Excerpts from Following the Flame

“Follow the orange cones straight up the hill, turn left, go through the trees...’’

When Coach Hightower finished, I looked up at our senior captain Don Neumann and said, “Where did he say we go after the downhill?”

“Ah, hell, Langenhooper, just follow everyone else.”

Coach Hightower took off his hat and raised the starter’s pistol. I made the sign of the cross and crouched. A pistol shot sent birds flying from the nearest tree and the runners down the course. I fended off an elbow to the chin and filed in behind Neumann and Bis hop Callahan’s sophomore sensation Tripp Saxton. I was pumping furiously and in fifth place as we started up the hill. A runner from Fort Worth Westbrook High shouted, “Anyone know a good joke?”

Neumann and Saxton looked at each other and at the same time yelled.

“Yeah, runnin’!”

Ten runners passed me on that hill. Ten more went by on the flat, and ten more on the downhill. At the mile mark I barely could see Saxton, who had broken away from the field. The longer the race went, the harder I breathed, the more tired I became, the more other runners passed me, and the more I questioned if I was going to finish. I kept asking spectators alongside the course, “How far to go?”

My blisters were so bad it felt like my black high-tops were trouncing through glass. Stomach cramps and fogged glasses made a tow bar practically necessary to pull me up the hill on the second loop. Ten more runners, including a girl and a chubby guy with leg weights, passed me. As I ran onto the flat, I looked back.

No one was there.

The starter’s pistol barely could be heard over the crowd noise. All I could hear was the thumping of my heart. All I could smell was the heat lotion lathered on the legs of Butai’s teammate Phillip Murambo, who ran second to his front-running countryman. I was last, behind my teammate Boyd Turner, as the four of us whipped around the tight bends. With three laps to go, a gap formed between the two Kenyans, and I filled it, sneaking between Murambo and the wall.

Butai picked up the pace, and I went with him. The crowd chanted “Boo-tay! Boo-tay!” as we raced past the smoke on the final lap. My adrenalin soared through the roof as I sprinted up to Butai’s shoulder on the backstretch. Around the final turn, Butai swung wide. But not wide enough. I had just enough room between his shoulder and the padded wall to match strides with the Kenyan. We leaned for the finish line, neither knowing who won. There was no finish-line photo, only a hometown finish line judge intimidated by a crowd of Kenyan worshippers. He gave it to Butai.

“That’s b-b-bullshit.” I started walking toward the judge, but Rupe pulled me away.

“Bah, don’t waste your energy, mate. Save if for the two-mile.”

I rested my legs in the empty natatorium next door and kept telling myself "I’m gonna get that Kenyan.”

Rupe walked with me to the starting line. “Go past him on the backstretch. Don’t wait until the homestretch. There’s not enough room.”

Butai went to the lead again, and again I went into last, behind Mitch Hansby. Butai surged hard at the mile mark, and I sprinted after him. With six laps to go, Butai and I had broken from the field. I stared at his smooth black calves and waited. The more he pushed the pace, the faster the crowd chanted “Boo-tay! Boo-tay!” and the better I felt.

“Just wait, just wait,” I told myself. “I‘ll surprise him on the final backstretch.”

Breaking me the last four laps wasn’t going to happen. This was a last-lap sprint, and this time I was ready. The pistol shot for the last lap echoed off the gymnasium walls. I revved up as we approached the turn and accelerated atop the backstretch. My lightning-quick burst was about to devastate Butai until he chopped me across the chest with a forearm. I slammed into the concrete wall with a “Ohhh” from the crowd and staggered around the turn holding my ribs and a middle finger. “You cheater!”

Rupe grabbed me as I came within a stride of Butai. The Kenyan escaped me again. “We will race again,” he said.

“How about tonight? In the parking lot!”

Everyone but the hometown officials saw Butai’s well-landed forearm. Now I knew what those scribbled words on the bathroom wall meant.

Maybe that’s why the grand sight of Hayward Field that sunny Saturday afternoon of June 27, did not send me to the toilet as I marched to the starting line for the 5,000 meters final of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials.

