November

“…we all need a happy place — an escape, if you will. Mine is coaching cross country.”

And then there was one.

Sometime in late May or early June each year I write my cross country season plan. There is a site known as print-a-calendar.com which allows me to print out each month on individual pages — June, July, and so on. Cross country practice starts in mid-June and goes to the last weekend of November — longer if runners go on to the national races. I fill in each of the 161 days that will constitute the training. Some of it’s simple scheduling, writing in all the races on their chosen dates.

Then it’s the long run, which I like to do on Saturdays. Sundays are for rest (I write that in), or mileage as needed to get to that week’s goal. I don’t meet with the team on Sunday, so those are written in as OYO — on your own. I stole that from my friend Tim Butler, who probably stole it from someone else. But it’s an easy thing to remember.

Then I add speed workouts and threshold workouts and hills — and there you have it. I throw away the training schedule for each month once it passes. So what begins as six pieces of calendar waiting to be unveiled becomes five, then four, on down to one. Which is where we stand now.

November. Nineteen days to the State Meet.

I’ve already revised it a few times, adding and subtracting this and that based on how the teams are doing. That single sheet of paper sits on my desk next to my laptop as I type. At practice, I write that day’s workout on a white board so the team can study what’s coming.

This morning I added something from the internet on the white board:

“The magic you are looking for is found in the work you’re avoiding.”

I don’t know who coined that. It could be Taylor Swift, Albert Einstein, anyone. I think it speaks to fear. So I also propped up my Ted Lasso “Believe” sign as added inspiration.

Let me hit pause for a second.

You’ve all been very kind in reading these missives. This community we’ve built through this blog has allowed me to share a whole lot more of my personal life than I ever intended. My goal was to let you inside the head of a working writer. You got a whole lot more. So in that spirit, I’ll let you know I bought the Believe sign as a talisman through this sudden cancer journey. That quote about magic and avoidance is equally fitting because I am so dearly in need of magic at this time when I am increasingly avoidant. There’s some great task staring me in the face and I have no fucking clue what it is.

In the meantime, we all need a happy place — an escape, if you will. Mine is coaching cross country.

So I study my training plan again and again, as I have done every day since practice began June 13. I look over at that distraction to my right, analyzing each workout to make sure it’s just what my runners need, reveling in the alchemy of turning pieces of paper into podium gold..

Martin Dugard is a best-selling author, a board member of the USA Track & Field Foundation and a high school cross country and track coach.