Rickity-Rack

There was something rather subversive about my track practice in high school, specifically involving practice for middle and long-distance running. First, let me preface by stating for the record that I was not exactly one of the “shining lights” on the team. I have always believed that the only reason they let me stay on it was that, during that season, my school bestowed physical education credit on students going out for athletic teams (it was called “Varsity Sports”), and they let me “hang on” for that purpose. Compared to the general population, though, I was a very fast, good runner.

The runners on the track team generally alternated practices between days when they’d do interval training (relatively short, fast bursts around the track with very short breaks between runs) and long, cross-country runs (which all the middle and long distance runners would do together). We would run different courses in our long runs, but usually they involved running around the public schools near us, through fields, or along roads. But sometimes someone would come up with a new course that involved going down a dirt path that ran through obviously private property. So in many of our runs, we actually trespassed on other people’s property. There was even once when we, in doing this, came across some orange trees and then proceeded to split into two camps, having an impromptu orange-throwing war (with someone else’s oranges, of course). Eventually, our school began receiving irate complaints from its neighbors about the trespassing, and it was curtailed (but not completely). That put me in a bit of a bind: do I show loyalty to the team and participate in the trespassing, or do I respect others’ property rights and break off from the team? My answer was to stick with the team but be low-key about my presence. Chicken!

But there’s still something to be said for running down a seldom-traveled back road and then just going off down a mysterious dirt path branching out of it. Many of these dirt paths criss-cross each other, and if you made a couple of path-switches without maintaining your point of reference, you stood a chance of becoming hopelessly lost! But, at least for me, there is something rather exhilarating about stepping off the beaten path and running an unconventional course through land that may not be all that hospitable. One of my running teammates dubbed the dilapidated old back road running behind my high school as “Rickity-Rack”, a nonsensical name that sounded good and stuck. That was back in the early 1970s, though. Since then, that road has completely changed, and many of the mysterious pathways through the countryside around my old school have disappeared with the extensive development that has gone on in that area. I can’t imagine the current cross-country and track team runners there today having anywhere near the fun that we experienced back then! Of course, I don’t believe that I’d have the guts nowadays to just go down one of those dirt paths if they were still there (knowing what I know now about human nature).