Track is the toughest of all sports. Swimming, wrestling, and cross country are a close second, but in the case of these runners-up venues, the pool and mats are temperature-controlled, and while cross-country is an outdoor sport that’s fully exposed to the elements, the fall weather isn’t so bad.
If you’ve looked outside for the past five months since the snow came in November, you’ll understand why the track is such a challenge. It’s not just the grueling nature of individual competition, it’s this competition against the elements, things far beyond your control.
In my sophomore year, Coach Sinner arranged a square meet in Thermopolis late on a Tuesday afternoon.
The track at Leroy Hayes Memorial Field is the fastest in Wyoming today. The surface is excellent for hurdles, sprints and relay races. Many boys and girls set their personal bests at the Bobcat Invite or their Twilight reunion.
This is the modern track, the one we rode that Tuesday in early April was good old fashioned cinder. For those of you who don’t remember or have never seen a cinder track, they were fast when rolled properly before a meeting, and they were made of ashes. The slag came from the railway and coal-fired power plants.
It was early April and the snow had just started to melt. The three inside lanes at the south end of the Thermopolis track were saturated, with standing water almost the entire length of the curve. I ran the mile with some runners from Thermop, a guy from Ten Sleep, and three kids from Basin. We didn’t care, my friend Cubby Furlong was in the running and he could walk.
After the first three laps, where we were all moving sensibly into the fourth lane on each lap around the healthy end, Cubby was leading by a good 80 yards and pulling away. When the cannon shot rang out for the final lap, we all picked up the pace, but one of the Basin runners had a better idea. As we turned wide on lane four, he cut inward to take the shorter still-water route of lane one. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him stagger, then fall and spin onto the track before sliding face first down the dirt.
Have you ever tried to laugh while competing in a distance race? It’s more of a snort and it wastes your wind and cuts off your crotch. All of us behind Cubby in the pack made that snorting sound.
This is Wyoming track.
A week later we were in Cody on a freezing Saturday. We arrived Friday night before hitting the tarmac at the Broncs’ new course. Not the rubberized asphalt you find at every high school in Fremont County, but regular old highway asphalt. It was slippery, hard, and worse in cold weather. None of our spikes worked on the hard surface, so we walked in flat trainers.
I was in the 180 yard low hurdles. The 180 Lows was a great event, you didn’t have to be lightning fast if you could hurdle and if you couldn’t hurdle but were fast you could keep up.
The problem that day was ice on the track. As we were warming up, I noticed ice ahead of the second hurdle in my lane. Coach Sinner told me not to worry, I would probably miss it. (Probably, is that word ever a good thing?)
The gun rang and I cleared the first hurdle with ease, but on the icy second, my plant foot slipped on the ice and I slid down the course on my back after smashing the hurdle. Dazed, I heard Coach Sinner yell, “Get up and shut up.” I got up, ran the rest of the flight well past the first, and finished the race.
I had a nice raspberry on my left shoulder from the slide and felt blood running down my cheek. Part of the shattered barrier had hit me in the face. A couple of butterfly bandages stopped the bleeding and I had stitches in Riverton later that evening when we got home. Yes, this is Wyoming track.
As a freshman coach, I took my Lusk Tiger track team to a meet in Bayard, Nebraska. As a kid, I struggled with rain, snow, and ice on the track, but never with the wind that awaited us in the Nebraska Panhandle.
Bayard was a wind tunnel with cyclone gusts hitting just before lunch. The field events were all over by 11:00 am. The hurdle heats were about to start when the wind started to pick up.
We finished the four flights of the girls’ 100-meter hurdles, but when we moved the hurdles up six inches and placed them on the markers for the boys’ 110-meter hurdles, the storm came.
This lateral tornado was new to me, but old hat to Bayard’s volunteer crew leading the meeting.
They had self-righting hurdles. If one fell over because a child hit it, or if a gust of wind knocked down a full three or four steps, the hurdles would gently roll back to the upright position. It was like watching wheat against a gathering afternoon thunderstorm.
They had two finish lines so the kids could always hurdle downwind, a much safer option.
Bayard developed a method for getting out of the sprints, hurdles between gusts.
There was a guy in the crow’s nest with binoculars looking west. About half a mile away, just west of the tiny town, another guy was holding a white flag. When the gusts reached full force, he raised the flag and the crow’s nest observer held up a red flag for the starter to see.
When the white flag fell, it meant a pause. The red flag was raised back inside, and the starter was given about a minute to exit the aircraft. Amazingly, it worked for almost all events except one.
The 3200 meter race started right after the hurdle heats. There was no way to run in the doldrums when the wind wasn’t blowing in an eight-lap race.
The girls ran first and a tiny girl from one of the schools in Nebraska was way ahead when a gust hit. This one was strong, maybe 60 or 70 miles an hour, strong enough to tear the high jump pits from their anchor straps. The boxes blew up and rolled over and she didn’t see them coming. One hit her hard, propelling her face first onto the track. It knocked out her front teeth. A school nurse put her teeth in a paper cup and she was taken to Scottsbluff for treatment.
At a competition the following week in Morrill, Nebraska, she did not compete, but her trainer told us she was recovering well and would be running the following week. Thanks to the quick action of a local dentist, she had her smile back.
A tough kid in a tough sport. Hopefully the weather will change soon and also give our local athletes a break.
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