let it go. Some of the others just sit there, rolling the shot from hand to hand, getting the feel for its heaviness as it thuds down into their chalky palms. Those guys are faster and smarter than you think. I heard someone say that all the best throwing performances come from guys with good feet and good heads. I bet the bear in front was one of the good ones. Burner couldn’t retreat fast enough.
“I didn’t think, man,” he sort of stammered. “I didn’t know you were there. Sorry. Sorry.”
I looked the bear right in the eye, just like you’re supposed to, and I tried to show him that I sympathized and understood. I said “Nerves” as if that single word could explain everything about Burner.
The guy nodded and he said he knew all about that but, come on. He wasn’t happy, but eventually he settled back down, sort of deflating back into his seat.
When it was over, Burner gave me this wide-eyed look of relief and pretended to wipe the sweat off his forehead and fling it off to the side. Then he rested his head against the window and just watched the traffic going by.
I looked over at him and thought about all the buses we’d been on together. Almost since the early days as juniors, he’d been on every trip I had ever taken. At first, it was only short hops up to London and back or maybe Toronto, but after a while, as we kept at it and got better and better, we eventually hit the bigger circuits. Now we were only home four or five weekends a year and the rest of the time we were exactly like this, squished up against each other on a bus or on a plane, trying to sleep sitting up or trying to read our books under those little circular lights in the ceiling and always waiting for the next fast-food stop or bathroom break.
I used to think that a bus full of track people on their way to a meet was like one of those old fashioned circus trains, the kind that used to roll into a small town carrying the big top tent and pulling a bunch of different crazy looking cars, each one painted with curly red and gold swirls. You know the one I mean? In the Fisher Price version of that train, every animal gets his own car and the necks of the giraffes stick out through a hole in the roof. All the freak show people live in that train: the strongman with his curly moustache and Tarzan outfit; the little girl contortionist who can roll herself into a perfect circle; the guy who can take anybody’s punch and never get hurt. I used to think that’s what we were like, the track people. Each of us had one of those strange bodies designed to do only one thing. The lunatic high jumpers who talked to themselves could leap over their own heads, and if you gave the pole vaulters a good, strong stick, they could put themselves through a third-storey window. The long jumpers could leap over a mid-sized station wagon and the shot putters could bench press it. Even the fragile-looking, super-thin girls with their hair tied back in harmless looking pony tails. Those distance girls might be iron deficient and anorexic and maybe none of them have had a regular period in years, but they could all run a hundred and twenty miles in a week, almost a marathon a day. Those girls had pain thresholds that hadn’t been discovered yet, and if they tried they could slow their heart rates down so far you’d actually have to wait between the beats. We all had our special skills, our fascinating powers, and we just barnstormed from city to city, performing them again and again in front of different people. Back when Burner and I started with this, every trip seemed like it was part of the tour, part of this bigger adventure, but I wasn’t sure anymore. Sometimes I thought it might be better to be able to eat fire, or swallow a sword, or hang upside down on the trapeze and catch my cousin as he flung himself through the air.
The hydraulic door hissed open when we got to the stadium and everybody bounced off and split up into their natural groups. Burner and I blended in with a bunch of distance people we knew from other clubs and we checked the schedule to see if everything was running on time. The air was perfectly still and the temperature was right where we wanted it, just inching its way over toward cool. Burner breathed it in deeply through his nose and I caught the way he smiled his small, secret smile.
“You’re going to have a good one today,” I told him. Sometimes you can just recognize it in other people.
“Wait and see,” he said. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
That’s what it’s like when you taper down your training in the right way. There’s just this weird feeling you get when you’re finally ready to race. It’s like you can barely keep your own body under control. In the beginning, when you’re pounding through those early weeks of the training and building up your base, you can never get away from the ache of being so deep-down tired and you feel like you’re slowly breaking down, right to the core of your last, smashed cell. Eventually though, time passes and you get used to it. Everything balances out and you can kind of reset yourself on this new, higher level. Then, when you get close to the competition, you cut your mileage right back almost to nothing and start sharpening up and taking lots of rest. It’s the trickiest thing to do correctly, but if you can lighten up at exactly the right time then it all kind of reverses and the hurt you put in earlier comes back out as strength. All of a sudden you feel like you have more energy than you need and everything seems easier than it should be. That’s where Burner was now. I could see it. You maybe get that feeling three or four times in your life, if you’re lucky.
