Nonfiction by Dick Daniels

My favorite race tee came from the Amory Railroad Festival Run. Bright orange and black, which happened to be my college colors, the front displayed a grinning locomotive chugging down the tracks in running shoes. Whenever worn, it stood out and drew favorable comments from other runners.

The shirt has long since gone the way of so many other articles of clothing: either victimized by my laundering inadequacies; passed down to one of my three sons; or packed in a grocery sack for donation to a local charity. However, my memories of that race day remain—as vivid as the orange of that shirt.

Amory didn’t have the appeal of other Mississippi towns like Natchez, Oxford, or even neighboring Tupelo. If Elvis had been born about twenty miles further south, that tee might have had a different face. But Amory had given birth to a thriving rail center, and that was the part of its history around which it created a festival every spring.

I was living in Memphis at the time and Amory was only a two-hour drive. The race brochure was particularly inviting—something for the whole family. Train rides on authentic railroad cars! Merchandise drawings! Colorful t-shirts! And the unstated possibility to a man nearing forty that he might have a chance for an age-group trophy at the small-city event. In those days, I eagerly journeyed to such out-of-town races as the Okraland Stampede and the Trenton Teapot Trot. The idea of accumulating more race shirts than you could ever wear had not occurred to me.

So off we went, my wife and youngest son along for the festivities. The sun came up early that late-spring day. Its warmth was particularly soothing after so many cold and dreary days of winter. The temperature eventually reached about 85 degrees, which doesn’t sound all that scary to a Southern runner. It was, however, the first day that year of any significant heat, and I would later calculate that it was nearly 30 degrees warmer than the average temperature at which I had been training just a few weeks prior.

As we gathered at the starting line, a quick survey of the field indicated a supreme effort might indeed result in age group recognition. For some reason, the actual start caught most of us by surprise, and there was an excessive amount of chaos and jostling for position as startled runners surged ahead. I remember seeing a young boy of ten or eleven who lost one of his shoes in the ensuing panic. He fought to retrieve it without being trampled by the herd of thinclads, then wisely retreated to the safety of the sidelines to lace up. A Stage Mom shrieked at him the whole time, ‘Hurry! You’re going to be last!’ Mercifully, I was soon out of earshot and had some running space.

The Amory Run, as I recall, was a five-miler, and I expected it to be less demanding than all those 10Ks which were the standard race at that time. My split times were pretty good the first two miles, but it was soon painfully apparent that I was overheating. I could visualize wavy vapors coming off the top of my head. That sinking feeling of knowing that you had ‘gone out too fast’ slowly overtook me. A mile later the disgrace of stopping to walk during a race had to be endured. It was my first time, and it was humbling. But I knew there was no other choice.

With each person that passed me, I suffered a little more as runners with excess weight or without the smoothest strides went streaming by. There were even children passing me. Among them, I recognized the boy who had lost his shoe at the start. His labored breathing had been audible before I saw him. As he went by, I could see a face flushed as red as a warning light on a car’s dashboard, similarly indicating an impending boilover. In that instant, I imagined how he might be struggling to gain his mother’s approval, thought about my own upbringing and how achievements had been expected by my parents, and knew how proud I would have been to see one of my sons showing that much determination.

Before he got too far ahead, I broke into a half-sprint to catch up, resolved to help him finish. I pulled up beside him and asked if he minded some company. His breathing was so heavy, words could not be summoned, so a shake of his head was my invitation. Over the remainder of that course, he became the recipient of all the information I had ever read on breathing, relaxation and pace. ‘Hold what you got!’ was encouragingly repeated.

My own pain and humiliation had been forgotten, and before I knew it, we had turned a corner and entered a long parking lot that housed the finish line at its other end. The resilience of youth and the shouts of Amory citizens lining the course spurred him to sprint the final straightaway, and I watched him proudly as he exuberantly pulled away with arms and legs flailing. When I finally came up behind him in the chute, he uttered his first words as he turned and looked up to me, ‘Thanks, Mister!’ I nearly cried. To borrow from Charles Dickens, “it was the worst of times” I ever ran, but “the best of times” I ever had running.

Dick Daniels is a combat veteran from Memphis with nonfiction work in Submarine Review and several other military magazines. His fiction pieces, backboned by historical research, have appeared in multiple journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Hare’s Paw, Wilderness House, Cardinal Sins, Valley Voices, and Two Thirds North.