After the Finish
Last week, I stood in a stadium that has held thousands of cross country skiing competitors. It began in 2002 with the Salt Lake Olympic Games and has continued for 23 years since.
I, of course, was there as a volunteer only. My job was to help test skis at the Junior Nationals for banned wax chemicals at the finish line. Which meant I had a front row, snowy seat to the end of a very short (1.5 k) but very fast effort by the youth that made it to this national competition.
Here's what they did first: hops, leaps, sprints in their t-shirts and race bibs before they started. Then they put those warm muscles to use in propelling them up hills as if they were eating them. Then coming down as if it wasn't incredibly hard to balance on skis narrower than their feet with no edges waxed to glide as far as possible. Then, in view of the finish line, put all their weight on one ski and the next, pushing their poles so hard into the ground that a few times over the seven races I watched the carbon fiber break in half. At the very end, they would push the foot with their timing chip far in front of them in attempt to eke out a few more hundredths of a second. A few times it actually helped.
Then they would fall. Poles akimbo, skis crisscrossed in the air, chests moving so far in and out that I could see the muscles between their ribs. They would lie there gasping for a few minutes, sometimes more than the actual race took. A quarter of them leaned over and threw up in the snow. Shovels had been previously pointed out so we could take care of such situations.
A few cried, but most couldn't even stand or sit up straight afterwards. I would tell them, let me help you take off your skis, and then fumble with the bindings. I am learning how to Nordic ski and thought I knew how to do this but it turns out there are four or five different kinds of bindings. So I would be there, on the snow, having an entirely different struggle. And admiring them for pushing all the way, especially since those that reached the final had done it 4 times by that point.
Many would agree that the height of human physical potential occurs in the 18-25 year old range, which all these athletes were. So here’s the funny thing about the finish line.
After they came down to a level of breath cadence that I had actually experienced (as an amateur athlete), a solid half of them used their first available words to do one of two things: congratulate their teammates or thank me for my work as a volunteer.
This, more than anything , brought me a throat lump. I couldn’t believe they were using what little breath they had to encourage and to thank. That their bodies were screaming at them and they chose to push even more energy out into the world. Good energy, at that.
That lump got bigger a few days later when the volunteer coordinator sent out a message thanking us for our help. It was less breathless than the words spoken by the competitors, but no less sincere. And the last line was what really got me. “For many, this will have been the pinnacle of their athletic career.”
I possess none of the talent, skill or fortitude to do what they did; the training, the waiting, the years of travel, the effort during the race, the good spirits when things didn’t work out. I will never get to do it, but I did get to be there in their orbit.
And what remarkable humans they are to have noticed that people were helping. Even when they barely had the energy to breathe.
