I. When the hurly-burly’s doneJoyce Oakes had warned Earl of Transport Nathan Legault. On Friday, she said, “You may want to reconsider your plans.” There was a storm brewing. Standing in a proud tradition of Earls of Transport past, Nathan patently ignored this well-intentioned and fully paranoid advice. At six the next morning, the skies were overcast but bright, not a drop of rain to be found. The rain was missing from the sky and five athletes were missing from the vans, having scratched within the previous two days. Treasurer Mike Luvin cursed the skies, thinking of all the money that might have saved, praying he wouldn’t have to be the treasurer to raise dues. As the Northwestern Track Club ventured their way further into central Illinois, things started happening. The aux port in Nathan’s van started acting up once they left Cook County. The sprinters had to squint through layers of dirt and grime on the windshield of their vehicle. And yet we soldiered on. It is easy to forget just how far away UIUC is from Evanston. We make it there and back in a day trip, after all. But when the vans passed Kankakee, and jokes about the Kankakee car wreck half-heartedly emerged from the back seat, and everyone realized that there was over an hour left in this car ride, it was impossible to ignore: Urbana is a trek. And yet the two and a half hour drive pales in comparison to the nine hours NUTC spent in the Armory, charging their laptops in the hallway, cheering on teammates, buying bagels from the Einstein’s kiosk outside, napping on the bleachers, and, occasionally, competing. II. When the battle’s lost and wonOur field events looked awesome this week. However, due to a scoring system that necessitates at least two athletes per event to score, favoring larger clubs, we were not able to accrue points on the field despite some great places and performances. Caleb broke the NUTC shotput record with a 10.56m throw, good for sixth overall. Heili had three great jumps and an unfortunate final jump, spraining her ankle. Nonetheless, she still managed a great 9.53m and a fourth place finish overall. Heili’s 8.74 in the 60 meter dash put her in ninth overall - a really impressive day for her! Next up were the boys. Zack, Rossoneri, Adam, Austin, and Tucker all raced 60s, with places ranging from 15th to 63rd. The women’s 4x8 started the distance events off strong (with the help of Sulli from Loyola University). Starting off with an incredible 2:25 split from Kurstin, the women held on for seventh place in 10:50, scoring three points for the team. The women kept rolling in the 3k, with Megan and Selin placing 20th and 33rd respectively, scoring another three points for the women. The men’s 4x8 got the men’s side on the board as well, scoring a point with their impressive tenth place finish in 8:36. Illinois got a hold of some fancy new technology which actually kept track of each runner’s splits. Mike and Adam’s splits were within .02 seconds of each other — I would like to personally request that they are in the same heat of every open 800 for the rest of the season. Unfortunately, two sprinters scratched out of a contingent of four sprinters. Thanks to some good old fashioned teamwork, however, both the 4x2 and SMR happened regardless. Zack, Rossoneri, Austin, and (Adam) all managed an impressive 4x2. John Docter, mustache and all, stepped in for an SMR, alongside John Laboe (making his racing debut for the first time in months), Rossoneri, and Austin. I don’t know why this meet has an SMR and not a DMR but, regardless, both the 4x2 and the SMR were really fun to watch and cheer for. After warming up about ninety minutes too early and sitting through seven heats of 3ks, Tucker finally toed the line in the men’s 3k, alongside NUTC alum Justin. The two ran well, Tucker finishing in 10:25, five seconds faster than his seed time - solid. The mile was truly the banner event for the distance crew. Kurstin got us warmed up with a stellar 5:29, good for fifth place overall. Selin was next, running her third race of the day (4x8, 3k, mile). Adam came next, just missing a PR, followed by Mike. Nathan Legault ran what I can confidently call the gutsiest NUTC race in recent history. The second the gun went off for the eleventh heat of the men’s mile, Nathan left the field in the dust, sprinting to a 100 meter lead on the field within the first two laps. His teammates spectated in confusion: what was he doing? Was the rest of the heat getting a really slow start? Or was he going insanely fast? (It was the latter.) One advantage here was that he certainly did not get boxed in, as Adam and Mike did in their heats. However, he did cross the 800 at 2:25 with a 5:14 seed. So, there was that. He held on though. The rest of the field started closing in on him with a couple hundred meters to go. Only two athletes, both kickers, caught him at the end. Nathan ran a 5:07, good for third in the heat but more importantly, tying his high school teammate’s time from the previous heat. Love some good rivalry between friends. Tucker tied Selin for most racing done in a day in finishing his mile. Andrews McCabe and Baxter got the job done, both running solid miles as well. And with that, the thirteenth heat of the men’s mile, NUTC’s day was done. (Let’s be real – no way was a 4x4 going to happen.) III. That will be ere the set of sunI’m not much of a Steinbeck fan, but I often think of the quote: “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” And yes, I know that this quote is kitschy and often embroidered onto pillows and painted onto mugs and sold on Etsy by people who have never read Steinbeck’s ambitious epic East of Eden and who don’t understand the context of the quote and Steinbeck’s deep love of the Salinas Valley. But perhaps that’s the point.
