By Elizabeth SullivanThe Dartmouth Senior Staff
Sometimes the chase just isn't satisfying. On Friday, Dan Lentz '13 wrote about his difficulties running the 4x400-meter relay for his high school track team ("Through the Lens of Lentz," May 20). I can promise that my experiences with that particular race were worse.
Generally speaking, the 400-meter relay was my favorite event, especially in the springtime. My body would collapse onto the turf and ache for 30 minutes afterwards, but I would convince myself by the next week's meet that the pain was worth it. But during the winter, meets were held in a local high school's field house, and the miniature track in the center was even smaller than the one where we held our daily practices.
The track's unusually small size probably 150 meters around meant that in the 400-meter relay, each leg started on a different point on the track. Like Dan, I was the anchor, and one week I lost my focus. And literally ran an extra lap. This possibility entered my head about 40 meters past the finish line, but the small size of the track and the bleachers in the middle meant that I couldn't see anyone else running behind or in front of me. It just seemed safer to keep running.
In that race, the pain actually wasn't worth it, and calling my mistake a victory lap didn't do much to ease my embarrassment. But sports are all about the chase or, to frame the idea differently, the hunt. On one level, it's the adrenaline-fueled slide tackle, the final push to speed up at the end of a race, the sprint to reach home before the throw. There's also the chase for the championship, or for the record books.
It's playoff season, so the idea of the chase in is the spotlight for everyone involved in sports right now, whether they are playing or simply following the season-ending or season-salvaging games. This notion of chasing a championship is even more prominent for Yankees fans. Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, stars now in their career twilights, are leading their own hunts toward very newsworthy milestones. Jeter's goal of 3,000 career hits has been on everyone's mind since the beginning of the season, when he needed 74 hits to reach that final, life-altering mark. Since then, Jeter has been steadily progressing and, despite haters' arguments that the shortstop is getting old, he's basically on track to match his hit-total from last season. At this point, Jeter has only 25 more hits to go, although he claims he won't focus on the record until the goal is a tangible one or two hits away.
Even more impressive, Rivera is 30 saves away from surpassng Trevor Hoffman for the all-time saves record. This is a daunting task for the 41-year-old pitcher, and one that realistically won't happen this season (despite an enthusiastic banner at the top of the Yankees' website). It should be noted, however, that Rivera's aging is all relative amidst chatter last season that he was getting too old to be successful, he picked up 33 saves. Even an incredible 53-save year didn't happen until the closer's mid-30s. Who said people don't get better with age?
Outside of the major leagues, some of us are now chasing the end of the term. We're suffering from too much rain or too little remaining DBA or too many papers to finish. Once we hit the milestone of the end of spring, though, we can't retire like aging baseball stars. It's on to the "victory lap" for everyone, whether that's a four-class Summer term (holler), a finance internship or gasp the real world. We can only hope that, unlike 150 unnecessary meters, our next steps actually feel like victory. Author's note: What a downer of an ending, I know! But oh so justified Green Key is over, there's work to do and not much in the way of Dartmouth sports to entertain me.
