Wednesday Night Stories: Mile Fun Run

In high school, I was somehow a three-sport varsity athlete. I know, I too am surprised by this revelation.

I specialized in endurance sports: cross country, cross country skiing, and track (running the 1600 and 3200 meters). I was solidly useless to my teams. I was good enough that I was never at risk of getting knocked off varsity, but in track I almost always finished 9th or 10th in my event. And at most high school track meets only the top 8 places earn a score. So, solid, but mostly useless (every once in a while I'd pull off a 5th or a 7th, but rarely).

At the end of every summer, our cross country team had a tradition of running in the local 5k or half marathon put on by the city. So, though it was a seemingly hefty fee of $25 to sign up, for the sake of tradition I signed up.

However, on race day, I woke up at about 9:00 AM and the race had started at 8. So by the time, I rushed down to the race, everyone was already done, but I still had to go to the registration table to turn in my race stuff and when I turned it in, the volunteers informed me, that there was one more race to be run.

The Mile Fun Run was starting in 10 minutes. They told me I could run that.

So at the urging of friends, I reluctantly agreed.

So there I was 5 minutes later at the starting line in the midst of a crowd of 7 year olds and a few scattered parents who were running the race with their kids.

I had no strategy per se but when the gun went off my race instincts kicked in and I took off. I sprinted out the gate and within a minute I had left every child in the dust.

It was ugly.

Worse yet, there was a golf cart out front leading the way and he had to keep pace with me so as I did this I was opening up the possibility for lil uns to get hopelessly lost in a prairie field.

As I was running, and as I was not slowing my pace, I knew it was wrong, but now I was so far out ahead I didn't know what to do, so I just kept going.

I was running about a 6 minute pace and as I approached the finish line there was a funnel of adults cheering on the competitors and two at the end were holding the tape. When I made the final corner and they saw me approach I heard a rousing cheer and could even clearly hear one older woman declare, "Wow, that kid's fast."

But as I got closer, the cheers got decidedly quieter and quieter. The originally impressed crowd had come to the sad realization that the soon to be crowned children's champion was not a child (however, if you've seen pictures of me from when I was 17, you know, I could have passed for 12 pretty easily).

Later, I realized I should have stopped short of the finish line and just joined the parents and cheered on the kids who would funnel through in about 5 more minutes, but instead I sped up, kicked it in, burst through the tape, and collected my rainbow ribboned gold medallion (on which we scratched out the "Participant" engraving and wrote "1st Place" in sharpie).

Some may call it cheating or cruel, but all I know is that I'm confident I now and forever will hold the meet record for the Woodbury Country Mile Fun Run.

Champion!