Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [111]
“Set the watch like I told you and call out the times whenever I pass you. And speak up. You have to holler so I can hear you.”
I dropped into starting position, thinking, Well, here goes nothing. I looked down the long straightaway. Time to prove I could to it. I gazed at Cynthia, and when she yelled “Go!” I sprang forward. For a moment my mind was empty, at peace, as my body automatically remembered what to do. I took the first turn and settled in for the long haul. I’d trained for six weeks in heavy tennis shoes, running and hiking in Griffith Park, and taken whirlpool treatments and had my legs massaged. The preparation seemed to be working. My shoes seemed light, and I felt clean in the brisk fall air. Pretty stride, indeed. I stretched out, reaching for the extra inch that meant a better time. But when I passed Cynthia after the first lap, I heard her yell out, “Sixty-eight!”
Sixty-eight? Obviously she’d read the watch wrong. I’d always finished the first quarter faster than that. I pushed harder on the second lap, imagining the stopwatch relentlessly ticking. Then a sudden tug at my chest and a tightening in the back of my legs told me I’d overdone it. I eased up a bit and let my momentum carry me, but my focus had shattered. I thought suddenly of the guard at Naoetsu who knocked me off the plank with a hundred pounds of coal on my back.
“Two-seventeen!” Cynthia called out.
A second slower than my first lap. She must be wrong. I panicked. What if I couldn’t run anymore? What if whatever I had was no longer there? I forgot about pacing and stride and just started sprinting like I had in college when the chips were down.
Immediately a sharp pain tore through my calf and ankle. Too bad, I thought, and pushed ahead. Maybe it just needs a good stretching. Either way, I’ll find out. I ignored the pain and ran another lap, then went all out in the final quarter. I didn’t even hear Cynthia mark the time. I just knew that no matter how bad the pain, I had to keep going.
I should have known better. My leg tightened and throbbed, and I closed my eyes against the agony. As I rounded the final turn I knew my quest was hopeless. I had no kick, no spring, nothing.
I crossed the finish line and collapsed on the grass. Cynthia rushed to my side. “Your time was four twenty-eight,” she said, upbeat. “Pretty good.” I could see in her eyes that she knew better.
I rolled over and sat up. A bad ankle, a sprained knee, a ripped muscle that never healed. All I could do now was give up my dream. Running had been my whole life, and now it was gone. Chalk up another victory for the Japanese. I dropped my head on my folded arms. “It’s all right, honey,” I said. “Just help me over to the car.”
I left the stadium as a runner for the last time, leaning on the shoulder of a 110-pound woman, with no cheers ringing from the stands and only a few curious children watching.
HUMILIATION FOLLOWED MY panic. Because I’d bragged so often in speeches, radio broadcasts, and newspaper articles that my new running career had just begun, I had too much to retract or ignore. Would my fast-moving friends, always ready for a laugh at someone else’s expense, consider me a big joke? Or, even worse, would they smother me with compassionate inquiries and reassuring platitudes? I didn’t really want to find out, and I avoided the parties and functions at which I’d have to admit failure.
When my depression finally dissolved, a fearsome rage replaced it. The nightmares, the headaches, a well-planned career stolen from me. What more could the Japanese have done? “God,” I said aloud, staring out the window of my apartment one afternoon when Cynthia was away, “what more will you let them do to me? What more will you do to me?”
I waited for an answer, but none came. Why should it? This was the first time God had crossed my mind in over a year, and again only in my moment of absolute hopelessness. I’d done the same on