Aberdeen & Pierre

I’ve spent the past week in Aberdeen, South Dakota (pop. 25,000) for the 55th Annual South Dakota Coaches’ Clinic, followed by a two-day training course. Last night I made a brief stopover in Pierre in order to catch my flight(s) home today. (Something to be aware of: here in South Dakota, Pierre is pronounced “pier,” which is how they know the locals from us visitors.)

The coolest moment at the coaching clinic, at least for me, was when Dan Fitzsimmons, the track and cross-country coach at Yankton High School, which is always a national powerhouse, was giving a talk about his training program. He discussed how he strives to always change and better his training program, and about how his most recent change came from a discussion with Marcus O’Sullivan (for the non-runners: an Irish runner, and one of the greatest indoor milers of all time). I won’t get into the technical details here, but Fitzsimmons went on to describe exactly the sort of workout I have been doing almost weekly for the past four years. This isn’t too surprising, since Tom (my college coach) coached Marcus and still works closely with him. I’m not sure how well known Tom is out in the Midwest among high school coaches, so I wasn’t sure if anyone else in the room had any idea who Tom Donnelly was; but it was nice to hear his wisdom again, so far away and so unexpectedly. It gave me a little faith in all that I’ve learned from him and from my teammates—beyond just a technical knowledge of mile repeats with short recovery.

Aberdeen is one of the biggest towns of 25,000 I have ever been, or at least thinks of itself in that way. I was for the most part unimpressed, but that may have been because we were staying on what one of the other coaches dubbed “Fast-Food Row,” a strip of gas stations, motels, and restaurants along Route 12. Basically it offered all of my least favorite aspects of the East Coast, from the sprawl of commercialization to the fake tough guy teenagers, driving around with too loud mufflers. I counted at least five tanning saloons, and the math teacher in me says that the citizen to tanning saloon ratio in Aberdeen seems incredibly high. But it still felt like South Dakota, sometimes; occasionally I could catch of whiff of the sweetgrass, and when we got away from the motel there were more open spaces and that same big sky. And lots of pick-up trucks. On our last night in town, I got in a pretty good ten mile run at dusk, which took me out to the edge of town and through some of the quieter residential neighborhoods, which sort of endeared Aberdeen to me a little more. My opinion of Pierre was formed about the same way; I found myself liking the city a lot more after I got in a run along the Missouri last night. City, of course, is a relative term, which was part of the appeal: it is still small enough to feel like a pocket of people, surviving out on the plains; but the river, big and black in the darkness, offers reassurance, connecting Pierre to the rest of the world, and everyone that I have for the time being left behind.