Ultimate Sports (17 page)

“Are you ready for the start of The Assault on the Record?” shouted Danny. “The World’s Record Hundred-Mile Relay?” Everyone but Andy cheered. He tried to look as serious as if he were starting the Olympics 1500 finals. Danny held up his arm with the blank gun. “Runner, take your mark.” He had a huge grin on his face, like
he was doing just what he had wanted to do for years. “Get set.” Andy leaned out over the line, his fingers curled so his thumbs touched his middle fingers. “Go!” The gun went off and Andy sprinted away. Everyone cheered. Bobby D punched the air, as if he had just won a championship ring, though he hadn’t done anything yet.

Luther and I sprinted across the field to meet Andy at the 220 mark and play rabbit for him for twenty or thirty yards. We had to hurry. He wasn’t jogging slowly, he was giving his all. We got there right when he did, stayed with him to the curve, and then let him go. Everyone else was lined up at the homestretch—runners and parents, and finally some girls had arrived. “Assault on the Record!” they chanted. “Assault on the Record!” Andy picked it up for the stretch, then eased up a bit at the turn. He’d get a good time, starting us out right. And Feldman, our fastest runner, would anchor it, so we’d end right, too. In between were some weak links. I just hoped I wouldn’t be one of them.

Luther and I ran back to the 220 mark to lead Andy around again on his second lap. “How you feeling?” we asked when he got to us. “Good, good, only nine miles to go after this,” he puffed. “This won’t be so bad.” His face was becoming streaked with red.

We ran with him to the curve and let him go. The fans were gathered again at the homestretch. Then Luther remembered that he was the third runner and had to do some more stretching. I still had about half an hour before my turn, but I decided to start loosening up, too.

•   •   •

Our first ten miles, one for each of us, went smoothly—good times and cheers for everyone (though I noticed that the crowd at the homestretch was pretty thin after the first four runners). Girls arrived in groups of three or four. They talked with the guys who lounged in lawn chairs, and they rubbed our shoulders. Most of us— not Feldman, of course—had our shirts off. We were ready to catch some eyes, turn brown in the sun, maybe line up some dates for the summer. I had been disappointed when Mariella told me she’d be out of town the day of die relay, but that meant she couldn’t complain if I was friendly with some of the other girls. As he started the final lap of his first mile, Luther threw off his Tigers baseball cap. We all cheered for that. “Kip Keino,” we chanted, “Kip Keino.” Danny had explained that a long time ago a Kenyan miler of that name had tossed off his cap as he started his final laps. I think he set a world’s record doing that.

My first mile was a pretty decent 5:05. As I handed off the baton to Bobby D, everyone was lined up with their hands raised for me to high-five. “Looking good, looking good,” they shouted. Danny pointed to the mileage marker. “You get to turn it over, Curt,” he said. Then he turned back to the track. He had two stopwatches, one with my time to be recorded, one for Bobby D. He was directing things like a general, a strange role for a fat kid who was usually picked on by some of the other kids, but everyone knew they couldn’t match his knowledge of track history and details. I looked over as he marked my time on a huge chart, his pale puffy white legs sticking out of his shorts, and I smiled. At last other people were realizing he wasn’t just a tub.

•   •   •

My time turned out to be second best on the team, after Feldman’s unbelievable 4:25. Hecht was almost seven minutes, even for his first mile, but we had expected that. The big surprise was that Bobby D—an okay athlete, though he hadn’t even gone out for the track team— turned in the third-best time, just ten seconds slower than mine.

Danny aimed the chart out at the street so passersby could see how we’d done. Hecht, whose time was slowest, thought that was a dumb idea. Andy Berlinsky, whose name was first on the list, thought it was great. Bobby D thought the names should be listed in order of times, not running position, so he would be third instead of ninth.

My second mile was 5:15, ten seconds slower than my first, but still a good time. Feldman was still way under five minutes. Somehow Bobby D kept up the pace, this time with a 5:30. I went up to him afterward and asked how he could run such strong times. Had he been working out? Running distance in the spring without telling anyone? He turned away from me and faced the other guys on the team as they sprawled in the lawn chairs, trying to chill out. “Hey, guys, listen to this! Curt’s getting nervous! He knows who the power in this race will be! Check out Feldman—he looks a little tense, too. The mighty Bobby D is running up their backs and they don’t like it one bit!”