In only minutes, a gunshot would send me onto the footsteps of Steve Prefontaine. My spikes would touch the same holes he made in this surface en route to an American Record and touching off a thunderous chant of “Pre! Pre! Pre!” heard from the surrounding green hills to the rocky Oregon coast. I took a breath and closed my eyes as I reached the starting line. For a moment, I felt like I was home.

I slept through my alarm the next morning and missed the bus to the Frankfurt airport and my flight to Athens. All that was present at the Air Greece counter was a red telephone. I picked up the receiver and told the Greek attendant I missed my flight.

“You did what?” the man yelled.

I pulled the phone from my ear. “I missed my flight to Athens.”

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

“Isn’t there a later flight?”

“No, there’s no other flight! You must come back tomorrow!”

He slammed the telephone down before I could ask him what time the flight was. Now I was stranded. I had checked out of the hotel in Heidelberg, and a large convention left Frankfurt without a vacant hotel room. I called Brigitte in Dorfenheimer. Her younger sister, Lilli, told me in attempted English that Brigitte had moved to Wiesbaden and had no telephone. I had her spell out the street address and the town, which I noted was only an hour train ride from Frankfurt.

Brigitte returned from work that night to a surprise guest on her apartment doorstep. We immediately broke out laughing. Brigitte remembered the last thing I told her when I left Dorfenheimer. “You never know where I might pop up.”

We picked up where we left off, eating strudel and drinking pitchers of beer. I slept on her floor that night, without an attempt to crawl into her bed. Brigitte was my drinking buddy and nothing more. Besides, I wouldn’t want a relationship with someone who speaks in a foreign tongue. I like to know what my girlfriend is yelling at me.

I said auf wiedersehen again the next morning and took the train to the Frankfurt airport, where a Greek ticket agent stood at the Air Greece counter and talked on the telephone with presumably her boyfriend. After about 10 minutes, I started looking at my watch and banging on the counter. She kept talking. I interrupted. “M’am, I have a flight to catch?”

She hung up five minutes later. I told her I had a pre-paid flight to Athens and showed her my passport. The woman checked her computer. “Nothing here for you.”

“What do you mean? I have a pre-paid flight from the Athens meet promoter.”

“Nothing here for you.”

“Can you check again?”

“No!”

I sprinted to the nearest pay phone, slammed down several marks, called Athens, received confirmation from the meet promoter, and sprinted back to the ticket counter. I waited in line for 15 minutes, while the woman took another telephone call.

“Look, ma’am, I just got off the telephone with the meet promoter, who assured me there is a plane ticket for me here. Could you please check?”

The woman looked at my passport and typed on her computer.

“Nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Look, there is nothing here under your name. Come back when you have some money to pay for a flight.”

I barely had enough for another telephone call to Athens, but no time to make my flight. I returned again to the counter, this time armed with the pre-paid flight authorization numbers. The woman typed them into the computer, and my order popped up. I leaned over the counter to see the screen and that she had misread my passport. She thought my first name was Jonathan and my last name was Christian.

“You gave me the wrong name,” she said, grinning. “So you miss your flight again. Ha. Ha.”

My hands formed a grappling pose. I looked at the ceiling and whispered, “Just one, Lord, just one. Please, just one around the neck.”

I shared a room that night with three zero-English-speaking Polish runners I met in the airport. They wore Poland national track and field sweats, and we communicated by pointing to each other’s names in the Track and Field News Annual Rankings edition. I finally arrived in Athens the next day, walked the Acropolis, ran a lap around the old Olympic Stadium track, and met a group of athletes at the practice track. They laughed as I told them about my travel misadventure in Frankfurt.

Then I smiled, turned around and stepped into a water sprinkler hole. Water shot out of the hole and sprayed up my shorts. I escaped the blast but not the embarrassment from the athletes, who held their stomachs and fell to the grass. I smiled, jogged off the practice track, and felt the golf-ball size lump on my leg.

“Ohhh! I think I broke my fricking leg.”