A KENTUCKY RUN OF YEARS AGO
In high school I ran cross-country.
For six years, from seventh-grade till I graduated, each fall I went out for the cross-country team.
I was too small and uncoordinated for football, and cross-country was the only other fall sport, and the way I was raised you wanted to be out of the house as much as possible, so I ran cross-country.
I almost always finished last.
And I never ran the hill.
Out behind our school, above the cemetery, there is a hill. In pine trees across its face, in giant letters, the name of our town is written.
Back when I was in school, the cross-country course, after meandering across the school property, ran up hill and then back and forth across its face.
And I never ran the hill.
The back-and-forth part, yes. The up-and-down part, no.
It was too steep for me.
I would start running up it, and a few times I got halfway, but I never made it all the way to the top. I always stopped and walked.
Six years, and I didn’t make it once.
Six years after that I reported to Basic Training.
It was Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1984 and it was what it was. I had a pregnant wife and no education and Uncle Sam had a plan.
I was terrified.
Back then it wasn’t a kinder-and-gentler Army, it was a pedal-to-the-metal, stand-up-and-be-a-man Army. At least that’s how it looked through my timid eyes. It was weeks on end of drill sergeants barking at your heels, squashing you in the palm of their hands, watching your every move.
And from the start there were two things we knew: If you dropped out of two runs they would kick you out of the Army, and that before we could graduate we had to run up Agony and Misery.
They were two hills on post. Long, steep, mythical hills that, with the gas chamber, were the obstacles we had to conquer to become soldiers.
I resolved from the start never to drop out of a run. My resolution was completely based in fear. I didn’t want to be kicked out of the Army, and I didn’t want to draw the attention and the ire of the drill sergeants. More than anything, I dreaded the possibility of falling out of a running formation and having two or three of them cluster around me, yelling and mocking.
I knew how unlikely my success was. I knew that I always dropped out of runs. That all of my athletic life as others had run on toward the finish line I had stopped to walk.
I was slow and weak and small.
But I was afraid.
And day after day, run after run, I ran all the way. I tried to bury myself in the middle of the formation and lose myself in the Jody call and let the strength of the whole carry me forward. I clung to the group and I clung to the run out of fear of dropping out of both.
As the drill sergeants nipped at those who slowed and straggled and ultimately walked, I pressed on, in step and at pace, run after run, day after day.
And then it came, in the last week of Basic Training, the week to run Misery and Agony. We had come up one or the other on the tail end of a road march and FTX and, already tired and with packs on our backs, it had been brutal.
And a run is worse than a walk, and when we set out that day from in front of the company area I was almost sick to my stomach. The little hill behind my school was the tiniest fraction of what lie ahead of us. Two trucks followed us to pick up the expected dropouts.
I think we did five miles before we got to the hills, and they blur into one in my memory, but we started at the bottom the entire company in formation shouting in response about a C-130 rolling down the strip.
We soon quieted down and spread out and the hurt set in.
It was an insufferably long hill, cripplingly steep and seemingly endless and my legs felt like lead.
For a ways no one dropped out. Then the first kid did, and then a couple of more and then it was like a dam burst. A couple of guys puked and some others started to cry and as they fell out the rest of us fell in, the formation shrinking, the platoons merging into one melting block of ranks and files.
One drill sergeant ran beside us, the others peeling off to tend to the men who’d given out, helping them into the trucks and distributing water.
It was a mindless agony of heads-down trudging up the hill, a damned-if-I’m-going-to-quit emotion somewhere between terror and rage. And it just went on. Sweat in your eyes and blisters on your feet and cramps in your thighs.
A lung-busting gasping for air and an almost roaring, whimpering guttural sound.
Up and up and up.
Less than a dozen of us crested the hill. It might have been barely half a dozen. It was us and the drill sergeant and the company guidon and as we ran on toward the barracks we started shouting in response about an airborne daddy gonna take a little trip.
When we pulled up in front of our old World War II barracks the battalion commander was there waiting for us, a lieutenant colonel, and our first sergeant put us in parade rest while he spoke to us. The rest of the company looked on from the back of the trucks.
The colonel said things that resonated with what we felt, about being soldiers and men, and about our country and his pride in us.
Then he led us into the chow hall, before anybody else, and ate with us, the group who had made it to the top, who hadn’t quit.
I know it sounds dumb, but I ended that day different than I had begun it. I ended the day tough, whether it was new or newly discovered, I knew I was tough. I knew I would never quit, that I could not be beaten.
And I have been a better man ever since.
And I think that’s how life is.
Strength comes through fear, and through surviving fear and using it. At first, I ran because I was afraid. At last, I ran because I was strong. The one was connected to the other and essential to it.
So fear should not be feared, or dreaded or fled. It should be seen for what it is, a chance to grow, to toughen, to persist and prevail. To become someone different and stronger.
That was true in Basic Training.
And it is true at every challenge in life. From unemployment to divorce, from sickness to death, for today and tomorrow.
Put your head down and don’t quit.
And you’ll come out all right.
You’ll come out better.
If you just don’t quit.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
