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A Night to Remember
A journey not soon forgotten.
Last night, January 11th, the first track meet of the year took place. It wouldn’t be the meet itself that stood out that day. It wasn’t claiming victory when bursting through the finish shoot. It was the trip home that left no passenger with a straight face. At 7:30 AM, half the team piled on the small coach bus while others took the van. There was only a light drizzle coming down. The two-hour trip to Davenport went by smoothly.
Taking the coach bus is generally a humbling experience. The windows leak when it rains, the slide doors often require human assistance to pull them closed and the heat barely works in the winter. Feet will slowly defrost about an hour after departing the bus and entering a warm building.
It was a fairly small, insignificant meet with only a few schools including ours competing. It was the perfect meet to shake out the nerves, run mediocre times and almost hand off the baton to the wrong person in the mile relay (it was a close call).
Later that evening, the forecast threatened vicious winds, slick roads and unforgiving road conditions to travel on. The way back was a question of, “Why did we even take this trip in the first place?” The max speed we traveled was equal to a steady crawl. Every few miles, the wipers would malfunction. They became increasingly…