If I ever have kids, I think I’ll let them participate in the grade school track meets when they’re little, but that’s it. Before it gets too serious, I’ll move them over to something else like soccer, or basketball, or table tennis. Something with a team or something where you can put the blame on your equipment if it all goes wrong. But when my child is still little, I’m definitely going to push for the grade school track meet because it never gets better than that. In the grade school track meet, you give the kids one of those lumpy polyester uniforms and they turn all excited. They get the day off school and they get to cheer for their friends and maybe they get picked to be one of the four that runs the shiny baton all the way around the circle without dropping it. At the grade school track meet, they give out ribbons that go all the way down to the “participant” level, and if you do well, they read your name over the announcements at school so everybody will know about it. You get to pull on a borrowed pair of spikes and go pounding down that long runway before you jump into the sand. It’s always hot and sunny and maybe your parents let you buy a drumstick or one of those overpriced red-white-and-blue popsicles from the acne-scarred high-school kid who has to ride around on a solid steel bicycle with a big yellow cooler stuck on the front. Maybe the girl with the red hair is there, the girl from the other school, the girl who wins all the longer races like you do. Maybe the newspaper takes a picture, you and the red-haired girl, standing on the top step of a plywood podium, holding all your first-place ribbons in the middle of a weedy field while all the dandelions are blowing their fuzzy heads off.
That’s how it should always be. The stands should always be full of parents who don’t know anything – people who can’t tell the difference between what is really good and what is really bad – but they’re there anyway, clapping and shouting their children’s names, telling them to “go” and “go.” You see why it’s so nice. The lanes are crowded with kids clunking their way home to the finish line and trying so hard. They go sailing way over the high jump bar – it looks so easy and they come down on the other side, rolling softly into those big, blue, fluffy mats. It’s sunny and everybody’s laughing and everything is still new.
All that disappears when you get serious. At the very top end – and, when you come down to it, Burner and I were still far from the real top end – it’s completely different. Everything starts to matter too much and too many things can go wrong and everybody knows the difference between what is really good and what is really bad. It comes back to the numbers. At the top end, we count it all up and measure it out and then we print the results so everybody can see. The guys I raced against were the mathematical totals of what they had done so far. That was it. Nobody cared about your goal or about what you planned to do in the future. It might take two full years of training to drop a single second or just a couple tenths off your personal best but you couldn’t complain. We were all in the same boat. For us, every little bit less was a little bit more.
Really, it’s the opposite of healthy. People will do anything to make those numbers go down. Some of them gobble big spoonfuls of straight baking soda before a race, even though they know it gives you this brutal, bloody diarrhea an hour later. That’s nothing. It’s even legal. They can’t ban you for baking soda, but I know guys who cross over, guys juiced up on EPO and guys who just disappear for a year and then come back like superstars. They say they’ve been training at altitude on some mountain in Utah, but everybody knows they’ve been through the lab, getting their transfusions and playing around with their red blood cell count. Burner and I never did that, but we used to go to this vet, a guy who worked on the racehorses out at the track. If you came at night and brought him straight cash, he’d give you a bottle of DMSO and a couple of these giant horse pills that you were supposed to chop up into little chunks. It sounds bad, but this was all perfectly legal too. His stuff was nothing more than super-powerful aspirin delivered in massive doses. We’d go see him and he’d say, “Now you’re going to have a big dinner and a full stomach before you touch this stuff, right?” and we’d lie and he’d give us what we wanted. As if he couldn’t tell that none of us ever ate a full meal. I used to pop anti-inflammatories like they were candy love hearts, going through a handful of naproxen every day.
