A Writer's Journey Part XII

Title: A Writer’s Journey

Part XII

The second year I coached cross country I was worried we wouldn’t even have a team at JT because of how many seniors we lost and then kids started showing up.  They would trickle in that year through the late summer and into the first week of school.  When they stopped coming we ended up with nine boys, three girls, and four modified girls.  One of those kids was Chris Hadley.  We were down at the Elementary school for the first time that year and he comes riding in on his bike.  “Is this where cross country is today?” he asked.  I’m like, “You rode a bike to cross country practice?  That is awesome!!”  I don’t think Chris did that again but he would spend the next four years running for JT.

Some people instinctively know how to run distance with little training.  Chris was not one of those people.  He was more of a sprinter, but he invented his own way of doing XC.  He would run hard  for a short distance and then walk with his hands behind his head recovering.  It was common for me to run past Chris his freshman year only to have him come zooming by me minutes later!  We would run in the off-season together over the next few years and I would often come up on him walking with his hands behind his head.  By his senior year, though, Chris could run the whole time without walking.  In fact, he got so fast his senior year that I couldn’t keep up with his jog much less his run:) 

There was no indication that Chris was going to be my top runner his senior year during his freshman season.  At his first sectional contest he came in close to dead last.  He did better his sophmore year but his junior year is when Chris would really take off!  The summer before Chris would run 200 miles over the summer and it would make a huge difference in his times!  He ran the a good number of miles the summer of his senior year too!  Some of those miles were run with me and other kids on the team.  Chris would run in races over the winter, in the summer in all different locales.  He went with me up to the Hornell running club and ran many a road out in the middle of nowhere.  Yet for all that work he struggled his senior year.  I don’t mean that he did poorly, I just mean he wasn’t accomplishing anything to make all that work worth it.  Chris was 69^th at McQuaid, which is good but didn’t get him a top fifty medal.  He didn’t get a county patch either and now sectionals was coming up.  I did some research and told him, “Chris the field is weak this year!  I think you could score a patch even if you have an ‘okay’ race.  So don’t put the pedal to the metal, okay?”  Chris went for it with everything he had.  I don’t blame him, I’m sure he didn’t want to miss his last chance, but he hit the wall and was struggling in the last mile.  “He’s going to miss it,” I thought, glumly.  Chris dug deep and kept struggling for that finish line but it looked bad.

You could tell he was bummed out with his place but double D was really, really strong that year and our class D was weak.  Why did that matter?  Well, DD runners didn’t count against him to earn a sectional patch.  Back then it was hard to tell which teams were in D and which were in DD.  There were over thirty-five teams running that day in Chris' race and I would have had to stand at the line watching runners specifically instead of cheering for JT runners.  I chose to cheer for our runners leaving me blind to his chances.  When Chris showed me his place card it seemed to be over.  There was no way he could have gotten a sectional patch with that place, right?  Yet there was a part of me that hoped beyond hope that maybe... just maybe he had won a patch.  Today results are uploaded to the web quickly, sometimes within seconds of your runner crossing the line, but back then you had to wait for the results to be posted.  There was usually a wall where the typed results were taped to and everyone would swarm around it.  Since this was the last sectional race of the day before the award ceremony (for small schools anyway), I knew from past experience that the results might not even be posted before the ceremony.  It was a lot harder for race officials to calculate everything in time back then.  Today the computer does it all in seconds.  Being a coach I had access to the room where the results were being examined and loitered there anxiously.  Minutes before the program I discovered that Chris had won a patch!! 

I told Chris’ friends in the hallway but insisted they not tell him.  Steeling myself, I walked out glumly and said, “I’m sorry, Chris.”  He dejectedly put his head down in his arms.  Brandon and Josh started laughing and I pretended to get angry.  “Hey guys!  Chris has worked hard!  You need to show some respect!”  Which only made them fight the giggles even harder.  I told Chris softly, “We have to support Court and you need to be a good sport when the guys go up from our league.”  He nodded and pulled himself together. 

When they read off the tenth place runner for boys class D, Chris’ head shot up in surprise.  “I beat that kid!” he thought, trying to process what was going on.  “And ninth place, Chris Hadley!”  A huge smile broke out on his face and he mouthed, “I’m going to kill you Coach!”  Up to the podium he went to stand with the other champions!  His hard work had paid off!  Chris Hadley had won a sectional patch!

