Super Optionals

I've been running with a pack of middle school boys

I’ve been running with a pack of middle school boys. Ostensibly, I’m mentoring them, but it feels like a pretty balanced exchange of illuminating the righteous path for re-instilling youthful exuberance.

Last October, a handful of 6th and 7th graders were preparing to race a Thanksgiving 5k and sought my guidance, perhaps because they notice me running a lot at meets in between yelling encouraging things at them like “embrace the pain” and “finish on empty.” The Turkey Trot would be just over 5 weeks after the middle school conference championships, where they’d come a disappointing third behind the Lexington Minutemen and Wooster Generals. The first step in battle-sharpening our Ashland Arrows would be this little off-season training block.

I was already planning to run most days with Rowe, and I had some autumn races of my own to prepare for, so I invited a few of the boys tag along on our runs each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. That left me three days a week—Friday for track intervals, Saturday for long trail runs, and Sunday for hikes—to round out my own training.

Suddenly I needed a plan. They would show up eager to run and expecting instructions! We began on day 1 of the off season, a Monday, with 6 by 400 meters at aspirational 5k pace, plus drills and stretching and socializing.

It was immediately rewarding. They seemed to see me as a kind of coach, which I suppose I was. I loved the role as well as the workouts. Three 6th graders and four 7th graders participated in at least one session in our 5-week block. Folks just joined on the days they chose. These sessions were so optional that they weren’t even officially “optional” for the team. I decided to call them “super optionals,” joking at first, then eventually using the term seriously.

Three of the boys were still juggling travel soccer through the fall, while another had officially retired from the beautiful game to fully take up the art of endurance. One made the 7th grade basketball team (hell yeah) and thus had to bow out when practices started. Rowe and I were present for every session.

A super optional session would typically start with a few minutes of chit chat and checking in. We warmed up easy, discussed our running goals, hopped through dynamic activation drills and leg swings, completed a structured workout or steady long run, and closed with strides, a cool down jog, stretches, and hyping up each other up on our job well run.

Our goals for the fall included running a sub-20 5k, finishing a 5k for the first time, breaking 14 minutes in the two mile, and running 5:40:00 in a trail 50k.

We shared miles on soccer fields, wooded trails, country roads, gravel, dirt, the track, and in our neighborhoods, the rain, snow, sleet, wind, and the cool sunshine of ever-shortening evenings.

We did strides most days to build neuromuscular coordination and raw speed. We ran track sessions to tune up our anaerobic power and leg turnover. 400s, 200s, 400s, 200s, 400s. We developed our aerobic engines with fartleks, progressions, and long slow cruisers.

But mostly we just enjoyed the daily act of running and enjoying each others’ company. I stayed quiet and listened to plenty of girl-focused gossip from the 7th graders, and clash of clans strategizing from the 6th graders.

On the easy days we often played a game called “guess the pace.” I wore a GPS watch while most of the boys were tech-free. We’d pick a target pace as a group—7:12 or 8:34 or 10:45 per mile—and the boys would take turns trying to lead the pack at that pace for a pre-determined distance. At the end of the interval, they each got to call out their guesses for the pace we’d actually run. If the guesses were close, coach had to do sit-ups that night before bed. If the guesses were off the mark, the boys had to do sit-ups that night before bed.

Most of the boys were mildly to wildly inaccurate, but they got slightly better over the 5 weeks, tuning into the internal and external cues of pacing and speed, learning to differentiate “race pace” from “tempo” from “threshold” from “steady” from “slow” from “easy.”

CS was an exception the rule of inaccuracy. That boy just never missed. He’d calmly tap out the prescribed pace when it was his turn to lead, and confidently guess the pace the others’ had set when it was his turn to follow. He perceived the very fabric of space time. I still suspect some sort of covert spy craft technique whereby he was receiving data from my watch spoken into a hidden earpiece or something.

Don’t tell the boys, but I never did my sit-ups.

All in all, there were 19 sessions – totaling 73 miles. We took Halloween off so they could all trick or treat. This is a transitional age. They were willing to work hard, to willingly occupy a place of pain and effort day in and day out, but they’re still children.

Our biggest super optionals was on an unassuming Wednesday night. All 8 of us boys—CC, RC, GM, CM, EJ, CS, RR, and KC—got in 3 miles in the hood from 4:45pm to 5:30pm with a 5:15pm sunset.

RR saw his old house. He moved out of our neighborhood when he was 6, after his parents split up and only has foggy memories of the place.

GM got nervous when we jogged past AS’s house. Later that night he texted AS to see if she wanted to be his girlfriend. She said yes.

CS’s mom passed away a year ago on that Monday. Running can be a place of solace. Last night he was smiling and talking crap with the boys, filling up with cold dry air, and emitting a healthy steam when we stopped to do our strides and stretches in the auburn and indigo twilight.

A great run.

The next day we did hard 1k repeats on the road. A pack of college runners cruised by during their warmup and hollered encouragements to the boys.

The next week we jogged an easy 4 miles on the solstice loop with grass strides. A cool mist eventually darkened our hoodies. CM softly concluded, “I like trail runs the best. It’s just so…like…calm and peaceful.” We walked back to the house in silence.

It’s hard to articulate why these mundane runs were so special to me, but “ichi-go ichi-e” is a relevant Japanese idiom that captures my feelings during most super optional sessions quite well. It means something along the lines of “for this time only” and is uttered as a call to treasure and appreciate any present moment as if it will never be experienced again, because it won’t. It’s mostly used in the context of tea ceremonies, which are simultaneously mundane and transcendent rituals of traditional social life in Japan.

The phrase, and it’s home of origin, reminds me of the time I was in Kyoto to present my research on social coordination opportunities in conflict-laden interdependencies. I skipped out on a day of meetings and talks to rent a bike and just started heading northwest on a ribbon of crushed limestone. Eventually I was hours from town, waving at confused farmers, and ascending gently into the rural foothills of the Kitayama Range, never quite yet willing to half-close the experience by turning around.

I knew I’d never return to this place. If I didn’t explore the next mile of earth now, I never would. Only by accepting this fact could I embrace that the very finitude of life, the inevitable missing out on nearly everything there is to experience, is exactly why this moment, and any moment we actually do get to experience, is so precious and sparkling-through with nothing less than the bright and pure essence of being.

Even if we keep super optionals going for years, we’ll only hit strides at sunset in KC’s gravel driveway, then have his cats jump and crawl all over us while we stretch and debrief the session, once, then, and never again. CS will only steam away the night’s sadness under a burning sky surrounded by that crew of earnest brothers in legs once, then, and never again. CM will only realize it’s the peace of a soft rain and the quiet of a wooded trail that he’s out there chasing once, then, and never again.

Each of the boys of super optionals set a new PR in the 5k on Thanksgiving, with times of 20:26, 20:39, 21:33, 22:24, 22:41, 24:39, 24:41, and 24:51. I also got a PR in the 50k with a 5:42:14.

The Lexington Minutemen and the Wooster Generals sure better be out there getting ready to go up against next year’s Ashland Arrows. Track starts up next week so the 7th and 8th graders will be reporting for duty. I’ll keep getting out with the 6th graders whenever they want to put in some work.

In life, as in running, there are mandatories, there are optionals, and if you’re lucky, there are super optionals.

ichi-go ichi-e

~coach crispy~