Even the dangerous cortisone injections in those big needles, the ones they fire right into that band of tough connective tissue at the bottom of your foot, I’ve had those. They say you’re only supposed to take three of those in your whole life – that’s all a regular person can handle – but the year before the trials, I got six in five months. I just kept going to different doctors, in different crowded clinics, guys who didn’t know where I’d been two weeks earlier. It was the same thing every time. They’d go through their whole spiel again, and I’d pretend to pay close attention as they explained it all out.
“You can only get three of these,” they’d say, “just three, you understand?”
I’d look and nod my head seriously and sometimes I’d even write the number down for them, a big loopy three on one of their little pads and I’d underline it. Then I’d hop right up onto their tissue-covered table, rip off my sock, stick out my fucked-up foot, and brace myself for number 4 or number 5 or whatever came next.
It always got bad before the biggest competitions like this one, or before the Olympic trials or if there was a big trip to China on the line or carding money. You’d get stuck with this feeling like when you’re blowing up a balloon and you know you’re almost at the limit and you’re not sure if you should give it that little extra puff because there might still be room for a last bit of air, or it all might just explode in your face.
Burner and I started our warm-up jog about an hour before the race was scheduled to go. It took me a while to get started, and for those first few minutes I hobbled along doing the old-man shuffle until my body came back to me and my Achilles remembered what it was supposed to do. Burner was smooth right from the beginning. While I jerked up and down, fighting against the parts of myself that didn’t want to do this anymore, he kind of hovered beside me flat and easy. We were like two people at the airport. He floated and seemed to move along without any effort – like one of those well-pressed, put-together guys who zooms past on the moving sidewalk – and I was like the slob with too many carry-on bags, huffing and puffing and dropping things, hauling all this extra stuff and just hoping to find the right gate. Even my breathing was heavier than it should have been.
We made a big loop out and around the stadium, winding our way up and down the quiet little side streets, past houses full of people who couldn’t care less about what was happening just down the road. Burner and I had probably run thousands of miles together, but I was pretty sure these would be the last ones. I’d been thinking about it for a while, but I decided it there, during that last little warm-up jog. I think all those houses where nobody cared kind of forced themselves into my head.
“This is going to be it for me,” I told him, after about fifteen minutes.
“What do you mean ‘it’?”
“This is it. The last real ball-buster race for me. I think it’s over. Time to get on with everything else.”
It was easier than I thought it would be. All you had to do was say it. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt better and calmer, but Burner didn’t take it the same way.
“What?” he said, and he looked at me with this kind of confused sneer.
“Come on, Mikey. What else is there for you to do? You can’t be finished. You’ve got lots more in the tank. You can’t be one of those guys who gives it up and sits on the couch for a year eating chips and dip. You’ll never be the guy in the fun run, the guy with a walkman, the loser who wants to win his age group. You can’t just turn it off like that.”
I felt bad for springing this on him at such a bad time. It hadn’t been part of my big plan, but it’s hard to hide it when something that used to be important suddenly isn’t important anymore. I felt like I was kind of abandoning him, dumping him out there in the middle of those empty houses, and it was difficult and sad and correct all at the same time. Like when my mother and father finally broke up: difficult and sad, yes, but correct too, the right thing to do. Burner should have seen this coming from me. He could read the results sheets as well as I could, and he knew where my name fitted in.
“I’ve gone as far as I can,” I told him. “You know you can’t do this if you don’t have the feel for it.”
“Come on,” he said, “you’re kidding me.”
He reached over without breaking stride and gave me a little shot in the arm like he was trying to wake me up and bring me back to the real world.
“Give your head a shake,” he said. “Think about next year. You’ll heal up and be back good as new.”
We turned the corner and I could see the stadium coming back to us, getting bigger all the time. The stiffness was gone from my legs and I was rolling now, back to my old self, purring along. I felt fine, better than I had in months. The taper was giving something back to me too. But I was sure about this.
“Sorry, buddy,” I kidded him. “You’re going to have to find somebody else to kick down in the last hundred.”
“Stop it,” Burner said. He was looking at me hard. His lips pressed together and his mouth made a tight straight line across the middle of his face.
