Musings of a Former Athlete

I used to be an athlete.

Well, maybe that's a bit misleading. It's probably better to say that I used to be a high school varsity athlete-more specifically, I used to run track and cross-country. So I suppose calling myself an athlete is a bit like Rex Grossman calling himself a Super Bowl starting quarterback-true, but definitely not one hundred percent accurate.

Regardless, I used to be an athlete. At least, that's what I keep telling myself as I struggle to get up the seemingly never-ending steps in Kent, breathing heavily like a climber on Everest. Then again, even if you are in top physical condition, getting up the steps in Kent requires an almost superhuman effort. They should have rest stops at every landing with volunteers handing you cups of Gatorade.

I ran all throughout high school, mostly distance. Every summer, I'd find myself in preseason training for cross-country, trying to run through heat that would make the Sahara seem perfectly hospitable. Every fall, we'd run just about every weekend in meets, going into the first week of November. The day of our championship meet my senior year, the temperature was hovering somewhere around 40 degrees, and it had just rained the day before, turning the ground into a frozen muddy obstacle course somewhat reminiscent of a World War I battlefield. I remember that, since I didn't have running gloves, I had to wear socks on my hands to keep them warm. And yes, I'm aware of how pathetic this sounds.

In the spring, I would switch to track, which meant wind sprints and plyometric exercises until you literally couldn't get up. Track meets would take place on Saturdays-they would involve three or four hours of sitting around waiting for your event, about one or two minutes of actual running, and then another hour or two of sitting and slowly chewing on Power Bars. Needless to say, I didn't particularly like track meets.

I never considered college sports. Part of that was because, even at my fastest, my times wouldn't have been good enough to be a first-line runner on a men's team. Maybe on a women's team, but that would have required showing up to a tryout in drag. Nonetheless, there was never a point where I decided that I even wanted to try and get on a varsity team in college, much less try and balance athletics with a college workload. So with that decision made, I came to a school which had a less-than-inspiring athletic history, and joined the ranks of those who will forever live on their high school memories, telling anybody who cares that, one time, I actually won something.

This isn't to say that there aren't times when I wouldn't want to be an athlete again. My reasons for this are mostly shallow-I want to play baseball just so I can choose my own entrance music for at-bats, or for when I come out of the bullpen (Side note: the single best music choice for a closer is "Ace of Spades" by Motorhead. There's no debate on this.). I'd love to be able to come out of the tunnel like a football player, with my own crazy Ray Lewis-style dance, or to have the announcer at a basketball game say my name over the public address in a really exaggerated voice while the crowd goes wild around me. Like I said, this is all pretty shallow.

But being an athlete here is, not surprisingly, difficult. Beyond simply staying in shape and training and working out, you have to find time for the work that this place deems it fair to dump on you. You have to travel to God-forsaken places like Hanover or Ithaca. You have to deal with the fact that-unless you're a fencer, cross-country runner, or a member of the women's soccer team-the average Columbia student thinks that your team isn't worth half the funding it receives. And on top of all of that, odds are that every time you tell a random acquaintance that you're on a Columbia varsity team, the response probably isn't going to be more than a simple, "Huh, that's nice," with nothing beyond that.

But unlike the rest of us, the student-athlete at Columbia doesn't have to live on those memories. Every game, they get a chance to do something they've never done before, to create a whole new set of memories, and every now and then, they even get a chance to hold up a trophy or raise a banner or even walk off the field with a win. Sure, eventually, just like most of us, they'll be former athletes as well. But for now, they at least get the chance to accomplish the things that most of us left behind on a high school practice field.