A deflating experience

Thanks to avid blog follower and loyal Marist Running alum Marty McGowan of Staten Island for sharing this truly classic story from his time as a team captain back in the early 1970s. He responded to me via e-mail about my maturity-challenged post of yesterday ...

This is good stuff, from Marty:

Flashback. Late August, early September 1972. New Cross Country Coach Rich Stevens give out notebooks to all of us. Inside the notebooks are mimeographed pages of all the workouts we'll be doing during X-C season.

First phase, over distance (nothing has changed that much, right?). The second or third workout was running up Route 9 to Vanderbilt's place and back, about 10 miles.
Back then you could do this kind of workout running on Route 9's shoulder and not get clobbered.

Anyway, off we go up Route 9. About 4 miles in, somewhere near the drive in, Rich is parked by the side of the road making sure we're doing the workout. Lots of grumbling on our part. I remind everyone that he's still thinking like a high school coach. We pass him and off he goes in the car back to campus.

Now, I'm a college senior and I'm co-captain. After we returned to campus, I noticed Rich's car parked outside the old gym. I let the air out of all four of his cars tires. Anyway, he never checked on us on an off campus distance workout again. Real mature on my part.

Note: I checked with Marty on including this on the blog, and he was OK with it, reasoning that the statute of limitations on such behavior has probably expired. I would agree.