Everyone laughed. I turned away. I was just trying to be friendly, pay him a simple compliment, and he had to grandstand with it. I realized my fists were clenched. Danny came up and leaned his head toward mine. “Don’t worry,” he said softly. “I think he’ll take care of himself
I looked at him closely, but he turned back to the track, where Luther was coming in for the second lap of his third mile.

•   •   •

Each mile my time slowed. Everyone’s did. Some guys’ times went up a lot, like Hecht’s, which rose twenty or thirty seconds each mile. Feldman’s times hovered below five minutes, then climbed to 5:10 on the sixth mile. I added about ten seconds each mile, though twice I went up twenty seconds.

Around noon we had a big crowd. My folks brought a cooler of juice and candy bars—“Quick energy,” said my dad with a smile. A TV station came by and shot some film of us. We tried to get the cameraman to stay for Feldman’s turn, so we’d look as good as possible, but he shot Hecht instead as he struggled around the track. He talked with Bobby D (who did the interviews with his shades on and his shirt off, his muscles flexed the whole time) and left. We just shook our heads. This was our chance for fame, but on TV we’d look slow and arrogant.

We figured out that we could eat or drink during the laps of the first two runners after our turn. That would leave us about an hour to digest stuff before we had to run again. About the fifty-mile mark most of us realized our skin was being burned to a crisp, and we finally covered up. It was too late.

During the eighth mile I wondered if we could finish at all. Each step my feet and calves throbbed and I had to make up mind games to keep going. Seven miles done, I realized—more than half of my goal. After this there would be only two more miles. And I had already run half a lap. How many yards would that leave me? It would be
easier to figure with a calculator or computer, but I couldn’t see myself lugging a laptop around the track with me.

Three and a half laps to go, 440 yards for each lap, that was 880, 1,320, and a half lap more would add 220-1,540 yards until I could rest. But just in adding that up I had run 110 yards—what would that make it?

Drivers on the street alongside the track looked over and waved. During the first few miles I had waved back to each one. Then I had merely nodded. Now I didn’t bother. Who cared?

After I passed Danny, I’d have three laps to go—440, 880,1,320 yards until I finished my eighth mile often. All of us together would have done seventy-eight miles—only twenty-two to go until we set the world’s record. Who cared about the record anymore? But we had started out for the record, it had seemed so important, and I wouldn’t be the one to quit.

When I finally handed off to Bobby D, I realized he looked even worse than I felt. About the fifth mile his times had gone through the roof, increasing about thirty seconds each mile. His sixth-mile time had been fifth best of all the guys; his seventh mile placed him eighth. His times were getting to be like those of Hecht, who chugged through, grumbling that he hadn’t realized what he was getting into. Seconds after Bobby D took the baton, I wondered if he was running at all. My momentum took me past him, but he didn’t race past the way I had expected. I turned to see where he was. His legs were moving, his knees came up, but there was no forward speed. “Bobby D, you okay?” I asked. He didn’t answer, and finally he passed me and continued around the track.

Danny came over to show me my time. “You’re still
second or third best,” he explained. “Luther beat you on two miles.”

I nodded toward Bobby D. “What about him?” I asked.

Danny smiled big. “What’d you expect?” he said. “He couldn’t keep up with the times he had at the beginning. He was between you and Feldman and was determined to keep up with you both. No way he could continue that.”

“So why’d you put him there if you knew he couldn’t keep up?”

He shrugged. “Somebody had to bring him down to size,” he said. “And this way he does it to himself.” It was the first time I’d ever noticed Danny looking devious.

He turned to the scoreboard and wrote my time in big numbers. I flipped the mileage marker to 78. Bobby D was still only halfway around the track.

