8 Lanes, The Secret, and the State Champions of Lincoln High School
The first real race I ever ran in was on the old, battlescarred, 8-lane blacktop track at Lincoln High School. With the State Capitol building sneaking a peek over the top of the fenceline like some too-curious neighbor and my Reebok basketball shoes slapping down the straightaway, I remember my oversized shirt billowing behind me like a gray parachute and my Mom and Dad’s voices echoing off the cement steps of the grandstand.
I was in first grade, signed up to run against kids two years older than me but damn the age groups, I wanted to get out there and let it fly.
I remember getting my ass kicked that day, if we’re being totally honest. I remember the backs of those older kids in front of me, as they crossed the line at least a few steps ahead of me. But, I remember smiling.
And the feel of that prairie wind swooping low on those city streets and kissing the sweat on my bowl-cut forehead as I put my hands on my knees and stared down at my double-knotted sneakers — still humming with the drum roll of my feet having slap-dashed their way 100 meters as fast as my young legs could pump — sucking June air into my lungs as I tried to catch my breath.
And, I remember falling in love.
With a sport. With a place.
It’s the kind of permanent-ink memory, the kind of mental tattoo that might fade with time, but will never — can never — be fully removed.
I have run hundreds of races since. In stadiums from Miami, Florida to Fayatteville, Arkansas to Buffalo, New York and just about any small town with lanes and an oval in between, but that stadium will always be my home.
I remember being down on that sametrack, still a boy, readying for the city finals of the 400 meter dash, when the most Midwestern of summer intrusions decided to put an official hold on the proceedings: the tornado sirens went off, howling through the boiling skies that hissed and hung low over the events. And sprinters sprinted. Not to the tape, but to a laundromat across the street where friend and foe alike jammed shoulder to sweaty shoulder into the women’s restroom (*Author’s note: my fellow 11-year-old boys with eyes as wide as my own at this particularly cruel form of awkwardness).
I remember the feel of the red rubberized surface scraping across my knees as I fell across the line, legs fully of mutiny and acid, and I remember the feel of the hands that picked me up and helped me stumble into the infield where I had to contemplate silver-plated failure. I remember and remember and remember.
Always that sport. Always that place.
I do not write this, now, to attempt to turn your eyes to the past exploits on that track. No, merely to qualify my love of the Lincoln High School track and field program and the two curves and two straights that helped raise me for a good portion of my life.
If you want to talk Lincoln High track and field, the present and future are most certainly the correct place to start.
On Saturday afternoon, under the gray skies of a just-barely-cooperating Nebraska May, the Lincoln High Boys track team clinched their first State Championship in the sport since Dwight D. Eisenhower was in office and Elvis Presley was working those hips in front of auditoriums full of swooning poodle skirts. They did this through a wild combination of effort, grit, guts, talent, skill, and the coaches who light the fuse for that particularly beautiful explosion.
And they won by exactly one half of one point.
With contributions across the board, from crash-landing glory buried in piles of sand to state records in the 110-meter high hurdles, make no mistake: if one step had gone the wrong way or one man had eased up instead of leaning? This would not have happened. If one extra lap or one last repetition had been skipped, that trophy wouldn’t have shined quite so bright with the words “Runner Up” stenciled on.
You see, I remember that sport and that place and I remember what it taught me in victory and defeat. I remember The Secret that it whispered in my ears while they were ringing from my own ragged breath all those years and miles and pounds ago: there is no secret.
Just the red of that track and the red of your blood and the determination to mix those two if need be.
I certainly never rose to anywhere near the heights these young men reached this season for the Black and the Red, but it makes my heart pound with 31-year-old glee to look down at that track and know that, in this year? In 2018? That’s not merely an oval that they are standing upon. It’s a Link.
And my link of the chain may be many laps back, many decades stuffed behind those newer, shinier trophies, but I will let my smile gleam as though it was just polished.
Most runners can remember their hardest workout. It’s like your first bad breakup: highly dramatic, sometimes involves hyperventilating, and oftentimes you feel like you’re going to die.
The hardest workout I ever had at Lincoln High School came in my Sophomore year. We were doing a series of escalated, near-max-effort 200 meter sprints with minimal rest in between. Which doesn’t sound that hard for a distance runner on the surface. But, all hopped up on testosterone and competitive spirit, we immediately did the first set too hard and put ourselves into a severe deficit for the remaining runs.
I ended that day fading briefly in and out of consciousness on the plastic-lacquered steps of the weight room, thoroughly exhausted.
The head coach at the time, and of every time at Lincoln High since 1983, was Bob White. Coach White had been keeping a close eye on our workout that day, and he came and found us sprawled out in a pile of headbands and sweat on the steps.
He leaned over and smiled at me, blue eyes sparkling sarcastically and smirked in my direction. You see, Coach White, too, knew the secret. And he was watching me learn it, right then, at 5:17 PM in 2003, before his very eyes.
He said 8 words to me that I’ll never forget.
“If you’re going to puke, do it here.”
And, with that, he handed me a trash can and went back to the track. Coach White was forever going back to the track.
No mess. No bullshit. No Hallmark card or Knute Rockney speech. He saw that I had put in the work, saw that I was figuring out what it took, and wanted me to get my ass back up and do the same thing the next day. He saw I was learning the secret.
I remember that day. The day I got a call from another former Lincoln High runner, telling me that our head coach, the head coach, Bob White was in the hospital. That he and his brother had been injured by a drunk driver. He had a skull fracture, a broken pelvis, and a severely injured leg that ended up requiring amputation.
But when I went to see him in the hospital, he smiled at me. Somehow. Someway. And it was that same, wry, secretive smile that he had given me nearly 4 years earlier. Coach White was in pain. He was battered and bruised, and he would need to learn how to walk again with a prosthesis.
But he knew the secret. He knew it didn’t apply only when you were inside the lines and leaning into the curves to the left.
On Saturday, while I was giving my son and daughter a bath in Lincoln and manically refreshing the feed on my phone to see that the Lincoln High Links had pulled out a stunning victory in Omaha, I fist-pumped and then set my phone down to dry off my daughter’s curly little hair.
Coach White had taught another generation the secret. He had had given them that same memory that he had helped give me from that sport and that place.
Congratulations, Lincoln High.
