Cross country has been going on for awhile, and we recently ran the Mondovi golf course, closely followed by the Durand golf course two days later. I do not exaggerate when I say that the Mondovi course is evil. It is designed to thoroughly destroy the morale of any and all who run it, and it was not made any better by the fact that girls had to run 5-K, rather than 4-K. I lived through it, though, and I got a good story out of it the next night, when I was lying in bed, wondering how I could have made myself go faster....
A Hound of Hell
By
S.R. Koch
Waiting for a race to start is terrible.
It goes beyond nerve-wracking into the realm of insane, and I don’t know why I
do it. I stand there, waiting for the dumb gun to go off while my stomach does
somersaults in my chest cavity and I promise myself that I’ll quit and never
run cross country again. After the race, though, I’m always so happy and
satisfied that I just end up doing it all over again. In the meantime, though,
my gut usually goes through a sort of clenching, twisting feeling as the ref.
announces the fifteen and ten-second marks, and we all stop moving and wait for
the gun.
On the day of my best race ever, the gun
went off at the seven-second mark. That was highly unusual. The ref. normally counts
down to five and goes quiet, and we have to wait for an indefinite amount of
time for him to actually fire the gun. Sometimes he shoots right away. Other
times, he leaves you hanging for an additional eight seconds or so, and people
end up false-starting and tripping over the starting line. It’s extremely
nerve-wracking, and I’m pretty sure they do it just to get us wound up. On the
day of my best race, the gunshot at seven startled us all, but we were too
pumped with adrenaline and too dazed by the sudden rush to get going to pause
and consider what was going on. In retrospect, I suspect that what we thought
was a gunshot was actually the tree behind us snapping in half, because I
vaguely remember there being a belated gunshot a half second after the first as
the ref. realized that the race had started without him. I didn’t pause to
consider it, though, because I was well up the first hill by that point and
trying my best to close on a girl from Mondovi.
Running cross country is
interesting. It’s a team sport, but everyone is isolated in his/her own little
bubble of mental agony as we plug along down the course. I usually start out
thinking pretty positive, something along the lines of, “I got this, no
problem, pass that girl, tough as nails, I got this,” and gradually pass into
the realm of, “Why the hell am I still
doing this dumb sport?!” I’m a slow starter, so the first half-mile I spend
mostly picking off runners as I work my way up to my usual place. On the day of
the race, I was in the process of cutting off a particularly stubborn little
Asian girl from some school with an orange jersey when the first hint that
there was something amiss with the meet caught my attention.
Usually at cross country meets,
there’s a bunch of parents gathered at corners with cowbells, posters, and
cameras so they can yell at us for a few seconds before running on to the next
cheer spot. Well, they were there this time as usual, except none of them were
cheering, and they were already in the process of turning tail and running when
the first half of the column of runners went by. I wouldn’t have thought much
of it, except that I realized they weren’t even running for some other part of
the course—they were running towards the woods that bordered the trail we were
running on, apparently with the intention of getting out of the open.
Distracted, I lost my Asian girl to a tight corner I should have had her on. I
was twisting my head around over my shoulder, trying to get a glimpse of what
the spectators were running from. A moment later, I ended up passing the Asian
girl up a nearly vertical hill, going at sprint speed with my head lowered. The
girl stared at me with wide eyes as I passed, half surprised that I would be
stupid enough to sprint halfway through a 5-K race and half shocked that a
tired, teenage human girl was even capable of producing that much speed. I didn’t
care one way or the other, though; I’d just caught a glimpse of what the
parents had been running from.
Have you ever seen a wolfhound? They’re
very cool dogs—big, long-legged, with narrow faces, big black eyes, and shaggy
gray coats that make them look like grizzly-haired old men. They’re usually
fairly friendly in a regal, dignified sort of way, and I’ve always enjoyed
making friends with them.
The thing galloping up along the
line of runners was not a wolfhound, or at least not any kind I’ve ever seen
before. It was huge—bigger even than a mastiff—with fur the color of coal and
eyes that literally burned red in its skull. This wasn’t some Hound of the Baskervilles-type prank,
either; the animal was nearly the size of a horse, and in the late evening
sunlight, I could pick out every detail of its monstrous, shaggy body. There
was foam dripping from its pearly white teeth and the long pink tongue lolling
from its jaws, and wherever its massive, jagged-nailed paws touched the
manicured golf course lawn, the grass hissed and withered black as if touched
by fire. There was no hint of dignified good nature in this thing; this was
something out of myth and legend thought to be mere superstition by modern man.
A word came unbidden to my mind as I watched it lope towards me, its jaws
spread in a wide, doggish grin: hellhound. One of the dogs of Tartarus. Somehow
there was no doubting it, just as there was no doubting the fact that it was
coming after me.
I’m not being pretentious. The
animal was after me and me alone. It ignored the other terrified, screaming
runners that it passed, galloping by without a care as they broke off one by
one from the track and made for the woods as fast as their feet could carry
them. I could feel those burning red eyes boring into my own, and some sixth
sense told me that its one and only purpose at present was to chase me down.
Don’t ask how I knew it wasn’t after any of the other runners who hadn’t
noticed it yet, I just did. If you ask what I did after realizing this, well that I can easily answer: I ran like
hell.
