NOTES ON CAMP

WE’RE JUST A COUPLE OF KIDS, AND SOMEBODY LET US HOST A SUMMER CAMP FOR OTHER KIDS. 

OKAY FINE. I’m 23. I’m old enough to supervise your kids. I can drive safely. I’ll feed them balanced meals. I babysat a few times in high school. Yeah, yeah. Check, check. Nobody’s going to die. 

What we weren’t as sure about was whether we’d be able to teach them anything useful. We’re not dumb or unconfident in our skills. We’d just never done anything like this before. Seventeen high school runners flew across the country because they were promised that they’d be taught media skills: how to improve their writing, take a better photo, structure a good YouTube video. 

We always joked that it could be the Fyre Festival of summer camps—entirely disastrous, a huge scam, completely humiliating. Of course that’s not what happened. It was the coolest thing we’ve ever done. 

WE HADN’T EVEN ARRIVED TO CAMP for the first time yet, and the kids in my car spotted Matthew Centrowitz in a gas station parking lot across the street. They made me stop so they could take a photo with him. I don’t think they even knew each others’ names yet.

WHEN THEY FIRST GOT TO EUGENE, we took the kids to the Olympic Trials. When I was their age I didn’t know who Steve Prefontaine was. Never heard of David Rudisha. I don’t think I knew a single pro runner. If somebody had taken me to a serious track meet like the Trials, maybe I would have.

MAX BOWYER WAS THE FIRST CAMPER to arrive to Eugene, so he had to hang out in our living room with Cooper while we waited for the other flights. “He’s right there. I mean, Cooper Teare is like right there. He’s just like he is in the videos.”

MOST OF THE CAMPERS were interested in photography and videography, but three of them were writers. Teaching writing is difficult, and I wasn’t exactly sure where to begin, so we just started doing writing exercises. Write about a track meet, but you can’t mention the actual competition. Write what you can remember about your middle school cafeteria. Write about your camp crush. We focused on writing a few good sentences, nothing more. Anything more than a sentence gets too complicated. We’d pass our notebooks one to the left and then pick out the worst sentence on the page and announce to the group why it sucks. Part of learning to write is learning to detach, to shed your ego. Your words on paper simultaneously are and aren’t an extension of you. If the words are good, be proud. If they’re shit, who cares. And a lot of them were shit. But a week later, they were better.

WE WERE MORE INTERESTED in inviting creative kids to camp than fast kids, and it showed right away. On the first day of camp some of the campers already wanted to start skipping runs to take photos, and of course we let them.

ON THE FINAL DAY OF THE OLYMPIC TRIALS, we barbecued lunch a few blocks from Hayward Field. (Shoutout to Johnny’s Track Meat. It ain’t a meet without meat.) It was a slow afternoon, hot, sunny. We sat in shade of the trees, eating Doritos, minding our business. All was calm. And then the FBI showed up. One of the kids flew his drone over Hayward Field, and I guess that’s a felony or something. I felt terrible—not because we’d broken a rule but because the lady from the FBI was sternly moralizing over our camper in the street in front of everybody. I knew he was going to feel so guilty and embarrassed. Thank god he didn’t go to jail for that. If he’s guilty of a real crime, it’s that he invented the worst gimmick mile I’ve ever seen: the Wendy’s 4 for 4 blue jeans basketball mile. What kind of a sicko thinks of that?  

FOR SOME REASON we decided to begin the run at 1 p.m. on the hottest day of summer. We were on an unshaded red dirt road in Southern Oregon near Crater Lake, and almost everybody decided to run just a couple miles. Charlie Townes wanted to run eight. He said this is what it was going to take if he wanted to make his team’s top seven: doing what other people were unwilling to do. I thought his cause was noble, so I tagged along, just the two of us, and we suffered the whole way. It wasn’t long into the run that I knew his decision was masochistic, but I was glad I went with him because I didn’t want to be liable if he didn’t make it back—passed out in a ditch, vultures circling overhead. Charlie had just finished reading Once a Runner, and when it got really tough we talked about Quenton Cassidy. Quenton Cassidy surely wouldn’t let himself suffer. And then, even if just for a few miles, we were Quenton Cassidy, and then the run was over, and then we went home, and neither of us will ever forget what happened.

