Track and Field

Today when I was walking back from the clinic I passed by the track/soccer field near my house. I usually walk through that field to get home but winter is track and field season and all of Dhahran Middle School was there. In other parts of the world, track and field is a sport that athletic, motivated kids take up maybe shortly before high school. But in Aramco track and field is a sport for everyone, fat kids, short kids, chain smokers, drug addicts, and one or two people who can actually run.

When I attended Dhahran Middle School track and field season was one of my favorite times of year. Of course my track and field experience consisted of maybe 6% track, 4% field and 90% walking around talking about boys. Practices officially started at 3:15 but it was much more fashionable to roll in around 4:00 because that way you missed pretty much all of the scheduled activities. So my friends and I would change clothes, eat some french fries, then I would sit around awkwardly while my friends smoked cigarettes (I was really into those Truth adds...) and then we would wander over to the track.

Maybe I would run a lap or sprint down a lane, and by sprint I mean take a short jog but most of the time I just sat around pretending to stretch. Of course there were a few kids who were naturally very fast and they would run around and around because our team needed them for when we participated in one of our three meets. There are only four Aramco middle schools and one of them had a graduating class of four girls last year (seriously, no guys.. ouch) so with around 120 kids in each grade, our school won everything based on sheer numbers.

So as I walked by that field today I watched the slender, athletic kids running around, followed by the far less motivated mass of walkers and then the occasional chubby asthmatic kid behind them. I watched the high jumpers rolling around on those comfortable blue mats and the shot putters trying to hit each other with those heavy balls. And in good DHS fashion, they could only really throw the thing 2 or 3 feet which quells a lot of safety concerns (still, our school never really did trust us with javelins).

As I watched them I smiled to myself and a good memory popped into my head. I was practicing my high jump by bouncing up on down on the big blue mat while three of my friends lounged around gossiping under the thin mat that lies on top of it. I was never a very coordinated person and somehow I managed to slip, rotate 180 degrees in the air and fly headfirst into the ground. I probably should have broken my neck doing that but I think when you're thirteen years old you have a magical ability to do things that would seriously debilitate normal people and end up perfectly fine.

I remember when I first got to boarding school I went to the first day of practices for Choate track and field and to my surprise, the coaches actually expected me to run... fast. It was a strange concept to me. Needless to say my short affair with track and field ended in high school along with my basketball and volleyball careers. It's really too bad because I always enjoyed sports before then, at least the Dhahran Middle School variety. I think it's a beautiful thing when you're a slow, overweight, uncoordinated 11-year old girl and you go to your first basketball practice and the coach (who is also your math, science and geography teacher) enthusiastically greets you with, "hey there! Thanks for coming! Go shoot this ball for a little while and then we'll play HORSE!"