Thursday, February 05, 2009 we were rabbit chasers

Sup turds. So uh yeah. I slept retarded last night and this morning I woke up with a messed up neck. It hurts to turn to the left. Not that you guys care, I’m just sayin. Well, only 2 people messaged me last week with requests, and to settle it I flipped a coin. Looks like you will be hearing more about my track days, because I guess that’s an area of my life not many people know about? Idk. They wanted to hear more about it. So prepare to be fucking bored. Haha. not really. I loved it. Well, let’s see where to start. Yeah. I ran track all 4 years of high school. That is all. Haha, j/k. but yeah, I ran track all 4 years of high school. Originally I joined track as a way to keep in shape and to do shit in the off-season for soccer. I ran the 800. Actually it’s the hardest race in track. Ask anybody who’s ever ran. I’m not saying it just to make it sound like I’m a badass, but yeah, I don’t remember how I ended up picking that as my race. Actually no, I take it back, I WAS A BADASS. Haha. I don’t know how other schools did it,(I’m sure they all did this), but the track team was divided into 3 groups. The sprinters, the field guys, and the long distance guys (me). our track team was about 80 kids or so. You’d think that It’d be evenly split like half sprinters half distance guys but no. it was about 50 sprinters, 15 field events guys and 15 distance guys. The long joke was that the sprinters and events guys were the “pussies” and the distance guys were the “crazy/hardcore” guys. Haha. the reason was the practices. To put it this way, we (the distance guys) actually practiced. Haha. also, the biggest thing as to why considered them pussies, and they would even agree to this sometimes, but the indoor track season would start in January. How is a distance guy supposed to practice inside during the winter? The answer is that we don’t. haha. no matter how cold it was outside, or how much snow there was, we would always go outside and run around West Chicago. IN SHORTS!! Haha. whereas the sprinters would stay in the field house and do whatever it was they did. Run back and forth or something. Pussies. So yeah, we’d always be out there taking the weather like the MEN WE ARE. Haha. also, what we actually did for practice couldn’t compare either, an easy day for them would be like doing a couple reps of whatever their event was, but not really going full speed or anything. An easy day for us was outside running 6 miles. Our hard days, were things that the sprinters couldn’t even believe. I remember once a kid who was a sprinter came out with us on a day we were doing reps of 500’s. (oh man I hated those). Once it was nice outside, the sprinters would walk out to the track (which was across the street), and do their workout. The distance guys had to run out to Ingalton ave. and do out workouts there. Ingalton was about 2 miles from the school, so once we got there, the sprinter kid was already tired and thought we were done for the day haha. once we got there and started to do our actual workout, the kid freaked out and walked WALKED back to school. We had to do out workout which was like 6 to 10 or however many reps you wanted to do of 500’s. by the way these are all meters I’m talking about. The track world, just like the rest of the world, uses the metric system haha. aaaanyway, we did our workout and then we would have to run back to school. By the time we got back, most of the sprinters were gone or just hangin out around the school. We’d always come back to, “man you guys are crazy” and shit like that. And then we would hit the weights. And then go home. Yeah. So when I read that somebody wanted to hear about my track days, I started to think about it in my political science class, because I can’t understand the teacher, so I just daydream the entire time. Aanyway, I was thinking about it and I started to remember all of the great memories I had, and how much I miss it. I’ve always considered myself a soccer player, and I’m sure everybody that knows me considers me a soccer player, but I think I miss track more than I miss soccer. Mostly because of the memories, and the friendships. Not to get all sappy and emo and shit, but as I mentioned before it was only like 15 or 10 of us. So we were all pretty close. A lot closer than the soccer team ever was. It’s hard to explain but soccer is the team sport whereas track it’s just you by yourself doing your event, but the comradery (sp.) amongst the distance guys has never been matched by anything I’ve ever done with other people. I mean, on a foggy day, when you couldn’t see who was in front of you, you could tell who it was by listening to the slap of his sneakers on the pavement. I’m thinking the only thing closer without actually being related would have to be the brotherhood that you hear about in soldiers. That sense of togetherness that only come about from spending so much time together, the torture we went through haha, and all of the great memories we had. I think nothing like that ever developed with the soccer team because for one the team was huge, and when we practiced it’s all soccer related, and the dialogue is all soccer related, “pass me the ball” “man on” “move into space” etc… Whereas with the distance guys it was only a few of us and when we would go out running we would all run together and just talk about the most random things anybody could think of. I mean we would talk about some weird shit. From the light crap like do you think so and so is hot, to some pretty heavy shit. The only comparison I can think of would be to take a car ride every day Monday through Saturday for 3 hours with no radio from January through May with your best friends. It was great. Well enough of the sentimental crap. now for some of my favorite stories. Pissing off coach carper. Hahahaha, coach carper was the girls coach. And for some reason he would always think he could tell us what to do (which he probably could have), but nobody ever listened to him and just ignored him. One example was when the girls were having a meet. Before meets, the team is supposed to set up for it by pulling out the hurdles and setting them up, setting up the mats