“Seriously. Stop it. You can’t quit now. You and I do this together. That’s our deal.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not.” I thought he already knew about this part of it. “We have never done this together. It’s one of those things that can’t be done together. In the end we have to be by ourselves.”
I didn’t want it to sound as bad as it did.
“Think about it,” I was smiling now, trying to show him that everything would be fine. “Think about it. When you come around that turn today, you’ll be alone, and when you head down the stretch by yourself you are going to surprise a lot of people.”
“Fuck you, Mikey,” he said. “I don’t need a cheerleader.”
His face was a little flushed and he turned on me quickly.
“You’re just covering your own ass. In about twenty minutes, I’m going to rip you apart and you can’t stand it. You can’t stand to lose to me and now you’re making excuses. Fuck you and your retirement party.”
I wanted to laugh it off and make it slide away, but before I could even get to him, before I could say anything, he took off. Burner put his head down and shifted gears. In ten seconds, he had pulled away and opened up a gap that couldn’t be closed. I had to save everything I had left and I couldn’t go chasing after him so I let him go. It was just jitters, just nerves. That’s what I told myself. After it was over, everything would be fine again.
When we got back to the field we split for good. He grabbed his spikes and his bag and went under the bleachers by himself. The last fifteen minutes are the most important. You want everything to feel easy. I put him out of my mind and lay on my back for a while, feeling the air coming in and going out of my body. I pulled my knees up close to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I held it all in like that for about fifteen seconds before letting everything go as slowly as possible. I rolled over on my stomach and did a few easy push-ups, and when I got back on my feet, I put my hands flat against the wall and tried to get my calves and my goddamn Achilles to go out as far as they could. I didn’t want to push it because you can only take as much as your body can give you on the day. I took off my socks and put on the ugly fluorescent spikes I’d been wearing all season. They were another Adidas freebie and I was expected to wear them, but I didn’t like them much. It had taken months to break them in, and the red blood stains were still there around the toe and heel from all the broken blisters I had to go through before my feet finally hardened up in the right places.
When the announcer’s voice called us out, I took off my sweats and did a couple of short sprints down the back stretch, trying to keep it all quick and smooth and under control. All the rest of the guys were there too, and we did our usual nervous hellos and our cautious smiles as we passed one another. When they called us to the line, I came up behind Burner and put my hand on his back, just kind of gently, so he’d know I was there.
“Have a good one, buddy, you little psycho,” I said, and I smiled at him. The officials made us stand there, side by side, each of us in our pre-selected spot along the curved white start line while the announcer read out our names and listed all our best times and our biggest wins. He said this was shaping up to be one of the best 1500 metre finals of the last decade. When the voice got to my name, he said I had the fastest personal best in this group and he named all the different times I’d made the national team. He said Burner was always dangerous and that he had put together a great season and was rounding into top form at the right time. Then the rest of them each got their turns and their compliments, Marcotte and Graham and Bourque and the others.
Burner stood still through all of this and didn’t even acknowledge his own name. Instead, he closed his eyes and made this big production out of rolling his head all the way around in a big circle. He went very slowly – first down, with his chin touching his chest, and then way over to the side and then straight up and back again. I could hear the bones in his neck crackling as he made the loop. He kept his mouth wide open, and when he looked up it seemed almost like he was waiting to catch a snowflake or a raindrop on his tongue. They called us to our marks and we crouched down, bending our knees just a bit and holding our arms away from our bodies. When they fired the gun, you could see the smoke before you heard the bang.
The announcer’s voice took over after that and he described everything that happened to us. We were bunched up around the first turn so I made a little move and went into second place, just trying to stay out of trouble. Even as it was happening, the voice said, “There goes Michael Campbell, moving into second place, staying out of trouble.” It was like being inside and outside of yourself at the same time. I kept bumping back and forth with Marcotte and Bourque, trying to settle myself down and find a clear place on the outside of lane one. All the time the big voice kept going, describing how we looked and calling out the splits and telling the crowd what kind of pace we were on and our projected finishing times. I couldn’t see Burner, but I knew he was close by because I heard the voice say something like “Jamie Burns is safely tucked in at fifth or sixth place.” I remember this only because the announcer used Burner’s real name and it sounded so strange to me.
