April 2026 Alumni Update

Bison,

The weather of spring in the first weeks of outdoor track was austere, as if gray was the only color. The wind came at us relentlessly, unapologetically, arrogantly, at the plateau of Pheasant Ridge overlooking the valley, on the long stretch of Furnace Road on an Old Farmer's, at the crest of Appalachia. It'd swirl around the stadium in twisters, carrying bits of cinder from the track, grazing our faces. It whipped us no matter which way we ran.

The weather made for willfulness. At our first major outdoor meet of the year, Colonial Relays, the weather was almost always strikingly different, enough to make me feel as if we were betraying that willfulness. It all felt too easy. As we drove south to Williamsburg, we felt the intensifying warmth of Virginia in April. We shed our gray sweats to run shirtless. We took our first steps of the season on a real outdoor track, tartan, on it for a week before the meet to train. In one workout, Coach put the distance runners through their routine quarters in 70, a pace we knew like our names. We ran the first one at what we thought was that pace. As we finished, he yelled 65, leaving us to believe his watch was broken. It wasn't. We'd run the same distance we'd always run, with the same effort, but in a time reflecting the track and the weather, 70 on Bucknell's cinder in the chilly, blustery spring of Pennsylvania the equivalent of 65 on William & Mary's tartan in the warm, languid spring of Virginia. The realization we'd been running that fast on our cinder all along felt like a slant of light piercing the gray.

But only for a moment. As said, we went to Colonial Relays a week before the meet to train. Coach brought to that training the paradigm of bonding through hardship that was a hallmark of his philosophy of building a team. While Williamsburg in April felt tropical, the trip was as far from spring break as imaginable, with double workouts even more intensive than those we did the rest of the year, and with a lifestyle to match. On one trip, Coach apparently had decided that staying in a plush hotel in Williamsburg for the week was a little too privileged for this team. So he arranged to have us stay for a few days in a military barracks at Marine Corps Base Quantico. The barracks was the size of Gerhard Fieldhouse, not with an indoor track, but with a dozen rows of metal bunk beds, ten bunk beds to a row. Its bathroom made the public showers at Van Cortlandt Park we risked our lives in after running the IC4A's in cross country look like the wellness spa at the Waldorf Astoria. The base did have an outdoor track. Marines ran on it in combat boots, carrying rifles while chanting cadenced responses to their drill sergeants. But the track wasn't tartan, or even cinder. It was cement, as springy as a sidewalk. Run a quarter on it, and every muscle, joint, tendon, and ligament from head to toe screamed in pain. "C'mon, Frank, get this one under 60," Coach told Frank Carroll '75 at one point in a workout, angry over the slow quarters of his milers, and uninterested in orthopedic crises.

The later weeks of spring eventually prevailed, winter yielding, as it always does. The season soon radiated the grace of Bucknell, a gentler place of doors held open, of knowing your name, of taking you at your word. I'm still not sure why the change in weather made for the change in culture. Perhaps it was the clarity of the later season, the simplicity, how it displaced the obscurity and complexity of winter, wondrously serene as those snowy, candlelit nights were. Perhaps it was the promise of the later season, the freshness, how it unveiled vistas of endless possibility, freed from the weighted realities of winter; expressive of what was to come; a future sung by the sudden burst of cherry blossoms in the quad on a sunlit morning, insisting life anew. Our runs would feel lighter then, the way life felt, all of it ahead of us, in its innocence, in its hopefulness.

But in those early weeks of spring, the clarity and simplicity of the weather were expressive of austerity; of asceticism rather than luxury; of what we didn't have rather than what we had; of hardness borne of hardship; of willfulness--of the grittiness of windswept cinder rather than the sleekness of sunbaked tartan; of 70's that were 65's; of a Marine Corps barracks with steel bunk beds; of a cement track that refused to give.

Willfulness borne of weather.

--Robert Braile