for the high jump, etc… and just like in a movie, coach carper told the guys to help out and help set up, and everybody just stood there and ignored him like he wasn’t even there, then coach Mac came out (our coach), and told the guys to help out and immediately everybody ran off to go see what needed to be done. He would get PISSED!! Haha. To get to Ingalton, we had to run down main street and eventually down some other streets. Aaanyway, once me and a kid, broke away from the pack on main street and ran into Turner Junction, and ate tacos and French fries, then once we saw the kids coming back down main street on the return run, we paid our bill and caught up to the pack and ran back to school. Haha. the tacos were good though. The many dog chases. Not really though. Oh, once we were doing a fundraiser where we were supposed to go out and sell some card that had a bunch of coupons on it, like for a large pizza with the purchase of a large or some crap like that. We were supposedly raising money for new warm up suits or something like that. Instead, me my brother and one of our friends, pitched in bought one of the cards ourselves and went to Rosati’s and helped ourselves to the free pizza. When we got back coach was like how many did you guys sell and we were just like 1. Haha. We also lost a kid once. We found him though, but we couldn’t find him for an hour. On one of our longer routes, our 10 mile one, we run the prairie path to the Dupage County Airport and back. But we have to make some turns down some residential neighborhoods and parts of an industrial park and then eventually back onto the path. This part of west chicago is hardly seen by some people, especially the people who live in that little part of Carol Stream that somehow are in West Chicago’s school boundary. Anyway, a new kid came out with us once, and somewhere along the way we lost the kid. We got back and we were all like, “where’s so and so?”. We all figured out that we lost him, and well all took off back to the trail to try and find him. We found him in Reed Keppler park. Haha. so in reality we ended up running like 15 miles that day. But no man get’s left behind!! Haha. Making fun of whoever dropped a baton. That’s the stick that people hand off during the relays. If you drop one during an exchange, you get ridden all day for that. The random people you’d meet on the street. One time we were all running, and this old lady come out of her house and yells at us, “MY HUSBAND WAS A RABBIT CHASER BACK IN THE 60’s!!!” that was kind of funny. We all started laughing at her. Everybody would yell at us “RUN FORREST RUN” that got old real fast. Since we ran on the street the distance guys would collect hubcaps. Cars would lose hubcaps on the street and we would pick them up and bring them back and hang them up in our locker room. We had quite the collection. There was a collection before I got there, so hopefully the tradition lives on. The dump contests. Haha, they would have contests to see who could take the biggest dump. One of my friends has the all time record, I seriously doubt anybody could ever beat him. I remember that day everybody, even the coaches went into the stall and would be like “oh my god” or “what the fuck is that”. Haha. I mean, imagine a giant cinnamon roll. Nobody knows how he got it to twirl the way he did, but man, it was amazing. Oh, probably one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen was when one of my friends from soccer joined the track team. He joined and ran for one practice, and then then next day we had a meet. (he joined late). But coach mac told him he could sit out of the meet if he wanted to but he didn’t want to. He ran the 800 just like I did, but I think, they had to do 2 legs because there were a lot of people or something, I don’t remember, but I remember standing there on the side of the track and when the gun went off, he just took off. Full speed, sprinting. Everybody looked around in disbelief and was like “what the hell is he doing?”. Since he had never run in a race before, and basically had zero coaching, nobody told him how to run the race. And for those of you that don’t know, an 800 is on average (depending on the size of the track) but usually 2 laps around a track. You don’t start off sprinting when your going to run a lot because during the second lap, you’re going to be tired as hell. He hadn’t even done one lap when we could all see that he started to slow down. By the time he had 3/4ths of a lap left he was walking. Everybody had caught up and passed him, but everybody on the team was laughing at him. Eventually he started running again and finished, and everybody came up to him and was like “what were you thinking” etc… it was funny. That’s all I can think of right now, I’m getting hungry and I’m gonna go eat. If I think of more, which I assure you there are I’ll write them later in a different blog or something. Reading them over again they’re kinda lame, but whatever. These are MY memories anyway so who gives a fuck what you think. Haha. this shit’s for free anyway, By the way, I went to the mall this weekend and bought a cd for the first time since I don’t’ know how long. The gaslight anthem. For my avid blog readers, this as you may recall is the band that I deleted and then I couldn’t add again once they got huge. Well yeah. I bought the cd and I haven’t stopped playing it since. It’s one of those rare cd’s that you can listen to all the way through. Go buy it. I just saw on espn that anquan boldin says that his chances of him returning to the cardinals are “slim”. The bears better move in on that. That’d be great. Also, I’m getting sick of hearing about Michael phelps smoking pot. Who gives a shit what he does in his free time. And Jessica simpson getting fat. Who gives a shit, maybe that’s how tony romo likes his girls. I don’t see why everybody has to make such a big deal about it. Seriously I bet some 1 % of the American population has actually met these 2, but it’s all over the net. Wtf people. Alright. Peath out. Oh, and send me messages otherwise I’m just going to start writing about whatever again. (which is maybe what you guys want idk) whatever. Or don’t. Whatever. Go bears