The pace was fine, not too fast, not too slow, and after a lap and a half there were still lots of people close enough to the lead and feeling good. The problem with feeling good in a 1500 is that you know it can’t last and that eventually, sometime in the next ninety seconds, everything you have left has got to come draining out of you, either in a great explosive rush at the end or some painful slow trickle. The kickers would’ve been happy to let it go slow and leave it all to some blazing last one-fifty, but the rest of us didn’t want that to happen. As we went through 800, most of the serious guys were looking around, waiting and watching to see who would make the first move. After about thirty seconds, Dawson decided it would have to be him. He threw in this big surge coming off the turn and broke the whole thing open, dividing the race up between those who could go with him and those who could not.
The voice said, “Eric Dawson is heading for home early.”
Graham and Bourque and I hooked up a couple steps back and it felt like we were breaking free of the others. I never turn around when I race and everybody knows it’s not a good idea to look back, but I was sure Burner must have been close by. Even then it was clear that Dawson didn’t have a chance. He’d given it a pretty fierce try and the rest of us probably owed him something for being brave enough to go, but he didn’t have enough left and I could see he was starting to break down.
People in the crowd always wonder why the guy with the lead heading into the last lap almost never wins. They wonder why he can’t hold on and why he can’t look as good as he did just a minute earlier when he came flying by. Some people believe that myth about Roger Bannister and John Landy back when they ran the Miracle Mile in Vancouver in 1954. That was probably the only time in history when the whole world actually cared about two guys who could run a mile in under four minutes. Bannister was the first to do it, everybody knows that, but by the time they met in Vancouver, Landy had gone even faster. He was the new world record holder and most people were betting on him to win. You can look it up if you want. The Miracle Mile was pure craziness, like the Tyson/ Holyfield of its time. Every country sent their reporters to cover the story and more than a hundred million people listened to the call on the radio. It was the first time CBC Television ever broadcasted live from the west coast. If you go to Vancouver today, the famous statue is still there, the one where Landy is looking over his left shoulder as Bannister comes by him on the right. The press and people who don’t know anything always say that if Landy had looked the other way – if only he’d looked to the right – he would have seen Bannister coming and he never would have let him go by. They call it the phantom pass, as if Landy was just a victim of bad luck and bad timing. As if Bannister was like some ghost, slipping past unseen.
That’s the story they tell, but it’s not true. If you ever watch a tape of that race you’ll see that poor Landy is dead before he even starts the last lap. It’s one of those things you recognize if you’ve been through it yourself. When a guy is done, he’s just done and no amount of fighting can save him. The exercise physiology people will explain that it’s all about lactic acid fermentation and how when you push beyond your limit your legs run out of oxygen and the tissue starts to fill up with this burning liquid waste. We called it “rigging,” short for rigor mortis. When your body started to constrict, to tighten up involuntarily, first in your arms and your calves and then your quads and your hamstrings and your brain – when parts of you gave out like that, dying right underneath you at exactly the moment you needed something more – we called that rigging. At the end of a mile, everybody is rigging, everybody is dying, just at different speeds. Dawson was dying in front of us that day and we could see it in every broken down step he took. Just like Landy was dying in front of Bannister fifty years before and he knew it too. Look back at the grainy black and white video of the Miracle Mile. You’ll see it. Landy wasn’t taken by surprise. He knew exactly where Bannister was coming from – he just couldn’t do anything to stop it. For that whole last lap Bannister is right behind, tall and gangly and awkward and just waiting, deciding when to go. When Landy looked to his left – in that moment they made into a statue – he wasn’t trying to hold on for the win. That possibility was gone and he knew it. No, Landy was looking out for the next guy; he was trying to hold on to second and not to fall even farther back. People forget that Richard Ferguson, a Canadian, finished third in the Miracle Mile. He’s the important missing character, the one who didn’t make it into the statue. Ferguson was the threat coming up from behind; he was the guy Landy feared. It’s always like that. The most interesting stories in most races don’t have anything to do with winning.
