Confessions of a non-athlete
I am a non-athlete cursed to grow up in a neighborhood of good if not great athletes. When people ask me if I played football I tell them I was cursed with the four “eses”. I was too slow, too short, too sorry and too scared. I was a horrible basketball player. I couldn’t jump, couldn’t shoot, couldn’t defend and couldn’t dribble. Other than that I was great. When we played pickup games, I wouldn’t even be picked. “We’ll play three on four.” In football I was so slow that they wouldn’t even tell me to go long. My brother, although he never played organized sports was a decent half-miler. The boys I grew up with included an all state football player, an all state catcher, two basketball brothers who got HBCU scholarships and two track stars one who was the only person to beat “Bullet Bob” Hayes in a 100 yard dash in college. I wasn’t even the smartest in the bunch. OK my brother was a genius but the two basketball players became engineers, the catcher got a doctor of divinity from Harvard and another got a Phd in mathematics. Part of my problem was I was the youngest of the bunch by a couple of years but that was only an excuse. I used to say that at least my feet were athletic.
So I go to the University of Georgia where we were required to take two years of sports. I decided to take ones that we didn’t play where I grew up like golf, tennis and volleyball (white folks sports). I also played intramural softball and flag football. Lo and behold! I found out that I was pretty good at golf and tennis. Prior to my arrival in Athens, golf was taught at the Athens country club where the golf team also practiced and hosted matches. No more. They took one look at me and we got banished to the intramural practice fields. The golf team had to find another club and the university was forced to build its own course. It is gorgeous! When the golf coach gave me a tour some years later he remarked that the course should be named the Harold A. Black Memorial course. Well I don’t know about the memorial part. I also discovered that I was not so terrible an athlete after all – I just was terrible compared to the kids in the neighborhood. I still was lousy at basketball but I turned out to be an above average baseball player and the quarterback on our flag football team. My friends joked that I was the first black quarterback in the SEC. I guess I needed some white neighbors in my all-black neighborhood. I can’t sing or dance either.
When I went to graduate school at Ohio State I kept playing golf about once a week and ended up being a bogey golfer. I had to stop while I was writing my dissertation and years later had to stop for good because of a bad back. For the last couple of years in graduate school all time was devoted to the dissertation. I completed it in the year I spent at the University of Konstanz am Bodensee and when I went to Florida as an assistant professor of economics I weighted 235 pounds (and have pictures to prove it). Working hard to get tenure and raising a young family didn’t lend itself to losing weight. However, the stress was too great for our marriage and we got divorced (I got custody of my son). I moved into an apartment where the great marathoner Frank Shorter and his wife lived. Shorter would go out in the mornings on a leisurely 20 mile run accompanied by his wife on her bicycle. Shorter probably weighed 140 pounds and I asked him how could I best lose weight. He told me to start walking, then jogging a bit before running. I did that and eventually worked my way up to 10Ks, half marathons and full marathons. When I came to UT in 1987 I weighed 165 pounds. I used to go to the gym, run 5-10 miles and still go teach my 8 o’clock class. I ran 6 days a week.
When I lived in Washington, I ran with the DC Roadrunners. I may have been the slowest of the bunch and in my first marathon I got passed at mile 22 by a race walker. I became a 9 minute a mile runner but my best marathon time was 4 hours and 15 minutes. I wanted to break 4 hours to qualify for Boston and all I had to do was to shave off those pesky fifteen minutes and average 9 minutes and 9 seconds per mile over the 26.2. Piece of cake! So I trained with a professor in the law school at UNC who was a 3 hour 30 minute marathoner. We ran sprints some days and did 20 milers on the weekend running around the Chapel Hill city limits. Confident I could break 4 hours we then ran the Norfolk Beach marathon choosing one that was flat. We went through the 20 mile mark comfortably under 9 minutes a mile. The next thing I remember was waking up in a tent with an IV in my arm. The good Lord had sent me a message and I never ran another marathon sticking to halfs and 10Ks.
About 10 years ago my knees gave out. They are arthritic and I have to get steroid injections to keep the pain and discomfort at bay. I now walk on the treadmill early each day without fail. When the injections start to be ineffective and I still have to wait another month for another shot and walking up and down stairs even one at a time is painful. But I can still walk on the treadmill without discomfort. Afterwards, I can go up and down the stairs for an hour or so without pain and then its back to hobbling up and down like the old man that I am.
There are not many things I regret, but not being able to run early in the morning is one of them.
haroldblackphd.com 