WE WERE ALL ON THE DOCK at Diamond Lake since you can’t swim in Crater Lake, and it felt like a caricature of a summer camp: hot day, cold water, the boys trying to throw the girls in the water.

KRISSY GEAR WAS DISSATISFIED with her fifth place finish at NCAAs in the 1500 a few weeks before camp, so she gave her trophy to one of our campers, and he slept with it every night.

THE MOUNT TOM HOUSE IS BIG but still not quite big enough for all of us, so the counselors had to sleep on the couches in the second living room. Every night I’d barrel into that room, beat and tired from driving the kids to Crater Lake or talking to the FBI or whatever, and I’d snuggle up in my little makeshift floor bed by the fireplace, and the photo kids would just keep sitting on the couch editing their photos. I’d yawn cartoonishly. Brush my teeth in the living room instead of the bathroom. Change into pajama pants. I did everything but tell them explicitly that it’s time to go to bed, and they just could not take the hint. They’d edit photos all night if I didn’t intervene. Finally, with authority, “Get out of my bedroom boys. Your photos will still be there in the morning.”

WE COULD ONLY GET TICKETS for one day of the Olympic Trials, so we watched a lot of the meet on TV. An entire summer camp crowded into a living room to watch Cole Hocker. An entire summer camp yelling for him, miles outside of town. An entire summer camp proud.

THE HARDEST I’VE LAUGHED in such a long time was writing superlatives for the campers the night before camp ended. The four counselors waited until the kids had all gone to bed, and we sat out on the grass and just laughed our asses off for hours. Most likely to accidentally go viral. Most likely to lose to Ben Crawford in a mile. Most likely to star in a shitty Disney Channel original show. Of course they all came from a place of affection. It’s such a funny and bizarre thing to bring 17 teenagers who’d never met before to the same place, and writing the superlatives was our way of processing it all.  

I DON’T THINK ANYBODY thinks we made this happen on our own. It was mostly Johnny Truax. He helped us understand that we can do anything we want if we have vision. He introduced us to the right people. He also makes the best burgers and has a beautiful family and the world would be a better place if everybody were just a little bit more like him.

I WAS 17 AND IMPRESSIONABLE and had just arrived at a running camp in a different state where I didn’t know anybody. It was the summer before I first went to college. I wasn’t very sure of who I was, and at the time I was preoccupied with cultivating a vibe for myself, a style of my own. So I started wearing flannels because a girl I liked there wore flannels, and I started drinking coffee because the cool older guys who ran a bunch of miles did. I bought the same Toms sneakers as one of the counselors. I started shaving my legs because he did. Kyle Merber was one of the speakers, and I was so charmed by his admission that the only year he didn’t PR at Columbia is when he’d fallen in love and then fallen out of love, and I thought about how maybe one day I’d fall in love and then fall out of love and run fast and then not run fast and I liked how I had no idea what might happen to me. I started running just because I was good at it, but running camp was when I first loved running, and part of the reason I was so excited to start a running camp of our own is because I knew the power it held for me, and I loved the possibility of it meaning something similar for kids we hadn’t met yet.

CARTER CHRISTMAN WAS A HUGE TRACK FAN in high school but didn’t really have an outlet to express it. He says, “I’d rewatch historic races online again and again, scroll through message boards, study the latest Diamond League entries. I was fully invested. But it was hard to find other people who shared the obsession.” Carter would have his dad take him to big track meets like the U.S. Championships or the Pre Classic and he’d get his photo taken with Galen Rupp and he’d make friends in the stands, but he had to do that all on his own. There was no big summer camp. No way to bring him to the same place as 16 other kids with the same longing as him.

SUMMER CAMP IS THE WEIRDEST THING EVER because you meet a bunch of strangers, and then a week later you feel like you’ve known them your whole life, and then you’re really sad to go home, but you do it anyway.