Club running is inherently imperfect. Missing relay legs, half a relay team absent, mismatched uniforms, spotty wifi at the Armory. A confusingly loud and aggressive school bell sound, ringing over loudspeakers, marking the leader’s final lap on the track, and a downright frightening starting gun. And we keep coming back. This is Illinois’s eleventh annual club relays, and their biggest yet. Adam and Megan, current and former presidents of NUTC, spent twenty minutes wandering around the bleachers asking schools if they had a spare distance girl who would be willing to wear a Northwestern jersey and compete in Northwestern’s 4x800, as our fourth runner had dropped. And Loyola said yes. What is there not to like about a meet where a neighboring school will lend one of their athletes to a rival school so that three women, left without an anchor leg, can still compete in a relay together? A boy running a sprint medley relay from another school was wearing a NIRCA buff wrapped around his chest, bandeau-style. Minnesota ran a 4x400 in 4:01 using a giant crayon as a baton. There is nothing perfect about any of this. After all, no perfect meet would ever entail nineteen heats of the mile. But there must be something inherently good in being silly, in being brave and asking random Midwestern track clubs for a spare athlete, in having your distance guys try a 60 meter dash for the fun of it, and in his being pretty satisfied with a 63rd place finish (out of 63). As we headed out, arguing about Fat Sandwich, it had never been clearer: we make no claims toward perfection. After my final high school track meet, on the van ride home from state, the sun was setting behind us on the highway. It was almost too poetic, too perfect, the sun setting on my high school running career, etc. As we left Club Relays, the fog was freezing and dense. After a five minute walk to the parking lot, everyone was cold and no one was in the right van and Adam discovered after a harried phone call that, somehow, Andrew Baxter was still in the Armory. And yet, as we settled into Culver’s (not Fat Sandwich, not sorry), sharing fries and passing around the extra chicken tenders and butterburgers from Kurstin and Austin’s incorrect meals, there was no denying that this was good. Not perfect. And thank goodness for that.
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Peace had finally come to the continent. After thirteen years of Napoleon’s rampages, the armies of the House of Bourbon had finally been defeated at the Battle of Bourbonnais, and a new system was needed to govern the relations among the states and royal houses of Europe. To write the rules of this new order, the rulers of the victorious coalition met on February 16, 2019, and the Congress of Hyde Park was born.
Representatives of every state and house of Europe were in attendance. Her Royal Highness, Grace Kelly, the Princess of Monaco, was in attendance, undertaking her first diplomatic mission since leaving the Varsity team in Hollywood. “Hopefully acting has some crossover with powerlifting, and I can still run a good time,” she said. Her 68 second 400 meters was exactly such a result, and secured sovereignty for Monegasque House. Her closest ally at the Congress was Megan, the Queen Mother, (not to be confused with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex), who had quit Hollywood several years before, and was by this time very familiar with the ins and outs of European diplomacy. They had planned to join Crown Princess Emma, and Kurstin of Kalisek in the Distance Medley Relay, but the organizers of the Congress of Hyde Park had decided to remove it from the agenda. Though they both still contested the mile, the Queen Mother withdrew from the 3,000 meters in protest. The Crown Princess was an early favorite, leading the first two laps of the 15 lap race, before being passed. Tucker, Comte de Paris, had arrived, hoping that the Congress would restore his House of Kentucky to the throne of France. The Comte was scheduled to face the 3,000 meters alone. His chief counsellor, Jean de la Boe, had been denied diplomatic credentials for the Congress, and would only be able to watch from the sideline. Luckily for the Comte, he ran well in the mile, setting a weirdly slow PR with his 5:14 finish. President Forrest of the Republic of Trackmetricia opposed the return of the House of Kentucky to the throne of France however, believing that another monarchy would only threaten the future of peace in Europe. His arguments were popular with the Congress, which gave him three points for his stunning kicks in the mile and 800 meters. “Democratic peace theory is incredibly well supported by empirical evidence, and I’m pretty happy with the results of this meet.” Jing, the Celestial Emperor, had come all the way from Beijing to compete in the 60 meters and 200 meters. In the 200 meters, he was edged out by Zack Trapp, Marquis of Sprints. Jing had also entered the 4 x 400 meters in coalition with President