Light Lifting Read Online Free PDF Page B

as much as your body can give you on the day. I took off my socks and put on the ugly fluorescent spikes I’d been wearing all season. They were another Adidas freebee, and I was expected to wear them, but I didn’t like them much. It had taken months to break them in and the red blood stains were still there around the toe and heel from all the broken blisters I had to go through before my feet finally hardened up in the right places.
    When the announcer’s voice called us out, I took off my sweats and did a couple short sprints down the back stretch, trying to keep it all quick and smooth and under control. All the rest of the guys were there too and we did our usual nervous hellos and our cautious smiles as we passed one another. When they called us to the line, I came up behind Burner and put my hand on his back, just kind of gently, so he’d know I was there.
    â€œHave a good one, buddy, you little psycho,” I said and I smiled at him. The officials made us stand there, side by side, each of us in our pre-selected spot along the curved white start line while the announcer read out our names and listed all our best times and our biggest wins. He said this was shaping up to be one of the best 1,500 metre finals of the last decade. When the voice got to my name, he said I had the fastest personal best in this group and he named all the different times I’d made the national team. He said Burner was always dangerous and that he had put together a great season and was rounding into top form at the right time. Then the rest of them each got their turns and their compliments, Marcotte and Graham and Bourque and the others.
    Burner stood still through all of this and didn’t even acknowledge his own name. Instead, he closed his eyes and made this big production out of rolling his head all the way around in a big circle. He went very slowly – first down, with his chin touching his chest, and then way over to the side and then straight up and back again. I could hear the bones in his neck crackling as he made the loop. He kept his mouth wide open and when he looked up, it seemed almost like he was waiting to catch a snowflake or a raindrop on his tongue. They called us to our marks and we crouched down, bending our knees just a bit and holding our arms away from our bodies. When they fired the gun, you could see the smoke before you heard the bang.
    The announcer’s voice took over after that and he described everything that happened to us. We were bunched up around the first turn so I made a little move and went into second place, just trying to stay out of trouble. Even as it was happening, the voice said “There goes Michael Campbell, moving into second place, staying out of trouble.” It was like being inside and outside of yourself at the same time. I kept bumping back and forth with Marcotte and Bourque, trying to settle myself down and find a clear place on the outside of lane one. All the time the big voice kept going, describing how we looked and calling out the splits and telling the crowd what kind of pace we were on and our projected finishing times. I couldn’t see Burner, but I knew he was close by because I heard the voice say something like “Jamie Burns is safely tucked in at fifth or sixth place.” I remember this only because the announcer used Burner’s real name and it sounded so strange to me.
    The pace was fine, not really too slow or too fast, and after a lap and a half there were still lots of people close enough to the lead and feeling good. The problem with feeling good in a 1,500 is that you know it can’t last and that eventually, sometime in the next ninety seconds, everything you have left has got to come draining out of you, either in a great explosive rush at the end or some painful slow trickle. The kickers would’ve been happy to let it go slow and leave it all to some blazing last one-fifty, but the rest of us didn’t want