Crazy Legs

Running Roots

“I didn’t know the course, what pace I was running, how long I’d been running for, or even why I was running in the first place. All I knew was that my heart and lungs were exploding out of my nine-year-old chest.”

The hill was enormous. The kind of hill you’d walk up slowly, or turn around and run away from. But there was no way I was going to do either of those things, because at the top of that hill were three cute girls from my Grade 4 class. I fought my way up the mud slicked, rutted incline, toeing my “sneakers” (there was no such a thing as running shoes yet) off the roots for better leverage and ran straight over the cusp, pumping my elbows back with a little extra embellishment, a heroic grimace plastered on my face.

I nodded to the girls as I ran by them at the top of the hill, but on the inside, I was screaming. I didn’t know how long the race would take, couldn’t remember how many kilometres it was, or even how long a kilometre might feel like. I didn’t know the course, what pace I was running, how long I’d been running for, or even why I was running in the first place. All I knew was that my heart and lungs were exploding out of my nine-year-old chest.

On the way down the next hill I jammed my foot under a root and felt almost relieved to be off my feet for a second as I f lew through the air. That relief was cut short when I landed. I skinned my knee on a rock and muddied my hands, but got back up and eventually finished. I don’t know what place I came in, or how well I did.

My classmate Kathryn Sherwood ran the girls’ race that day. She was our school’s running superstar, always finishing near the front and making it look easy. We used to race in Toronto’s Sherwood Park, and I was convinced they had named it after her.

Thirty years later, I ran into Kathryn again, incredibly, at another cross-country race. This time it was an Ontario Masters Athletics event in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Park. And this time I was prepared. I had run hundreds and hundreds of races, trail, road and track. I had a plan, I knew my pace, I had cross-country racing spikes, and proper running gear. I knew to take it easy on the hills.

At the top of a big hill near the end of the course, a few women cheered. I nodded, grimacing. But inside I was smiling.

Kathryn, it turned out, had the opposite experience. “I remember that running wasn’t hard for me back then, and I really enjoyed it,” she says of her grade school days. “I didn’t think about it, I just ran. No race plan, no idea of pace, no putting pressure on myself. I discovered that I had some talent and did well, and so I stuck with it. Running didn’t hurt back then. I had not yet encountered the pain of lactic acid!”

Running cross-country as an adult, Kathryn found it much harder. “I find I do too much thinking, have pre-race jitters and worry about time and placement,” she says. “I find that I think a lot about quitting in every race when it starts to hurt.”

And yet, there we were, both still running cross-country races after all these years. Why did we keep coming back? I’m still not really sure. It’s not like a road 5k or 10k, where you’re going for a personal best. But maybe that’s the point. With each step on those gnarly routes, it’s a grind, where the past and the present collide. When I got in touch with Kathryn to ask her about our gradeschool racing days, she said she hadn’t run cross-country in a couple of years, but told me the thought of it had inspired her and she plans to get back into it this fall.