Coach John Burkett

Running is like walking. We all think we know how to do it because we’ve pretty much done it all our lives. You parents hoist you up, give you a nudge, and off you go. No instructions necessary. Running, if not altogether instinctual, is at least learned by example from watching others. I mean, what’s to learn, right?
I see a lot of runners in the park, including some pretty hard-core types that are there every day, mile after mile. I see lopers. I see bouncers. I see draggers. I see lurchers. I see stumblers, but unfortunately, I see very few people who really know how to run.

I grew up in a small farm town in rural Illinois. Illinois isn’t just a big basketball state. It’s also well known for cross-country running at the high school and college level. I am long legged with a spare build, not enough upper body strength to be much of a force on the basketball court, but it just so happens bone thin, long legged, spare build is just what the doctor ordered when it comes to distance running. Running, like just about any other farm kid, was just about the most natural thing I did. In school, I could either get off the bus at the end of the farm block when the Watkins kids got dropped off – about ¾ of a mile from my house – or ride the bus for an extra 45 minutes and be the last kid let off at my own driveway. I often rode my bike down to the Watkins’ house, and thought that it couldn’t be that much of a walk. I wasn’t really as concerned about the distance as I was the time. I figured it ought to at least cut off a few minutes from the circuitous bus route. And it did, but I soon discovered that if I ran it, I could really chop off some time. Like 20 minutes. Carrying schoolbooks, I remember running this distance and getting home neither winded nor sweating. Ah, youth.

One fall day we had a school wide physical fitness run scheduled for all boys of all grades. I was a freshman that year. We were to run part of the school’s cross country course which wound around behind the school, back behind the Lion’s club pavilion, back up around the parking lot, baseball diamond, and then to the rear of the gym, about a mile and a half. I don’t think I much even really knew what cross country was, much less what they did or who they were. I knew the junior and senior track guys, and had some idea that some of them ran cross country in the fall, although what that meant was foreign to me. I don’t remember much about the run except for two things. I came in third, behind the two top varsity runners, and the cross country coach, who’d never spoken to me before, barely let me alone long enough to take a shower and change. Very soon I was being sneaked into varsity meets and placing well.

We moved when I was a junior to a fairly large city with a much larger high school. I’d been touted as something of a basketball player (which never really played out) but kind of made it in under the radar as a cross country runner. One of the reasons for this was that the little school I ran for prior to that couldn’t begin to compete – either individually or as a team – with larger school. The cross country coach was a short, squat man with a growling voice and a constant grimace on his face. I’m pretty sure that in the 2 years that I knew John Burkett I never saw him smile. I suppose that everyone has a teacher, or coach, or minister; someone who impacted them and “changed their life” in some way. John Burkett was that man for me. I hated him. Or feared him, or both, maybe. I know the sense of fear was purposeful (he was actually kind of a big teddy bear of a man, now that I look back on these days). He had to keep us on edge. On meet days we met at his house at 6 am. No running. It was a day of total rest. His wife brought out plates of scrambled eggs and steaks. I’m not so sure it was even legal for us to go to his house under Illinois High School Athletic regs, but we did, and we ate well. Then no more food all day. Woe betides you if you got caught with a Twinkie. Then, by 4 pm we were well fed, digested, rested, and ready to run. He also had us on a program of these packets of vitamins (this was years before any sort of vitamin craze). We took two packets a day. Each packet had twelve tabs, each one about a half inch long. Our pee was bright orange. And in the summer (this much I’m pretty sure is completely outside of the ISHAA regs) we had TWO A DAY practices. We met on a golf course off campus, across town. Each morning, 5 to 7 miles. Each afternoon, 7 to 10. When I was a junior in high school, I was 6’3” tall and weighed something just a bit more than 140 pounds. I could hold my breath for nearly 3 minutes. My resting pulse rate, (diligently recorded per Coach Burkett, three times a day) just before dropping off to sleep at night was just over 40 beats per minute. I could hear the powerful thump in my chest if it was quiet enough.

And I could run. Oh, how we could run. At the time (if memory serves) the regulation distance for cross country was 3.25 miles. This was not run on a track, either, but very often over hill and dale on golf courses, country clubs, forest preserves. The best time I remember posting was just over 15 minutes. Today I run 5 miles a day in 45 minutes.

The first thing that coach Burkett did with us was teach us to run. Some of us had already met with some success and were just a little dismissive of this squat little man presuming to tell us how to run. And he never did run by example, either. But he talked. Or shouted. A fiddle maker friend of mine tells me that Ishtaak Perlman’s violin instructor never touches a fiddle, pointing and gesturing instead with a cane. Burkett got us to look at how we ran from the outside. To notice what our legs were doing. Our arms, our posture. Almost the first thing he said to me when he saw me run was a pretty typical remark from him: “You could be a pretty good runner if you’d learn how to use your legs.” And then walked away, purposely leaving me to hang on the words.

I watch these scufflers and draggers, bouncers and flouncers, bumpers and plodders in the park and I think of John Burkett. I can hear his words. “Pick your feet up! Your shoes shouldn’t make any noise when you run! Heel, toe. Heel, toe, Heel toe!” But mostly what people don’t do is the simple thing that he taught us; use the legs that you have. We assume that because we learned to run somehow that we know the only way – perhaps the optimal way – that our body is capable of doing this. I know for a fact that he got me to increase each on of my strides by nearly a foot. He got me to know where my head was. Your head should be on a string. Straight, not bouncing up and down. Torso upright, shoulders back. Arms serve a purpose – they are for balance. You are not running if both your feet aren’t off the ground at the same time. You are walking with style or spirit or something, but you aren’t running.

My junior year we went to an invitational meet that included the small conference that I had come out of. I would be running against some of my old competitors from my freshman and sophomore years. I can even name some of these guys, they had been such nemeses of mine then. Of all the runners in that conference in that meet that day, the nearest runner to my time was over a minute behind me. And I didn’t win the meet. I don’t remember where I placed, but I remember standing with my coach, nearly fully recovered, watching these runners coming in panting and wheezing. And I remember the tiny half smile that coach Burkett gave me as he turned to walk away.

Coach Burkett was probably 50 then, in 1970. He may still be alive, but judging by his beer gut and lifestyle back then, I’d be surprised. He taught me something else, too. Something that I didn’t know I’d even learned until well into adult hood. How to go through pain. When you think you’re done, you still have about 20 percent left. I can hear him say it. You always have more.

Thank you, coach.


Later.