Forrest and Prince Luvin of Luxembourg. Though not joining them in that race, the Marquis of Sprints advised their attempt. In the final point on the agenda, Countess Heili of Hesse tied her club record in the triple jump. It was an exciting result, securing the rule of the House of Hohenzollern over Prussia, and setting the stage for the coming Wars of German Unification, which experts forecast will begin next week, when John Brown is expected to raid the Armory at Urbana-Champaign. The contributions of many other delegates to the Congress, and to the modern study of international affairs, must also be recognized. Andrew McCabe, the Viscount Castlereagh, laid major groundwork for the development of liberalism in international affairs, arguing that with institutions to guide their cooperation, States could cooperate with each other for the common good. His greatest rival, Klemens von Metternich, of the Habsburgs, argued that cooperation was impossible in a state of nature, and the various kingdoms and principalities of Europe should be of a balanced size and power. This idea, which came to be known as realism, is today highly connected with scholars at the University of Chicago. After the close of the Congress, in an attempt to fill his coffers, Nathan, the Fifth Earl of Sandwich, told everyone they should go get dinner at Panera. IT IS 1907. A group of travelers convenes in the far corner of a converted chapel in Bourbonnais, Illinois. There are sixteen of them, each clad in purple garments and carrying a pair of light, spiked shoes of varying age and condition. They form a circle from metal chairs upholstered in green fabric, bodies cloaked in the shadow of stained glass beneath the arc of a cardboard solar system. Their sentences are short and direct. “We really should have ordered Jimmy John’s.” “Why are there no times on the heat sheets?” “Did you hear that Adam walked into the girls’ bathroom?” There is no connection in these lines; no attempt at unification. But Father Forrest has gathered them here to change that. It is the second day of the second month, high time for a merger of all the Christian sects in the Chicagoland area. The chosen location is a private university in Bourbonnais, bedecked with all of the typical furnishings of any good chapel: a rock-climbing wall, a withering snowman to remind us all of our mortality, and an iron bowl hosting an eternal flame (lit by either the Passion of the Christ or a gas burner). In attendance are representatives from every denomination: Zacharius Trapp, father of the sprints; Sister Duffin, minister of jumping; Emmanuel Kumer, worshipper of the long distance. These are not your typical worshippers. Their temple is the Ryan Fieldhouse. Their highest saint is Steve Prefontaine. Their sacraments are battered toenails; their Bible is Shalane Flanagan's Run Fast, Eat Slow. At reconciliation they confess to fabricating trip logs; they imagine purgatory is in Gillson Park. To be a part of this faith, one must not just put faith before family and friends, but also put Bahá'í before school and hospital. The group has no idea that this merger will successful, that it would make them into more than just a unified religion: it will make them a team. In hindsight, they should have known the group was sacred. There were more Adams and Johns than a Catholic church. There were checkerboard spandex. There were people signed up for field events. Later, this event would be known as The First General Assembly, or perhaps as The First Indoor Track Meet. FIRST TENET OF THE NAZARENE FAITH: THOU SHALL TRY AS HARD AS THOU MIGHT TO BREAK THE RECORDS OF YESTERYEAR. Father Forrest’s General Assembly was not the first to be called in that particular chapel. In fact, the same location had hosted Magdalene Beach’s own assembly a year prior. Many, many attempts had been made at unification. Some were successful. But every year, new sects of Evangelical Christianity sprouted in the Chicago area, and thus, the assembly had to convene again. To bond the various members once and for all, the meeting consisted of a series of running, jumping, and throwing events, all laid out on an indoor ring (you know, to make it “holy”). The Assembly was nervous about their performances, since a polar vortex had put an end to their bi-weekly field house gatherings, but as the were determined to stick to the slogan pasted across their vaguely-biblical promotional posters: We Do Our Best. As was the tradition of those days, the ladies started first. After achieving a 3.88m in the long jump, Sister Heili Duffin ended up flying 9.20m in the triple. It was such an incredible leap that she shattered the previous record painstakingly kept in the ancient, cobweb-crusted Google Document by Emmanuel Kumer. This would only be one of the three records broken: the second and third of which belonged to converted track star Kurstin Kalisek, baptized into the sport of running after a brief period of Rowingism. Her 62-second quarter mile stunned the