“That kid,” my coach keeps his finger pointed at a pixilated, curly haired youth on the monitor but turns his gaze to meet mine, “He reminded me, today, of why I live track”
The speakers crackle out the roar of thousands of fans, track die-hards whipped into a frenzy by the 3200m relay’s anchor leg of the Penn relays. Celebrating it’s 116th year, it is the longest-running track event in the United States. On this day, everything inside Franklin Field is a celebration of accomplishment and innovation, of history and it’s upheaval.
The stadium is an amalgam- its ancient, scholastic spires and stadium on the north end bordered by it’s state-of-the-art stadium seating- in the same way each athlete is: age-old blood and sinews straining symbiotically with gaudy apparel and footwear. Blood and sweat wicked away by nike-swooshed Dri–FIT jerseys and speedsuits (62 percent cotton, 34 percent polyester and 4 percent spandex), lower extremities pumping like pistons, propelled by spike-plated, fly-wire, glove-type-fit footwear with spectacular arches.
At this level, all distance athletes’ quads (a term which is misleading, as they are optically construed as more of a muscular triumvirate) look similarly ropy: so finely-toned that the vastus lateralis plateaus out over the meaty vastus intermedius, butting up to the slightly-cantilevered vastus medialis, forming an arroyo of sweat, double-helixing with the Sartorius and spilling out over the knee cap in steady rivulets. These hypertrophic quads look comical on the otherwise-ectomorphic greyhounds, and are not dissimilar to the dominant arms of their raquet-weilding counterparts.
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