Archive
02/09/11 - (3)
Race Days
You never believed, conceived, imagined, dreamed, When your robust, athletic heart, vigorously beating, And your elastic lungs, furiously pumping, Powering the arms, torso, and legs that powered the oar, Whenever you and your eight boat mates Took to the sleek, thin-skinned shell, on race day, To row for the sheer celebratory glory of the moment, Hoping to eclipse your previous best time, In the Henley, the Blackwell Cup, the Harvard-Yale Regatta, Take home the prized, sweat-drenched shirt Of the opponent occupying your identical seat, In the losing boat, idled in the humiliation of defeat... Never suspected that sooner than youth could catch its breath, You'd have long outdistanced your skills, prowess, and stamina, Lost your ability to rev up your body to such frenzied energy That you could, at the height of exhaustion, Call up, out of miraculous reserves, fuel, in raging abundance, To generate a sustained series of racing 42s, A final, climactic blast of 50, 52, 54 strokes per minute, Your blades a mere blur above the water's surface... Never thought that you'd ever arrive at a challenge such as this, In which your entire existence is to be measured, tomorrow, In less than ten, eight, or six minutes, on a treadmill, With a thallium stress test, geared to assess your blood flow... Never realized that your once-sleek shell Would check — lose its momentum, sacrifice its glide — With every erratic, fatigued recovery, Or that those mettle-testing Saturday regattas you so loved, For their clashes between muscular passion and cerebral strategy, Would cause you to catch a crab and come to a crashing stop, Or hurl you into a lake, river, tidal basin, up to your gunwales, Gasping for breath, praying you'll race another day.
02/09/11 - (3)
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