A Day at Franklin Park

I experienced a first yesterday: our team had a weekday dual meet on the Franklin Park XC course.

Franklin Park on a Tuesday afternoon with a couple of teams is very different than Franklin Park on a Saturday morning with 100 teams. For one thing, there's soccer going on in the middle of Playstead field. For another, there are multiple college teams working out on the course. The actual race kind of disappears into the general ambience of the area.

The course itself is kind of empty, and at the same time full of the memory of other races. It's hard for me, at least, to stay in the moment without reliving past glories or failures. I have to check myself before I become a doddering grandpa, telling everyone about the snowstorm of '04, the dustbowl at Mayor's Cup, and the world championships where many African runners ran barefoot through the March slush.

And, too, it was easy to become mesmerized by the collegians, running their long intervals or tempo pieces, flying through the course in compact formations built for speed. Harvard was there. Northeastern was there. (Seb Putzeys yelled out his greetings during a rest from the hammering pace of the intervals.)

I wondered whether it was a little overwhelming for my kids, having adult D1 runners blitzing the course around them. I hoped that it might actually serve as inspiration to see groups of very fit, very fast harriers all around them having a blast just doing their Tuesday work. In the development of a distance runner, imagination plays a part. I wished that some of the CA runners came away imagining what it would be like to be in one of those highly-trained packs.

And I wondered why there aren't more places like Franklin Park where runners can do endless loops on forgiving terrain, away from cars and traffic, having only to avoid the stray soccer ball that rolls across the course now and then.