Rough Draft WP #1

Walking in to the space you begin by seeing the mostly ugly concrete tiered pieces of the back of the stadium structure and as you continue walking you begin to see the outline of the bright red track.  From there on most of your view is a vast wide open space with many things located on the surface of the ground but not very much protruding up from the earth.  Beyond this you can see the outline of rural road and hear the buzzing of cars going by, through the line of trees next to the eastern fence.  After getting the first impression of just stepping on the track you may start to notice many other things as well such as the presence of much activity on the infield by athletes and the not so overly crowded stadium for the audience.  This may be the track but there are vast varieties of events taking place to suit your liking whether that is watching strength events such as throwing or speed and endurance events taking place on the track.  Pretty much there is something for everyone to come and watch.

The track itself from can be seen from Mark Twain’s more touristic point of view as a boring inanimate object but the details in it make it a little more interesting, such as the lines and the way that everything is laid out on it.  Everything is very uniform and has a specific purpose for one thing and one thing only.  The things that give the space the life that it has and the ability to become a place are the Athletes and coaches using it for its intended purpose.  Depending on the day that you come, you will see anything from an easy practice day to a conference championship taking place on the Olympic quality track.  Looking past the track you will see the very large and extremely tall flight of steps that welcomes you in the beginning and urges you to continue your way up to the press box, but unless your one of the athletes running on the track you will probably be out of breath halfway up the steps and assume a position on one of the seats there.  Sitting down on the cold or hot hard metal bleachers will start to make you wonder how anyone would ever want to come and watch these events because they are so unbearably uncomfortable.  Just about the time that you are thinking this you glance around to see most of the other spectators that have chairs that sit on the benches to make them a little more comfortable.  This brings to mind all of those times that you wish that you had come up with such a simple idea but somebody beat you to it.  While you sit there and you ponder over your lack of brilliant ideas at the moment a gunshot rings through the air and breaks through the silence like a wolf’s cry in the night.  You look around to see what happens and then you realize that it was just the start of one of the many racing events of the day.  Watching the athletes run around the track brings a certain question to mind. That question would be about what it would be like to actually participate and run one of the races.

Now from a current runner’s way of looking at things a race can feel very different depending on many different factors such as how long it is or how much competition that he has in the race.  This seems much more in line with Twain’s professional approach to a subject after he learns all the ins and outs of doing things such as the navigation of a river.  I can tell you one thing about races thought they are always appreciated much more after the race is over with.  From the stadium it may seem like all fun and games before the race but it is actually much more serious than this it just all depends on the race.  When you are warming up and stretching all that you can do is telling yourself that you know you’ve put in the work to be able to run the race and hopefully win.  When they call everyone out on the track to line up for the race everything that I was previously thinking about I try to push out of my mind and just think about the race that I am about to run.  I look up at the crowds and see all the people lining the fence, and think to myself that if all of these people came here to watch something exciting. it may as well be me.  The gun goes off and I round the first turn into that longest just shy of two minutes in my entire life.  These experiences are much different than when I first started using this place. 

Before I gained the experience that I have currently, running in all the races that I have, I saw this place as a more fun place and it brought out the adventurous side of me.  I wanted to try everything no matter what it entailed.  As I wander around I fall into the group of distance runners because they seem most like me.  The track team may seem like a melting pot of people all working together but a lot of the times it is more like James Baldwin’s Fifth Avenue Uptown with most of the people segregated between races.  Mostly all of the sprinters are African Americans while most of the middle distances to distance kids are Caucasian.  This is not because most people like to stick together with their race it is just the different abilities of the runners. No matter how hard people try to bring everyone together as one group, people still end up being segregated just like in the past.  Going beyond the initial segregation of the different people on the track everyone seems to get along and is working to push each other harder and harder.  In the end the only thing that matters is winning the race or winning the meet.  To win it is a group effort especially in the relay races.  You can see the hard work and time put in to training for these races as they hand off between legs of the race.  These athletes completely trust that each one of them is going to do what needs to be done.  It is very easy spot the kids that don’t trust each other because there are a good many times that the hand offs go terribly wrong. 

Other than the athletes running the races there are many other people running around wildly on the infield.  These people appear to be the coaches running around trying to do everything that makes the meet run.  You can see a whole line of them run to different corners of the track together as they wait for their athletes to run by so that they can give them their splits.  Sometimes I think that the coaches get more excitement for the races than the runners. This is probably true because they are not the ones that have to endure the huge amount of pain that a runner is put through a race.  Then there are the fans that are continuously getting yelled at for getting too excited when they cheer for their favorite runners and they start to do stupid things.  I have learned the hard way that there are many things that fan cannot because I have gotten yelled at many a times.  All of these different aspects go to show how much of an active space this place is to be in on race day. 

On any given day other than race day, if you walk out on the track you will most of the time see an absence of activity other than during practice times.  One of the reasons for this is that it is insanely hot outside during the middle of the day but if you can stand the heat, I find it a very peaceful place to use to study.  I can sit and listen to the cars go by or the rustling of the trees as there is no one there to bother me.  I look up from what I am working on and I see the wide open grass field in the center of the track used for all of the non-running events, past the past the track and the long jump pits.  Occasionally an airplane flying overhead disturbs the silence and breaks my concentration.  The fresh air can do wonders for your ability to think and come up with ideas such as what to write for an essay.  I sit and stare down those long straights while I’m working, wishing that I could be one of those runners out there on the track during race time but that chance has come and gone.  All of these things starts to remind me of the time when I used to run, and work every day towards the goal of running in college.  Every day at practice we would all run countless laps at what seem like blazing speeds to people that have never run on the track.  I can remember every day wanting to die after practice because our coach pushed us so hard, knowing that there was a purpose behind everything which was to make us better runners and people than we were before. In the end knowing everything that I do about the track and what it takes to run these races has taken most of the beauty and fun out of the sport for me just like Mark Twain experienced when He was a river boat captain.  Running became more than just a fun activity it became my life and it slowly lost what I used to love so much about it and that was the feeling of freedom.