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TOGETHER: The team, including, center, Coach Ogilvie, and Wisner, right, huddle at the 2017 ACC Cross Country Championships in Louisville.
Just keep moving
T
Running with the track and field team suddenly became a different story.
he runners wear black and blue on an overcast day. They stretch with motions balletic and graceful. It seems so effortless and fluid, the way they move. Two of us stand out: director of track and field and head men’s coach NORM OGILVIE, cool and easy in his gray business suit, and me. I’m in running shoes, sure, but yellow shorts and an orange shirt—thankfully not any rivals’ colors. Oh, and I’m twice the age of the first-year athletes. My confidence is high. I’m a runner, yet I’m here as a writer. The guys around me—the men’s track team— they’re at Duke to run. All I have to do is keep up during
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their “jog” through Duke Forest. Their jogging pace (about a seven-minute mile) is my fastest, which I’ve only achieved once during a timed 5K. So all I have to do is maintain my top speed for as many miles as I can alongside Duke’s fastest distance runners. And all while talking. Maybe my confidence is too high. One Coach Norm pep talk later and a mass of twenty-odd runners sweeps away from the track, carried along broad pavement to the Cameron Boulevard light like snowmelt seeking sea level. There we pause, waiting for the light to change and sparking with potential energy. Don’t walk turns to walk and we surge across, bold en masse and
