“I don’t know about the hardest workout I ever did, but of all our weekday workouts at Stanford during cross country season – and I’m taking us way, way back to the late Sixties now -- Thursday was my favorite, because they were the most focused, and the most competitive. Fifteen or twenty of us would trot out to the soccer fields, psyched up for our toughest intervals of the week: six or eight one-thousand-yard reps. Those Thousands opened you up, seared your lungs, burned your thighs, tore up your guts – made you hurt bad! I was just a Freshman, so on the first few reps I would do my best to hang on just behind the Varsity lead pack until the half-mile mark, when I would try to move up, hoping not to twist an ankle on the Eucalyptus berries scattered over those final hundred yards of sideline rocks and dirt… Thursdays were the one day of the week when guys heaved on a regular basis. Between the later reps, there would usually be at least one of us leaning against a Eucalyptus tree dry-heaving his guts out, having already emptied his stomach after the rep before. And yet the poor guy would without fail re-join his team at the starting line, looking slightly green around the gills but more-or-less ready for another rep. (Thursdays: good day for an early lunch.) Nerves caused Jim Plunkett to toss his cookies in a bucket before his first game in the Stadium, but I never threw up from running in my life – not once. The stories of Jim Ryun vomiting at every other workout made me wonder why he bothered working out… The goal of our Thousands wasn’t to make you blow your lunch, or run on fumes, either. Our Coach Marshall Clark had a constant refrain: “Take it easy… Don’t force it… Stay within yourself… Run smart… This isn’t race day…” Coach let us be enthusiastic sometimes, too, but otherwise he was there to ground us, which is part of what any good distance coach should do. Coach Clark kept us healthy and built us into a team by nurturing what was inside us already: a passion for training and competition and a hunger to improve. Sometimes he did this by pushing us; sometimes by holding us back… And yet those final Thursday Thousands had an element of savagery, as the efficiencies that had kept us at or near our usual pace were thrown out the window. I was convinced some of the upperclassmen were going all-out, or nearly so, as it was all I could do to stay near enough to eat their dust… Some Thursday workouts left me so jelly-legged I didn’t even have the energy to jog back to my dorm and I had to walk back, eat a huge dinner, take a long hot shower, read a little of The Odyssey, and drift off to dreamland...” (Adapted from JOCK: a memoir of the counterculture, to be published soon.)