Dawson was almost shaking when we came by him. The last lap was going to be a death march for him. Graham and Bourque and I went past in a single step and there was nothing left in Dawson to go with us.
The voice said, “Graham, Bourque, Campbell. It will be decided by these three.”
I couldn’t believe I was still in it and feeling OK. Graham looked like he was getting ready to drop the hammer and put an end to this, but as we headed down the final back stretch Bourque seemed a little wobbly, and for about five seconds I thought I had a real shot at bringing him down and getting myself in there for second and a spot on the team. I was just about to release my own kick, trying to gauge how much I had left and deciding how I could fit it into that last 250 metres. I got up on my toes and I was getting ready to charge when I felt this hand reach out and touch the middle of my back, kind of gently, just a tap so I’d know he was there. I looked to my right and Burner came roaring by with his tongue hanging out and that enraged look in his eyes.
The voice said, “Look at that. Burns is making a very strong move.”
I understand that sometimes people get their priorities mixed up. And I know that when you give yourself over completely to just one thing, you can lose perspective on the rest of the world. That’s a feeling I know. I think it’s what happens to those old ladies who donate their life savings to corrupt televangelists or to those pilgrims in the Philippines who compete for the honour of being nailed, actually hammered, to a cross for their Easter celebrations. We have to scrounge for meaning wherever we can find it and there’s no way to separate our faith from our desperation. You see it everywhere. Football hooligans, scholars of Renaissance poetry, fans of heavy metal music, car buffs, sexual perverts, collectors of all kinds, extreme bungee jumpers, lonely physicists, long distance runners, and tightly wound suburban housewives who want to make sure they entertain in just the right way. All of us. We can only value what we yearn for and it really does not matter what others think.
This is why I cannot expect you to understand that when Jamie Burns came past me and started up that now infamous kick which won him the national title in the 1500 metres – his wild, chased-by-the-train sprint that carried him around me, past Bourque and all the way up to Graham – I cannot expect you to understand that when this happened, I was caught up, caught up for the first and only time in my life, in one of those pure ecstatic surges that I believed only religious people ever experienced. Even as it unfolded in front of me and I watched Graham hopelessly trying to hold him off, I knew I had never wanted anything more than this, just to see Burner come up even and then edge his way forward in those last few steps and come sailing across the line with both his hands in the air. I did not care that this was such a small thing or that it could be shared with so few. I knew only that this event, this little victory mattered to me in some serious way that was probably impossible to communicate. I didn’t pray for it to happen, because there would be nobody to receive a prayer like that. But I did wish for it and even the wish told me something I had never known about myself before. We are what we want most and there are no miracles without desire. That’s why a mom can lift a car off her child after the accident and a guy can survive a plane crash and live in the woods for a week drinking only the sweat wrung from his socks. That’s how Burner won that race, by miraculous desperation.
If you are not the person who wins, then the finish line of a 1500 can be a crowded place. There are bodies collapsing and legs giving out and people wandering around with dazed and exhausted looks on their faces. Burner’s kick caught everybody by surprise. Even the announcer lost control of the story. For the last fifty metres he just kept shouting, “Will you look at that. Look. It’s Burns at the end. Look.”
I’d been so busy watching that nothing changed for me. I ended up exactly where I was before and never got past Bourque. I finished fourth, the worst place to be, but it was still more than I expected. People from the paper were taking pictures as I walked over to Burner. When he turned around we both just started laughing and shaking our heads.
“You bastard,” I said, and I pounded both my fists against his shoulders. “Where did that come from? How in the hell…”
“No idea,” he said. “I thought I was out of it, but I decided to go in the end and everything else just happened.”
Other people, strangers I had never seen before, were coming around slapping him on the back and giving their congratulations. The whole place was still kind of quivering because no one had ever seen a guy come back from being that far down. Every eye was on Burner and everyone was talking about that last stretch and trying to find a place for it in their own personal histories.
One of the drug officials came over and took Burner away to go pee in his cup and prove that everything was natural. As he was being led off, he turned back and told me to wait for him.
