Just Keep Moving

Running with the track and field team suddenly became a different story.

By Corbie Hill

The 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 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 into the forest. The team rockets along well-trod trails and then deeper into the woods, chatting and laughing easily. It’s everything I can do to keep up. The pack seems unstoppable, insoluble.

Seems.

“I have been lonely on my runs for sure, and I miss my team,” Matt Wisner admits weeks later. “We all are in the same situation right now where we’re running alone.” Quarantine approaches its second month, and the pack is scattered, with the runners only encountering one another over Zoom calls. Ogilvie, whose twenty years as men’s track cross country head coach have cemented his reputation as a winner of championships and a trainer of champions, is retiring. And Wisner, two-time All-American and holder of two school records, is finishing his senior year home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Wisner came tantalizingly close to competing in the 2020 NCAA Track & Field Indoor Championships in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he and fellow star athlete Erin Marsh, a junior, were slated to represent Duke. The two flew to New Mexico, only for said meet to be canceled. By the time they returned, campus was deserted and everything had been called off, including the outdoor ACC conference championship meet that Duke would have hosted.

“I remember when I was a senior in high school visiting Duke,” Wisner says. “Coach Norm said, ‘Four years from now when you’re a senior here, you’ll have your final ACC championships right here on our home track.’

“Wild, right?”

If there’s a light, it’s that the NCAA is making allowances for seniors on athletic scholarships who want to compete for a fifth year. Granted, there’s variability between conferences and universities, but this will allow Wisner to run for the University of Oregon, where he plans to study journalism as a graduate student.

“I figured I’d move out west for a change,” Wisner says lightly, relieved even by the subject of life after quarantine.

But first will come interminable weeks of isolation—a long race if ever there was one. Wisner has good days, when he wakes up energized and driven, and he has the other kind. On these, his worst days, the pandemic feels like a dress rehearsal for climate change’s worst-case scenarios: lousy international collaboration; people quickly destitute and unable to pay rent. It keeps him up at night.

GO: Wisner, right, and teammate Charles Cooper, left, in the 1500m race at the 2019 Battle of the Blues in Durham.

Running has been a constant for me when everything else is unpredictable.”

Good day or bad, though, Wisner still laces up. He keeps moving.

"Running has been a constant for me when everything else is unpredictable," he says.

None of us predicted in early March, for instance, that the run I tagged along on would be one of the men’s track team’s last together. We all knew about COVID-19, Wisner recalls, but couldn’t imagine the all-encompassing disruption looming mere days in our future.

Our immediate thoughts instead turned to the roots and rocks of the trail and the runners around us. Don’t stumble. Keep pace. Run close but respect your neighbor’s stride. Cross Erwin Road without getting squished. Cross the highway off-ramp without getting squished. My thoughts as we race between the trees are that I’m running farther and faster than I do on my usual solo runs. I am part of something larger than myself, if briefly.

Junior Alex Miley, his shaggy blond hair straight from the ’70s, runs on my right. He asks me what I like about running. “The solitude,” I say, and we laugh as we run because there are so many of us.

I would answer differently if he asked me today .