We call the pace we run a 5-K at “race
pace”, and it’s usually something between a jog and a sprint. The pace I set
the day I raced a hound of hell wasn’t quite a sprint, but it was pretty darned
close. My feet flew over the grass like they were on wings, my toes barely
touching the ground between strides. I kept my head up, my shoulders forward,
and my arms loose as I pelted forward, my lungs, limbs and brain all screaming
at me to stop. That faded a moment later, though, and I was just running, my
senses overloaded with the need to go faster. I think I went beyond adrenaline
into something like the running version of Nirvana. It was awesome, but I
really wish I could have had a chance to enjoy it a little.
By that point, I’d passed everyone
on the course, and everyone but me had abandoned the race for the woods. There
was no doubt in my mind at this point who the hellhound’s target was—it had
ignored every last terrified racer as they broke away, and it remained fixed on
me as I continued running along the painted white race line that showed the way
through the race course.
That particular course is a nasty
piece of work. It starts on a downhill, and then contrives to take the unfortunate
racers up, down, and then back up every hill within a mile radius of the
starting line. I usually end up pooping out on the Big Hill, an especially
vindictive patch of terrain that goes up, curves around, levels out a little,
and then goes up again before plummeting straight back down. The day I raced
the hellhound, I flew up that hill,
my legs stretching their longest to eat up the hill in long, loping strides.
The hellhound stayed with me about forty feet behind, its head lowered to take
the hill and its long, powerful limbs matching me stride for stride. It never
occurred to me at the time, but in retrospect I find it odd that it could outpace
all the other runners, only to slow down behind me and fail to overtake me. I
also found it unusual that it never tried cutting corners and heading me off—like
me, it stayed following the white line and the corner flags, winding through the
course like an ordinary runner. It occurred to me later that, though it was
definitely after me, the hound may not have been trying to catch me at all.
After running for an eternity and an
instant, my legs carried me over the second-to-last hill, around a yellow flag,
into sight of the finish line. There was a deep dip between me and it, and then
a long, steep slope that led up to the finish at the top of a hill. That course
is renowned for that finish. That final uphill is what gnaws away at us the
entire length of the race, as we know that no matter how many slopes we
conquer, there’s always one more waiting for us at the end. I’ve never been
able to manage more than a three-quarter speed sprint up that thing, and I
always lose people there when my brain starts to give up.
The day of the hellhound, I
sprinted. I poured all my remaining strength into that final hill, going beyond
running Nirvana into a realm where all I could perceive was the rasping of my
breath through my nostrils, the pounding of my feet against the turf, and the
roar of the blood in my ears. The hound was right on my tail the entire way,
its wet black nose practically touching my shoulder blades and its hot breath
blasting down my neck. I ran as fast as I could, and then went faster, every
nerve in my body screaming for me to stop. Above me, the little yellow flags
that marked the finish line waved enticingly, drawing steadily closer at what
seemed a snail’s pace at the time.
With one final surge of effort, I
crested the hill. There was no one there to mark me—the refs. had disappeared
along with the runners and spectators long ago—but the little chip tied into my
shoelaces gave a little ‘beep’ as I crossed the electronic pad on the finish
line, and the abandoned computer off to my right recorded my place in first and
my time of ten minutes, twenty-five seconds. I kept running a few paces out of
habit (just to make sure I’d kept my place), and then let myself collapse, my
knees buckling and my spine losing all rigidity like a rubber chicken. I didn’t
even think about the hellhound for a minute, my brain simply reveling in the bliss
of being done and my heart rate still working on coming back down to normal.
That was the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever experienced: relief and triumph.
Things became a blur afterward.
People began returning in ones and twos, and my coach found me still lying
where I’d collapsed. My team tried to taking me to a hospital, but I just waved
them off and insisted that all I wanted was chocolate milk and cookies. They
gave me what I wanted, still convinced that I was going to drop dead on them
any minute, and watched in amazement as I downed half a gallon of chocolate
milk and five chocolate chip cookies. I felt great afterward, and promptly curled
up in the fleece blanket I’d brought along and fell fast asleep. The
paramedics, when they got there, concluded that there was absolutely nothing
wrong with me. I’d simply run the race of my life.
Of the hound, there was no sign
after the race. No one knew exactly when or where it disappeared, but disappear
it did. The only thing that convinced the spectators and runners that it had
been there at all and that they hadn’t simply dreamed the whole thing was the
burned paw prints on the ground and the shattered tree that they later found
behind the starting line (we suspect that’s where it first burst from the pits
of Tartarus and took off after the runners). A lot of the witnesses did try to
say that it never had happened, and that the hellhound had been some
hallucination prompted by exhaustion on the runners’ part and heatstroke on
that of the spectators. That how it was reported in the newspaper the next day:
a mass hallucination. Most of the story was credited to me, and my
record-breaking 5-K time of 10:25. Reporters asked me a lot of questions: how I’d
felt during the race, how I’d trained for it, how I’m motivated myself to run
that fast for that long, etc. I knew who to thank, though, and the reporters
didn’t believe me.
Believe it or not, though, that’s
what really happened the day of my best race ever. I simply ran as if the
hounds of hell were on my heels.
THE
END