“You’re going to be busy,” I said. “Forget it.”
“Just wait,” he said.
For those next fifteen minutes, I was kind of stuck between two different versions of myself. I wandered back over to my bag and started to get dressed again. I looked around the track and it seemed like this big chunk of my past was kind of crystallizing behind me and freezing into permanence. Whatever the next thing would be was still way ahead, indistinct and foggy, and I had no idea what it would look like. I pulled off those ugly spikes and in a mock-dramatic moment I tossed them into a garbage can.
“Good riddance,” I said, and I just stood there for a while feeling the cool grass on my bare feet.
Burner came jogging back from his test soon after that, but every step he took there was somebody else there shaking his hand and patting the top of his bald head. All around him people were smiling and a couple of younger kids asked for his autograph and wanted to get their pictures taken with him. Burner drank it in like one of those actors standing on the red carpet before the Oscars begin, and even though it took him a while to make it across the track, he kept looking up at me every couple of seconds, letting me know that I was still the final destination and our planned warm-down was still going to take place.
When he finally made it over he had this ridiculously huge grin on his face and he kind of shrugged his shoulders.
“What can you do?” he said. “It’s all crazy.”
“Did they get your pee?” I asked. “Everything okay in that department?”
“No problem,” he said.
He pulled on a dry T-shirt and his own pair of high-tech sweatpants and said he was ready to go.
When we made it out of the stadium everything quieted down very quickly. The announcer’s voice had moved on to the final of the women’s 400 hurdles and we could just barely hear him as we turned away and went backwards along the same streets we had run earlier. Whenever you do that – go back along the same course, but in the opposite direction – it’s strange how some scenes are so familiar while others look so completely different you wonder how you missed them the first time around. It’s just the change in perspective, but sometimes, especially when you’re in a foreign city, you can get yourself pretty disoriented and lost. Then you have to slow down and look around and try to locate a recognizable landmark before you can be sure you’re on the right track.
Burner and I fell into a nice rhythm right away and our feet clipped along almost in unison. We went back past all those houses where nobody cared and it felt fine and comfortable. Our breathing was the only conversation and it said that we were both relaxed and taking it easy. Some of the neighbourhood kids were still out shooting baskets in their driveways and practising tricks with their skateboards.
We just floated down those anonymous sidewalks and carved our way though the maze of minivans and garbage cans. We made a turn and were just about to head back to the stadium when a bunch of kids came streaking past us on their bikes. There were four or five of them, a couple of boys and a couple of girls, probably between the ages of seven and nine. Real kids, not yet teenagers. One of the boys almost hit us as he went by and another one kept trying to jump his BMX up and down over the driveway cut-outs of the curb. There was a girl on a My Little Pony bike. She had multicoloured beads on all her spokes and red and white streamers trailing back from her handlebars. Her hair was wispy and blond. As she came by, she turned around and yelled, “I’m faster than you are.” She sort of sang it in a mean, bratty way, using the same up-and-down teasing music that accompanies every “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.”
“You can’t catch me,” she said, and she stuck her tongue out and pedalled harder. Her pink shoes swivelled around in circles.
One of the boys, a kid wearing a tough-looking camouflage T-shirt, zipped around us and swerved in tight to cut me off. As he pulled away, he shot us the finger and said, “Nice tights, loser.”
I glanced over at Burner and said “Let it go,” but it was too late. His face was tightening up and that angry stare was coming back into his eyes. He wasn’t looking at me.
“Hey,” he yelled, and you could feel the edges hardening around that one little syllable. He pulled ahead of me and started tracking them down. I was caught unprepared and a step behind and I couldn’t figure out how we had managed to arrive at this point. Burner was charging again and the kids were running. They didn’t know. There was no way on earth they could have known. The little girl was pedalling as fast as she could and there was this strange, high-pitched, wheezing sound coming out of her, but there was nothing she could do. Burner had already closed the gap and his hand was already there, reaching out for the thin strands of her hair. It all disintegrated after that. He must have been a foot taller than the oldest one.