Summers, Empty and Full

(I originally wrote a version of this essay for New England Runner Magazine, but it seemed an appropriate time to re-post parts of it here)

"We spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. There was an occupation called 'just running around.' It was no game. It had no rules. It didn't start and it didn't stop. Maybe we were all idiots, but a good deal of the time we just plain ran around."
- Robert Paul Smith, Where Did You Go? OUT. What Did You Do? NOTHING


Coaching high school athletes has been something of a second adolescence for me. On an almost daily basis, I see or hear things that remind me of my own experience coming of age and becoming a competitive runner. While in many ways the experience of a high school runner today is comparable to the experience I had back in the early 70's, one thing that seems really different to me is how structured and directed life has become for the average high school kid.

Nothing illustrates this point better than summer vacation. The kids I work with use their summer months to travel to Europe and study foreign languages; they go to Guatemala for eight weeks to build roads and schools; they take major roles in theater productions; they hike the Pacific Coast Trail; they volunteer at the State House; they bicycle around Nova Scotia; and if they aren't doing any of that, they are either in camp or working full time. In short, they are not hanging around with time on their hands.

Now, maybe we were all idiots out in Western Massachusetts where I grew up, but from my early years through my years of high school, I remember summer as a kind of vast expanse of empty canvas, on which I was more or less free to paint as I chose. Of course, this involved a lot of running around with other kids in organized and disorganized ways. For example, we devoted hours to staging elaborate whiffleball games and tournaments in each other's backyards, or devising games that involved throwing a tennis ball off some part of the house or barn and then catching it, or playing basketball on the eight-foot hoops over at the elementary school.

But for me, running around also meant literally running. By the time I was 12, I was often running to places around town. In the summer, I used to run over to Alumni stadium on University Drive to watch the football players at their pre-season camp. I also ran to Memorial Pool to swim. I even ran to a few of my little league games, a distance of a couple of miles, until I realized that I hated being yelled at all the time and I quit baseball for good.

Like the summers before them, my High School summers were long and relatively empty, punctuated by bouts of house painting or lawn mowing, one or two badly planned bicycle trips to New Hampshire, and a lot of reading. I wasn't ashamed of this leisurely schedule, because I wasn't alone. Most of my friends were about as idle as I was. We hung around a lot, and no one deserted the town, unless it was for a family vacation. Otherwise, we stayed put and found things to do together. One of those things was running, both deliberate and incidental. I remember one year we made a habit of meeting every Saturday morning for full-field soccer games at the Amherst College soccer field, four or five to a side. We would run like idiots up and down the field for about two hours until everyone collapsed. Then we would go to the All-Star market to buy sodas, ice cream sandwiches, and Hostess fruit pies. Then we'd go to someone's back yard to play basketball. Somehow, I can't imagine today's teenagers doing that.

I remember particularly the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, a time that today's High School student would spend at the University of Madrid or climbing Macchu Pichu. I spent mornings scraping and painting houses, and afternoons hanging out with my friends. Oh yeah, in the ten weeks between the last day of school in June, and the first day of school after Labor Day, I also ran over 500 miles, recorded on a daily basis on a few sheets of lined paper that I kept in my room.

Nowadays, no kid I know spends summer like that. If some kid did, he'd be all alone because all his friends would be busy traveling, or taking classes, or at overnight camp, or working full-time. As a parent of two teenagers myself, I feel guilty if my kids find themselves with a week of unstructured time, because I know all of their friends are occupied in exotic experiences elsewhere.

In the town where I grew up, July was wide and hot and full of patterns, like the alternating corn fields and cow pastures that lined the roads of South Amherst and Hadley where I did most of my running. The day began with the song of grasshoppers and cicadas, and ended with the ethereal sounds of a baseball game on an AM station that faded in and out in the night. It was that expansiveness, that emptiness, that whispered and cajoled me into the few creative acts of my young life, one of which was running 500 miles and writing the daily story of doing it.

With so much for a kid to do these days, I'm not sure it would be good to worry about running so much. They'd have to fit it in between their summer school classes and their trips to Europe, and where's the fun in that? One thing I am sure of, I never thought of running as something that I had to fit in. If anything, running was the pure expression of the freedom I felt, and the exhaustion that followed was the enjoyment of the fruits of that freedom. It was so cool, so sweet, to be idle in the afternoon after running for hours past the farms and ranch houses that lined the Connecticut River. It was the perfect way to spend a summer day, and it would have been unthinkable if there had been someplace I had to be.

In early June, high school coaches hold organizational meetings for the upcoming fall cross-country season. They talk about the value of running over the summer, and the senior captains urge the underclassmen to run every day, if possible. I have no doubt that even with all the other things going on in their lives, most of these young athletes will find a way to train over the summer, maybe not every day, but perhaps most days. I have to wonder though, whether any of them will look back on this summer, as I look back on summers over 25 years ago, as something more than training, as a time, indeed, when summer and running and one's own free will seemed to fuse into a single essence, and the miles were like so many notes of a favorite song, still poignant and unforgettable many years later.