A Hound of Hell

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