Hal Higdon: On The Run

HITTING HADRIAN'S WALL

Getting Priorities Straight at the World Veterans Championships

FROM THE ROMAN ARMY MUSEUM, the three of us hiked up the hill and past a quarry used 2,000 years ago to extract stones for the wall we had come to see. It was a Thursday afternoon, an off day at the XIII WAVA World Veterans Athletics Championships in Gateshead, England. Delegates to the World Association of Veteran Athletes were meeting all day to elect officers, conduct business and determine the site of future championships, but my wife Rose and I had decided to skip all that and visit Hadrian's Wall.

When I stopped by the meeting and mentioned our destination to Jerry Wojcik, Senior Editor for National Masters News, he nearly jumped from his seat in his eagerness to join us. "I'd rather spend the day sightseeing than be stuck in this meeting all day," Jerry confessed as we climbed in a taxicab heading out of town.

I felt the same way, although there was some risk involved, both for Jerry and I. We were competing the following day: he in the weight pentathlon, me in the semifinals of the 1500 meters. For peak performance, we probably should have skipped both the meeting and the sightseeing and lounged around the hotel with our feet propped up contemplating our events.

But one needs to get one's priorities in order.

Sightseeing Op

At previous WAVA meets, my main priority often has been to compete--and to compete well, perhaps to win. On four occasions, I've won gold medals, earning silver and bronze medals five times. On other occasions, I've traveled to the meet more interested in participation than competition. The WAVA championships offer an opportunity every second year to sightsee in some exotic location and renew acquaintanceships with old (growing older) friends.

Jerry was not (yet) one of those friends. Oh sure, I knew his name and face from the top of his column "The Weight Room" in this publication, but we had never met before, or had met only briefly. Nevertheless, our friendship was quickly ignited as we stepped from the taxicab and caught a train that would take us to the town of Hexham, where we would catch a bus to Hadrian's Wall. Soon our discussions had passed beyond distance running, weight throwing and WAVA politics, allowing us to move to other subjects, most of them so trivial I've already forgotten most of what we said.

More than likely, I gave Jerry and Rose a preview of what we were about to see that day: Hadrian's Wall. Four decades earlier, while I was attending graduate school at the University of Chicago, I learned that a visiting British professor would be teaching a class in Roman History. The course would do nothing to advance me toward my degree, but the subject interested me, so I signed up. My term paper that year was on Emperor Trajan who by 88 AD had pushed the Roman Empire as far as it would get in Northwestern Europe, the 80-mile wide stretch of rocky ground that separates England from Scotland.

The Scots were ferocious warriors, plus it was obvious to Trajan and his generals that the mountainous country to the north would be easy to defend and costly to conquer. Trajan stopped, and his successor as Emperor, Hadrian, built the wall that now bears his name in 122 AD. For several hundred years, the Romans maintained their claim to most of the land around the Mediterranean between England and Persia, creating a pax romana, the longest period of peace that Europe has had. That is, it was peaceful in the interior around Rome, though battles raged on the fringes, such as at Hadrian's Wall. Eventually, Rome retreated from the land where WAVA would conduct its championships, but fragments of its once great civilization remained, including the wall.

Hazaerdous Footing

The hill we climbed was steep, but the turf was smooth, the only hazard being the sheep turds that forced us to look down as much as up. Finally at the top, we came across the remnants of the wall, which when constructed by Hadrian was two meters across at the base, a half dozen meters high and with defense towers every Roman mile and mini-towers every third-of-a-mile between.

Only the base of the wall now remains, but it was impressive to see it snaking across the countryside along the crest of a ridge. In several spots within our view, the wall overlooked steep cliffs. The Romans certainly had chosen as site for their wall an eminently defensible position, but sooner or later offense won the day. The Romans abandoned England around 400 AD. Today they are remembered only through snippets of sound in what became Shakespeare's language along with the piles of stone they left behind. That the wall remains at all is remarkable, since local farmers used many of its stones to build houses and walls. Hadrian's Wall is now maintained as a World Heritage Site, memorable for having been the best known frontier of the entire Roman Empire.

We might have spent days thoroughly exploring the area. When the bus appeared several hours later heading back to Hexham, we boarded it and returned to the realities of World Veterans competition. I saw Jerry at the track the next morning competing in the weight pentathlon. "I haven't thrown this poorly in years," he complained. "I left my legs at Hadrian's Wall." He had a smile on his face when he said it, however. Running in a semifinal heat of the 1,500 meters soon after, I too felt the pains of too much hiking through the countryside. My hamstring muscles felt like they had been struck by the lance of a Roman legionnaire. I ran faster than my best for the year, but failed to advance. Two days later, hamstrings still stiff, I scratched from the steeplechase rather than risk an injury. More to blame than Hadrian, however, was a lackadaisical attitude going into the WAVA meet that caused me to train less hard than I might have were winning my main goal.

But goals change, and two years from now I'll cross into a new age group less than a month before the XIV WAVA World Veterans Athletics Championships in Brisbane, Australia. That may motivate me to get serious again about my training to see if I can return from Down Under with a medal hanging around my neck. If not, there's plenty of sightseeing available in Australia, even if the Romans never got that far.

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Hal Higdon is Senior Writer for Runner's World magazine. His best-selling Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide has just been reprinted.

Copyright © 1999 by Hal Higdon. All rights reserved.

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