December 2025 Alumni Update

Bison,

December was still, a quiet interlude between seasons. The campus felt muted by the cold, softening all sounds, slowing all movements, the walk from Davis Gym up to the UC for dinner taking a little longer, buffeted by the wind. Cross country had ended, a memory now. Indoor track was just beginning, with maybe a meet before winter break, but with the heart of competition starting after, in January. Our ritual was the same, morning workouts, afternoon workouts. But without meets, the time from Thanksgiving to the break was calmer, a stepping back from our lives as athletes and students to be what everyone else on campus was--just students. Our thoughts turned to finals--papers to write, exams to take--which, yes, were stressful, but at least unaccompanied by the stress of meets. And finals had endpoints--papers written, exams taken. Soon we'd be going home, where closure would settle in like snow falling in a forest at night, courses over, meets over. Looking back, half a century later in these days of endless responsibilities, the tranquil closure of December seems like a dream.

The distance runners spent most of our time on the roads, as we did in the fall, as we'd do in the spring. We ran the same loops, Old Farmer's and Prison, Appalachia and Pheasant Ridge, Crossroads and Ledge. Weather was the only difference, the wind especially, how we seemed to be running into it no matter our direction. Sometimes the weather would turn on us. I remember a squall one afternoon on an Old Farmer's, the road suddenly covered with snow, two miles left in the ten mile run. One of us lost a contact lens. We began searching for it on the road, on our hands and knees in the midnight blue twilight, sifting the snow with our fingers. We actually expected to find it, a clear slice of plastic, smaller than a dime, resembling a shard of ice, amid shards of ice. It was December, after all. The run could wait. There was time now, time to think in other ways, time to live in other ways. We found the lens, amazingly enough. As we made our way back to campus, snow falling silently from the darkening sky, I thought about wonders, about how they can happen, if we take the time to let them happen.

We were on the boards when we weren't on the roads, sharing the track with the sprinters and hurdlers, the quarter-milers and half-milers. The jumpers, vaulters, and throwers were in Davis Gym, impossibly practicing their starts and steps on the warped amber floor of the ancient basketball court, a makeshift track. Sometimes Coach would give the word at the start of an afternoon workout. A storm was coming that evening. The shovels were in his office. We had to shovel the snow off the boards by morning, so we could practice on them in the afternoon. No matter how deep the snow, we had to clear it early enough so the sunlight would melt the remaining ice. And so there we were, after a morning class, shoveling snow instead of doing what we'd normally be doing, checking our mail in the UC, heading upstairs for lunch. The irony was as inescapable as the frostbite--exhaust myself shoveling the boards, so I can exhaust myself running the boards. Still, I didn't really mind. The change in ritual was calming, quietly so, even with the exhaustion. It reminded me of snow days in elementary school, when I'd hear on the radio a little after dawn that school was cancelled for the day because of a blizzard, and a very different day was ahead of me, a day of snowmen and sledding rather than spelling and arithmetic, a day at home. It was December, after all.

--Bob