Running The Mile
It was here. The day I dreaded more than any other day of the year. The day my sixth-grade, all-girls gym class ran the timed mile. I feared the day with a distain most children reserve for the dentist or vaccinations. I’d take needles any day over running.
The morning air was cool on my skin as I walked with my class the few blocks from Holy Trinity Middle School to Johnson Field, where the high schoolers played football. If not for the despised task before me, I might have thought the day beautiful. The air was fresh and still damp. The tulips and daffodils had begun to bloom, and pops of yellow and red dotted the greening grass. Puffy clouds floated in the sky, their whiteness a stark contrast to the deep blue behind. While the girls around me chattered happily away, sharing their run time goals, I gave myself a pep talk.
Stay calm. Don’t go too fast. Keep breathing, I coached. This year might be different, I reasoned. Maybe you’re in better shape, I thought. At 12, I had yet to lose my baby fat and, according to my younger brother, I was either fat, a pig or, his personal favorite, Slobin. While I wasn’t as thin as most of my classmates, I was neither the most overweight. You can do it, I told myself. It won’t kill you, I reminded myself.
The problem was, when I ran, I honest to God felt like I was dying. My lungs were squeezed and unable to process oxygen. Stabbing pains ripped at my sides. Blood pounded in my head and my skull seemed ready to explode from the drumming inside. But, I reasoned, I’d run the mile three times before — twice in fifth-grade and once in the fall — and I hadn’t died. I figured my gym teacher was trained in CPR and wouldn’t allow me to expire on her watch. As I took my place at the starting line, I emptied my head of every thought save one: it will be over in a few minutes.
When Mrs. Hartman said go, I took off in a gaggle of adolescent arms and legs. The farm girls and basketball players broke first from the pack, with the average girls in a clump behind. I stayed in this group, keeping relative pace with my classmates for most of the first lap. But halfway through the second, just past a quarter mile, my lungs began burning and I slowed down. I tried pacing myself, controlling my breath by timing the inhales and exhales to the shuffling of my high-top clad feet, but it was difficult to think of anything except my misery.
Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap! I thought to myself, as I fell behind the group. Dammit, I hate this. I thought of some songs I knew to distract myself from the suffocating sensation in my lungs and my growing sense of doom. We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine. And we live in harmony…. But the words became stuck and began to annoyingly repeat in my head. Soon again my attention was back on my legs and feet, which seemed disconnected from my body.
Just after the halfway mark, I slowed my shuffle even further to a walk. Big mistake. My teacher hollered toward me, “Keep moving! This is a run!” Ah, bite me, I thought. The thought of returning to a jog was devastating. I tried moving my legs faster, to will them to bend, extend, flex, but they seemed made of lead. The fast girls, finishing their final lap, paced me. They shouted out encouragement as they passed “Keep going! You can do this! You’re almost there.”
With most than a full lap to go, I certainly was not almost there. My thoughts moved from the pain in my body to the constriction in my heart. Why did I suck so bad at running? What was wrong with me, anyway? The night before, as I complained to Mom about the event, she reassured me that I was fine. “Your dad was never a good runner either,” she’d told me.
I’d actually only ever seen my dad run a few times, and each occasion involved either running to rescue of a child, such as when he hurled himself down the stairs when I, at the age of 6, got a butterscotch candy lodged in my throat, or running to catch us and deliver a spanking for some sort of naughtiness.
A part of me knew that, like Dad, my blood counts were lower than they should be. But my 12-year-old mind did not grasp the connection between a lack of oxygen-carrying, red blood cells to my inability to run. I just thought I was weak, and out of shape.
I am such a loser, I thought to myself. Eventually tears came, the tightness of my throat and stuffed sinuses exacerbating my struggle to breathe. Disregarding my gym teacher’s directives to keep running, I again slowed to a walk. Screw it, I don’t care. She already knows I’m slow, it doesn’t really matter.
Chugging across the finish line third from last, with only three chubby girls behind me, my gym teacher disappointedly announced my time, “Twelve minutes, 24 seconds.” Which was followed by the command that I was not to collapse on the beckoning earth, but clasp my hands behind my neck and keep walking.
My heart slammed wildly against the wall of my chest. And my face, now the color of a pickled beet, felt swollen. I felt like I was going to throw up. But I was done. The run was over. I’d survived.
My breathing and heartrate slowed as I trudged back to school. I was exhausted and couldn’t imagine how I’d last the afternoon. The exertion had burned through my energy reserve for the day and I attended the rest of my classes dazed. As the day wore on, a headache rooted itself in the back of my brain, reminding me something was terribly wrong.