Assembly, who’d never seen less than a 65. It wasn’t as if they gave themselves the chance to witness such a feat, however; it was well known that such a group notoriously scratched the 4x4. Kurstin followed this record with a stellar 800 at 2:28, her speed so enthralling that various members of the gathering almost converted to Kurstinanity before Father Forrest reminded them that the sole purpose of the Assembly was to form a new religion. They would call this religion Nazarene. They would establish an institution of higher learning and call it Olivet Nazarene. And they would establish an intercollegiate track and field team and call it the Nazarene Unified Track Club, or NUTC. SECOND TENET OF THE NAZARENE FAITH: THOU SHALL NOT STICK TO A TIME SCHEDULE. The hours dragged by with little to no respect for the passing of the hour. The organizers of the Assembly had planned a thoughtful schedule for each of the events, hopes so high as to mention that they might even finish a half-hour early. This was incredibly wishful thinking, as Magdalene Beach and Emmanuel Kumer found themselves accidentally warming up an hour early for the fated three-thousand-meter race. The surplus of preparation time led Beach to a 11:31 finish, just past her seed time. Kumer, however, was unable to count to fifteen, resulting in a premature final sprint, a confused push back onto the track, and a last lap resulting in a 11:48. Throughout the race, the organizers played a selection of popular hymns of the time, such as Lil Mama’s Lip Gloss and Far East Movement's Like a G6. Members of the sprints sect were notably faster than Emmanuel and Magdelene. After a Fast Supper in the Foster-Walker Complex before the event’s commencement, Zacharius Trapp led his disciples to impressive finishes. Trapp himself ran a 7.51 in the 60, followed by Rossoneri Jing at 7.63. Despite initial confusion over whether she was meant to run in lane 6 or 8, Sister Duffin finished in 8.9. Later, Jing finished a 200 in 25.72, with Robert Gallo two seconds behind. Perhaps the most anticipated event was the men’s open 800, so popular that six separate NUTC participants toed the line. Fastest was Adam, with 2:06. Then came headband-clad Johnathan, at 2:18. Then, Nathaniel, with a slightly-slower variant of 2:18 to round out the trinity of The Father, The Docter, and holy Legault. Only a second behind them, brother Austin and brother T finished at the exact same time, with the newly-baptized Andrew McCabe at a 2:27. In the mile, The Father and Holy Legault were joined by McCabe for a spectacular race. Amidst the stress of organizing such an assembly of NUTC competitors, Father Forrest still performed at his peak, dipping beneath 5 minutes on the indoor track with a 4:47. Legault and McCabe finished at 5:17 and 5:28, respectively. The men did not seem particularly proud of these efforts, but to quote Galatians 5:7, “You were running a good race. Who cut in on you to keep you from obeying the truth?” Father Forrest’s 1907 Assembly contained a tenant that had been missing for many years: field events. In the past, the group had been able to assemble a jumper here or there, but for the first time in history, they also had someone to throw the sacred shot-put. Cardinal Caleb Evert threw 9.48 meters, breaking into uncharted territory for the freshly-formed NUTC. THIRD AND FINAL TENET OF THE NAZARENE FAITH: THOSE WHO RUN, JUMP, AND THROW AS HARD AS THOU MIGHT WILL BE REWARDED IN ETERNAL FRENCH FRIES. For John Docter, Austin Ridenour, T Zaki, and Max Olander, the open 800 was simply not enough half-miles for a single occasion. These four men banded together to get a 9:26 in the 4x800. Father John Laboe the Second cheered for them with such vigor that he was named the honorary Fifth Man. After founding the Nazarene religion, they also founded a new fast-food burger chain, naming it Five Guys in his honor. At this establishment, the Nazarene Unified Track Club (now affectionately referring to themselves as "Joyce's Angels") discussed their newfound camaraderie over paper bags spilling double-stacked burgers, endless french fries, and self-serve peanuts. They ate the food and it was good; this was what The Lord had intended. Despite only a 50% success rate on the burgers (friar Austin, Abbott Maximus, and Father John Laboe the Second all received meals they did not order, but such is the manifestation of an all-knowing God), the competitors were content to sit together, nine people to a single table, and break bread. Friar Austin opened his tinfoil to find a bun enclosing a full stack of toppings, but no patty, and he ate it regardless. After all, it had been a long day with plenty of meet. There was no need for more. That morning, at 8 a.m. at the Foster-Walker Complex, they had been mere hole-y men and women, worshippers of the indoor track. But that evening, they were brought together by the faith of the only thing that has no end: The Olivet Nazarene Invitational. |
AuthorDefinitely Tristan Jung Archives |