I miss the feeling of flying around the track

High school track and field season is underway here in Ohio. My dad always said he didn't mind watching my cold October football games nearly as much as he minded watching my cold (and usually windy) early-April track meets.

Having had a few of my own kids run track, I understand where he was coming from. And while I don't miss freezing in the stands, I do miss being a sprinter and long jumper like I was in the mid- to late 1980s.

I was the only guy I knew who played football to stay in shape for track season and not the other way around.

Like any sport, track had its good days and bad days. But looking back, the good days were so good that I've blotted the bad ones from my mind. My track memories consist mostly of sunny dual meets and long Saturday invitationals that offered up far more wins than losses for my teammates and me.

What I miss most is the feeling. The feeling of being at the peak of your athletic ability. The feeling of hitting the long jump board just right and flying 20-plus feet into the sand pit. The feeling of attacking the curve in the 200 meters and blowing by the competition.

There's really nothing else like it.

I stayed in touch with the track world after high school first as a newspaper sports writer then later as a track parent and now as a public address announcer for track meets. I watch these young kids speeding up and down the straightaway and I want them to know how fleeting these moments are. I want them to appreciate every race, win or lose.

I want them to understand it all goes away much more quickly than you think it will.

It's not that I abandoned running the minute they handed me my diploma. But for many years starting in my mid-20s, running no longer meant sprinting, but rather long, slow distance races. I can't remember the last time I full out sprinted, though I'm guessing it was sometime in the early 90s.

Nowadays if I tried going all out in a sprint, my hamstrings would probably explode in a gooey mess all over the track.

But there was a time when I and the kids with whom I competed could move. Like, really move.

If they could figure out a way to bottle that feeling, I would buy several cases. As it is, though, I have only my old guy memories of races long completed and medals fairly won.

And maybe, given the ways things work in this life, that's enough.

Life isn't a sprint, it's...well, yeah, actually it is a sprint

Between the ages of 13 and 18, I ran competitive track and field.

I was a sprinter, and I was actually pretty fast. Not "state champion" fast, but faster than most of my classmates. I got to win a lot of races and feel somewhat athletic in the process.

Sprinting was actually a lot of fun, because your work day was a relatively short one. When our team ran in one of those all-day relay meets, my schedule would look something like this:

• 9 a.m. to Noon: Sit out in the sun and work on my tan.
• Noon to 12:05 p.m.: Take off warm-up suit and stretch a little.
• 12:05 to 12:10 p.m.: Walk over to the starting line for the 100-meter dash and try to look cool while waiting for the starter to tell us to take our marks.
• 12:10 to 12:10 and 11 seconds: Run 100 meters as fast as I possibly could.
• 12:11 to 12:15 p.m.: Put warm-ups back on and return to working on my tan.
• Later in the meet: Repeat process for 200-meter dash and the occasional sprint relay event.

This was in stark contrast to the distance runners, whom I never understood.

For one thing, they had to run a long way. I mean, a long way. At least compared with the sprinters. Why, I wondered, would you opt to run 3,200 meters when you had the choice to run 100? Or even 200? Certainly no more than 400.

And their practice workouts were horrible. They involved running for impossibly long periods of time without stopping, and doing so ideally without throwing up.

The sprinters' workouts, meanwhile, would consist of a couple of spirited fast jogs around the track, and then we all went home to do our homework. I think our grades tended to be better than the distance runners'.

Anyway, I mention all of this because I have two kids running track now, one of whom (Chloe) is a distance runner. And wonder of wonders, I've become one myself.

Sort of.

I get up most mornings around 5:15 a.m. and amble three miles. Not very quickly, but I do it.

Which gives me a lot of time to think while I run. I think about all sorts of "big picture" things, and about life in general, I guess.

Sometimes I think about how quickly the last few decades have gone. For example, I remember being 10 years old. Vividly. And it seems like it couldn't have been more than about three weeks ago.

Yet here I am at the ripe age of 43 1/2. Not "old," really, but certainly not young.

And I begin to realize how sprinting prepared me for life. It taught me to go all out and take advantage of fast-fleeting opportunities. It taught me to compete, and compete hard. It taught me how to dig deep and find that extra gear in order to accomplish my goals.

It also taught me how to sun myself. I seriously had the best tan in the late 80s...