Not necessarily paying full attention to the Sunday School lesson

Someone in Sunday School today said something about dragging our sins along behind us. This made me think about something.

Back in the day, I went to join the high school track team. I told them I wanted to throw shot put and discus. Mister Barnard, the track coach, told me I could, but everyone had to run for the first week. (I think it was so that they didn't send someone to the field events that should also be running.)

The first week of track practice involved the following: A warmup run around the track once, followed by stretching. Then anyone that was not new got to go where ever they were supposed to be. The hurdle guys went to dig out the hurdles. The cross country and long distance runners took off. Jumpers went to the jump area, that sort of thing. Us new guys got tires harnessed to us and we were set to running. For a weeks worth of practices.

Looking back on it, I think there were 3 main reasons they did this to us, from the least likely to the most likely:

1. They figured that running with a big truck tire harnessed behind you would make it so that you ran faster and more explosively when the tire wasn't there.
2. Mister Barnard thought it would be funny to make a bunch of kids run for a week with tires harnessed to them
3. The track was a soot/gravel track, and they needed to have it groomed. The easiest way to groom the track at the start of the season must have been to drag tires across it. In hindsight, I think that's the real reason they made us do this.

After my initiation, I was allowed to go throw discus and shot put. That same year, (when I was a Sophomore in High School) they started doing a "Fat Man" relay. This was a 4x100 meter race, they did it at the same time as the normal 4x100, but it was just field athletes. There were 5 of us that year that threw discus and shot put, but one of the guys ran in the 4x400 meter race. One of the guys had a bad foot and couldn't run, and that was before I dropped a shot put on him and broke his foot. The other 2 guys were football players, and seniors, the 3 of us and a high jumper started running the in Fat Man relay. At each track meet, we would spend the first hour or so of the meet talking the other school's discus and shot put throwers into running the Fat Man. We usually won the Fat Man, not that it counted for anything, since we would lose to the 2 normal 4x100 teams. One meet, we were running the race, the other team's normal relay dropped their baton at the hand off where I was. Our Fat Man that day ended up out running our own team's normal relay, and since the other team had trouble with the baton, we won the race. Just about our entire track team busted up laughing. The coach was not immediately outwardly amused. The normal 4x100 relay had to do LOTS of running that next week. After we lost to the normal relay the next week, the coach started joking with us about it, I think he must have been amused right off the bat, but he had to be mad at the runners for a while...

Also, a little story about those 2 football player/discus throwers. When I was a freshman, one day near the start of the school year, I was walking near the back of the school towards the front with my Baritone Sax case, and these 2 guys were running down the hall towards me. For some reason I don't fully understand, I made a move toward them with the case, I think to juke them out. The one guy flinched out of the way, they both got tangled up together and fell on the floor. Since they were running, they actually went sprawling all over the place. When I saw what I did, I got scared and took off running. (They had a foot and 50 pounds on me.) They chased me to the front of the school, but I had a head start, even with the Sax, and I had booked out the front doors. By the time they got to the front doors, I was at the little parking lot at the street hiding behind a car. They came out, looked around, didn't see me, and went back in. When the coast was clear, I went home. These guys never brought the thing up after I was on the track team the next year, they likely had long forgotten, and I wasn't brave enough to say a word about it...