Setting The Pace

I went for a run on Saturday. This is not news. I go for a run on most Saturdays. The fact that I ran to the lake doesn't make it much more sensational, since I've been doing that off and on for the fifteen years that I have lived in my house, a couple of hills away from the lake. Over the past few years, however, those runs to the lake have been less frequent. Instead, I have focused on keeping my training regimen on the shorter, neighborhood side of things.
What was going through my head as I left the house that morning was, "Is this really something I can do?" It was not my regularly scheduled, yearly ten kilometer race. This was my morning's exercise, and I hadn't experienced a very restful night's sleep before and there were a dozen other excuses that drifted through my mind as I ran out the front gate and down the sidewalk toward a path that I had committed to memory some time ago. As I ran, I argued with myself about the necessity to keep going, and that's when I thought of David Wottle.
If you missed the 1972 Olympics, or got caught up in all the tragedy and excitement that surrounded those Games in Munich, you might have missed Dave. He was the quirky guy in the golf cap, running the eight hundred meters for the United States. At ten years old, I was still a decade or so away from any interest I might find in distance running, but there must have been something about this guy that appealed to me. Maybe it was a funny-hat-Mike-Nesmith kind of thing. Or perhaps it was the fact that he waited until the last hundred meters to come all the way from the back of the pack to win the gold medal at the tape.
When at last I met up with my wife, who had driven over to the lake and walked a couple hundred meters to find me, I slowed down and caught my breath. I realized I was wearing a cap. It was blue, not white, and the medal David Wottle won was a lot more gold than mine. It didn't matter. I finished.