Yet despite being a team captain and winning a sectional patch, Chris was also the team photographer that year.  He had this new fangled thing called a digital camera and took like 400 pictures of XC (I’m not kidding!)  While I was writing this article I pulled it up an old XC yearbook and noticed JMS at the piñata meet, Josh Peraldo showing me a golf ball, a great picture of the modified kids (Justin, Lyzz, Rachel, and Aubry), and so many more pictures that Chris had taken!  I will always be in his debt for those memories!

Chris is a great reminder to not give up.  His career started with no promise of awards, fanfare, or victory.  Since he was an early runner  in our program, Chris didn’t get the hear the stories of himself or many other heroes on our team, because he was the first.  From virtually dead last his first sectional race to sectional champion three years later!!  He was our first “built” runner, which means a runner with no initial aptitude for distance running who becomes a team hero!  Now, I could have read famous runners stories to him and other kids after him (and I sometimes do) but it means so much more when someone that came up through our program does something great compared to the story of a runner from California, Africa, or Russia. 

Writing is similar to this in that there are tons of stories of nobody writers making it but you don’t know those authors personally.  They are larger than life and seem so much bigger than a small unknown author.  I can tell you that Doctor Seuss got rejected by 26 publishes and was heading home to burn his first book in frustration, when he bumped into a friend that worked for a publishing house.  Can you imagine if “Oh, the Places You’ll go!” didn’t exist?  How about “Green Eggs and Ham?”  What if as a child you never heard “The Cat in the Hat” or “Marco comes late”?  What if at Christmas time there was no “The Grinch that Stole Christmas”?  Yet as powerful as that is, Doctor Seuss is a writer that was not only published and had a fan base in his time, but an author that has stood the test of time.  He seems like a giant compared to the likes of you or me.  Horatio Alger Jr, wrote “Mark the Match boy in 1869” but you’ve probably never heard of him.  The only reason I know him is that I was in a play based on his Ragged Dick Series.  But you probably have heard of Charles Dickens, a contemporary of Mr. Alger.  Yet Mr. Horatio Alger was “one of the most popular American authors in the last 30 years of the 19th century and perhaps the most socially influential American writer of his generation,” according to the Britannica.  Even more obscure would be author Frank A. Munsey (1882), who was the author of the first pulp fiction magazine.  In fact, Frank wrote it and produced it (similar to self-publishing today but with a lot more risk!)  How many millions of popular fiction romance and mystery novelists have been swept away to obscurity of the last several centuries?  So when you read a story of a nobody that became a famous novelist, it is exciting but doesn’t mean anything to you.  When the writer is someone you know, that makes a big difference! 

What if no one seems to like your novels?  You can work hard like Chris and still come up with nothing, right?  I think writing is about finding people who enjoy you as a writer and this is not an easy task.  The famous H.P. Lovecraft was virtually unknown as a writer, had to spend the end of his life pumping out writing for others to survive, and died poor and unloved.  He had two friends named August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, that were determined the world should meet his work.  They started a publishing company with the express purpose of putting out H.P. Lovecraft stories.  At first it was a dismal failure and then... the horror craze started in cinema and suddenly his stories were popular!  What if no one in your life time likes your novels and you don’t have friends with deep pockets determined that people WILL enjoy your stories (would we all had those kind of friends:)  It is great that Chris got his sectional patch but even if he hadn’t, he would still have had good memories of cross country... well, except for that nightmare he had about it but that is another story for another time!

*** Author Adrian Essigmann has eighteen books in print on Amazon.com, soon to be nineteen!  All of them are $.99 cents on Kindle, with the exception of “An Assumed Risk” which will be (Lord willing) an e-book before summer.  All of his books are available in soft cover too!  Type Amazon Adrian Essigmann and his author’s page should come up ***

Book list

Fiction

Wolf Hunting – Action/suspense

Wolf Hunting 2: Trick Shot – Military action/ science fiction

American Fairytale – Colonial America/ Fairytale

Life, Liberation, and the Pursuit of Video Games – Dystopian

Asylum Series (Tribulation genre meets CS Lewis meets lost)

Asylum

Killer Robots

Werewolves

Elf Princess

Zero Book – 666

C-3 Series (Pilgrim’s Progress meets Ender’s Game)

An Assumed Risk

Heavy Opposition

A Distant Boom

Two Hearts

The Magnificent Six

Don’t Pass Go!

Two Paths – Coming Soon!!

The Princess of Ashes Series (C-3 Series spin off)

Falling Ashes

Non-fiction

Miracles Can Happen: The Jim Ross Story – Jim Ross was miraculously sparred from death... twice!

Attack on Girl’s Track – A look at boys competing in girls sports, from the perspective of a track coach.  The book uses five years of track results from Section V (2012 – 2016) to prove its point.