Four Events Is Not Enough (Part 2 of 10)

I rode my Dad’s bike, which only had one speed. I didn’t ride that to school, but I did ride it on my workouts. It was hard going up hills though. I probably aggravated my ankle doing those hills. I reported to Coach Tripp, every few days, but I was frustrated. I could tell I was being passed by as the cross country team got better and better. I attended the meets as they competed with other high schools. I made friends with many of the runners, Steve and Phil Allen, Bret Parker, Mark Catmull and others. We even had a girl on the team. Since we didn’t have a girl’s team, she just ran in the meets but she didn’t fit into any of the scoring. Cross Country is like golf as far as scoring goes. The team with the lowest score wins. One point for first place, two for second place and so on. The first seven fastest were the varsity and the second seven were the junior varsity, or JV team. At the first of the year, because I had been working out on a regular basis I might have been ranked in the varsity. But with a month layoff, I was going to be lucky to make the JV team.
I went back to the doctor and he finally cleared me to run again. I ran in my first meet at Kearns High School’s course which was in a dry and barren looking field. It had a lot of rocks on the dirt trail and I was so worried that I’d turn my ankle on just one of those rocks. Most cross country courses were in parks and on grass, but could really be on any surface. This was just not a good course for me to jump into. Needless to say I did not do very well. A few days later we ran our own course in practice which was at the Cottonwood Softball Complex, about two miles north on Thirteenth East up from our high school. I had run it before by myself and on this day, I did well. To complete our workout that day Coach Tripp had us run back to the school. I was doing this with three other guys when we ran through a section of Thirteenth East that had a lot of rocks off the side of the road. I turned my ankle again and went down. I soon got up and hobbled around for a few minutes. It was painful but I found I could soon run again in a few minutes. I had injured it just as badly as before. But there was no way I was going to go back to the doctor! This was certainly not the last time I would get injured while running in high school, but I never did go back to my doctor after that. He’d just tell me not to run anymore, ever!