Those Were the Days

We are very fortunate to have a first-class track & field facility in The Villages for our workouts and track meets. My early track experiences weren’t always so smooth. Remember when your parents would tell you they had to walk 5 miles to school uphill through 5-foot snowdrifts? Here are my equivalent stories for the youngsters out there.
 
I went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and ran on the track team all four years. We had a cinder track that wasn’t the regulation 440 yards. (We ran yards versus meters in those days.) For every home meet, the coach would have to re-line the track, and since it was about 20 yards short there were confusing lines for all the different starting points and relay zones.
 
Running on a cinder track could be challenging when it was wet. Clumps of cinder would come flying off the shoes of runners. I remember running the mile relay and being pelted with clumps of track on my chest and in my face. It was a very good incentive to pass the guy ahead of me so he could eat the stuff coming off my shoes.
 
In the winter we used our indoor “track facility.” Imagine a long oval with a gym on either end where the track curved. One of the straight sections was a lobby, and the other was a storeroom. Before each meet, we removed the lobby and storeroom doors so we could run through the door frames. There’s nothing like sprinting 55 meters through two sets of three-foot doorways. I’m sure it gave us a home field advantage. Luckily, no one ever ran into the door jambs.
 
The hurdlers had it worse. They started their 40-yard race in the larger gym and finished about 5 yards from doors propped open to the outside. An asphalt ramp just beyond their finish line was sometimes covered with snow and ice.
 
Outdoor meets would start in April. One year we had a 14-inch snowstorm in mid-April, with a dual meet scheduled that week. All of us track guys assumed the meet would be canceled. Our intrepid coach, Rex Foster, had other ideas. He had a maintenance crew plow a parking lot, and then he personally lined a track on the asphalt. We ran the meet in 50-degree weather on a wet track surrounded by 4-foot piles of melting snow.
 
Ah, those were the days.
 
~~Tom Rewolinski