When he came by at the end of the lap, the guys started
to
cheer for him. “All right, Bobby D. You can do it!” He looked over and snarled. Everyone shut up. His teeth were bared, his face squinched with pain—you could see he was working as hard as he could, but his legs were moving in slow motion. When he finally ended his mile—8:30, one of the slowest yet—he came over to the chairs and collapsed, his baseball cap pulled low over his face. “So how’d it feel, Bobby D?” asked Roger. There was no answer. “Just two more to go,” added Andy. Nothing. “Bobby, you okay?” asked Roger. He slapped him lightly on the leg and Bobby D shot upright. “Don’t touch me!” he bellowed, swinging his fists in a circle around him. We suggested that he remove his shoes while he wasn’t running, but he shook his head and said he would never be able to get them back on. Then he fell back on the chair
and pulled a towel over his head and shoulders. A few minutes later he was snoring.

The guys could barely wake him up for his next turn. Danny said he expected Bobby D to lash out at the people around him—“Why didn’t you get me up earlier?”— or to snap at them with his usual sarcasm: “You guys are so lame I can’t even count on you to wake me up!” Instead, he rose silently, stretched stiffly for about a minute, and then hobbled over to the starting line. “Let’s get in a good one, Bobby D,” announced Danny as he took the stopwatches in his hands. Bobby nodded, looking almost meek, took the baton from me, and staggered away.

Danny came back to the lounge chairs, smiling widely.

•   •   •

During our ninth miles, the crowd returned. All the parents arrived with their cameras, the girls came back, and even Coach Kirby stopped over, probably looking for new runners for the team next year. With fans watching, our times leveled off. I thought they might improve for the last mile, if only because of adrenaline, but only Feldman’s did. We couldn’t ignore our blistered feet, cramped legs, and burned shoulders. But at least our times didn’t continue to soar. Except for Bobby D’s. His ninth mile was ten minutes, his final one almost twelve.

With a crowd around us, we started joking again—teasing each other, showing off. Not Bobby D. He pulled a lounge chair away from the others, fell onto it as soon as he finished his laps and got a drink of juice, and didn’t move until we dragged him out for his last turn. He didn’t say a word and hobbled with each step. He seemed like a different person from the swaggering show-off who had always made fun of everyone else.

•   •   •

The important thing was that we finished, with a total time of twelve hours, seven minutes, and thirty-six seconds. We posed for photos, everyone in a line behind the mileage marker that finally said “100.” We all put our arms around each other’s red shoulders, then cringed at the pain. That night I soaked in a cold-water bathtub with baking soda for almost an hour, then lay on my bed with a thick coating of aloe vera cream that my mom rubbed on my shoulders and back. The next day we got a two-paragraph article on the third page of the sports section. Everyone’s name was mentioned, so we did achieve a small amount of fame, but that was the final activity for the Counting Cows. We never wrote our newspaper columns or compiled a book. Danny Daniels put out the word on the Internet about our accomplishment, and some guys in Oregon broke our record that August. Bobby D said he wanted nothing more to do with a group that would attempt such stupid projects. Without the availability of his refrigerator, we all went off to other things. I didn’t see Bobby D again until school started. He was still quiet, still limping.

Stephen Hoffius, a half-mile runner in high school, recently entered the field of publishing for young adults with the award-winning
Winners and Losers
, which die American Library Association named in 1994 a Recommended Book for Reluctant Young Adult Readers. It’s about parental pressure, competition between two friends on a track team, and what happens after one boy’s heart stops during a race.

Many of the characters in
Winners and Losers
appear in “The Assault on the Record,” a story that had its beginnings in Stephen Hoffius’s own high-school days. During die summer after his sophomore year, Steve and nine friends (who, he says, “like me, had more energy than sense”) ran a 100-mile relay, one mile at a time. They needed a week to recover, he admits. But they got a little smarter as they got older. The following year he and nine friends ran another 100-mile relay, this time with each runner completing twenty half miles. “A tip for those who would try it: The half miles were easier.” For all Mr. Hoffius knows, they still hold the record for this distance, though he can’t remember their times.

Stephen Hoffius was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife, Susan Dunn (an attorney), and their two children, Anna and Jacob. He is the director of publications for the South Carolina Historical Society and managing editor of
South Carolina Historical Magazine
. He is also a freelance journalist who covered the Olympic track-and-field trials in Eugene, Oregon, in 1980 and whose articles have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including
The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor
, the
Detroit Free Press, The Progressive, Swiss Air Gazette
, and
Southern Exposure
.