learning experiences and sports

Learning Experiences:

(p. 3)    About age five, in Indiana, I liked the Ludlow girl, perhaps a year older than me—the first of several secret loves who had no trouble remaining oblivious of my existence. One time she and her other girl friends were playing and built a house of cardboard and other playground materials. We little boys watched for some time, curiously observing their construction techniques and being amazed that it stood when complete. The sad part is that what happened next was my idea: “Let’s run by and knock the house down.” My two co-conspirators’ enthusiastic responses were as stupid as my idea, but my stupid idea being received so well was encouraging. So we ran by and pushed it down. The girls were predictably put out at us and sad. As I looked (from a safe distance) at the collapsed house and their unhappiness, I was trying to remember what made that seem like a good idea. It was not, of course, but was a really dumb thing to do. I decided that it is not fun making people feel bad (lesson 4), and decided at age five not to make people feel bad any more, not intentionally. I still clumsily bungle my way into hurting people’s feelings unintentionally from time to time, but not intentionally. And hopefully even the unintentionals decrease in frequency as I learn to be more wise, as gradual and imperceptible as that progress may seem. I’ve found that just keeping my mouth shut works well much of the time. Then other times I can even get in trouble for not saying what others thought I should have said. So the probabilities of pleasing everyone all the time are zilch, but I keep trying. That is another reason I like being in the mountains: my social skills attain perfection when alone in the mountains. It’s so exhilarating to come back from a hike in the pines, having lived a perfect life for 8 hours.

(p. 5)    I did 1^st and 2^nd grade in Hawaii while Dad taught at the University of Hawaii. Then we moved to L.A. where he began a Doctorate of Musical Arts at USC. We first lived in the Watts area, 4 blocks from the Los Angeles Coliseum. Living in the inner city was tense. I hardly dared leave the yard. One venture away from the house thoroughly reinforced all my fears. I was in 3^rd grade, and my brother Eric in 1^st.  We were with our only friends, another pair of brothers in 3^rd and 5^th grades. A group of 6 or 8 black guys of high school age or older came down the street.  They stopped us and took turns hitting the 5^th grader in the mouth.  They would feign compassion while looking at his mouth, saying things like, “Oh, we’re sorry. We didn’t mean to hurt you,” then they would smash him in the mouth again. One of their group was decent enough to try to convince the others to leave us alone, which they eventually did. We three 1^st and 3^rd graders were helpless against the gang and could only watch, hoping their amusements would not eventually include us.  I’ve reflected on that in the years since: did they think they were proving to each other how tough they were by collectively beating up a 5^th grader half the size of any one of them? Was that their entertainment—bloodying up the mouth of an innocent, smaller passer-by?  How sick to enjoy such brutal pastimes on the innocent! We later moved to 90^th Street where my best friends were Charles Scholes, Michael Okajima, and Bill Williams, a shy black boy and the gentlest nicest guy imaginable.

Sports (lousy at basketball, okay at track):

(p. 10)  In 7^th grade I read two or three books on Geronimo, the Apache warrior.  As a boy of 12 or 13 years of age, I was much impressed with what I read.  His military genius is still studied in military academies today.  As a youth in training, rounding a curve on a mountainous trail, he was once attacked by a mountain lion.  Slashing with his knife as the lion tore with claws and mouth, they both rolled down the embankment below the trail.  When the dust settled, the other boys saw Geronimo arise, but the lion did not.  He also had premonitions from time to time. One was that white man’s bullets would never kill him.  Sources offer ranges from 50 to 200 for the number of bullet wounds in his body at death. He later died of pneumonia at 80, after lying drunk in the rain all one night.  The book told of how he could run 7 miles when 7 years old, 50 miles when 13 years old, and 300 miles over 3 days when 18 years old.

            So at 13, the summer after 7^th grade, I decided to try distance running. I thought anything less than 2 miles would be embarrassing, so the first run was 2 miles and it about killed me. Two days later, the 2^nd time was easier.  The 3^rd time felt good. Then it became a habit from that day to this, 5 or 6 days a week.

(p. 11)  We moved from L.A. to Utah when Dad was hired onto the BYU music faculty and I was starting 8^th grade.  Orem was still rather rural then, not the metropolis that Utah Valley is now.  I loved it—fruit orchards, mountains for hiking, fields for running, and being able to walk down any street without having to worry about getting beat up.

(p. 12)  When spring came, I learned that the junior high had a real track team.  I had been running 2 to 4 miles a day for a year by that time, tried out, and happened to be the school’s best half-miler (longest race they had). The one annual track meet was Alpine Day.  As it was my first race, I was nervous and did not know what to expect.  Fifteen runners, the three best from each of five junior high schools, lined up for the two-lap, 880-yard half-mile. 

            The starting gun fired, and everyone took off sprinting.  A half lap or 220 yards into the race, I was 13^th place out of 15.  I couldn’t even see the leaders.  I knew I could not keep the pace they were running, so I resigned myself to simply doing my best, no longer entertaining any thoughts of winning.  Toward the end of the first lap, I noticed that the crowd had slowed to about the same pace I was running and my position stayed the same for awhile.  During the third quarter of the race, from 440 to 660 yards, they slowed a little more and I passed 4 or 5 guys to be in about 8^th place with 220 yards to go.  At 660 yards, the pace had slowed to considerably slower than I was running, and I easily passed 3 more runners in the next 100 yards.  With 4 runners and 120 yards ahead of me, I took off for the final effort.  Three were grouped together and I passed them quickly.  From second place I could see that the first runner was now 15 yards ahead, but not going as slowly as the others; nevertheless, I was gaining.  With 50 yards remaining, he was 8 yards ahead.  With 20 yards remaining, he was 3 yards ahead.  I overtook him in the last five yards and won by only a foot or two.  It was a new record for the 8th grade half-mile—2:19—breaking the old record of 2:21. 

(p. 18)  Eleventh grade was the first time I attended the same school 2 years in a row since 5^th grade—6 different schools in 6 years (5^th to 10^th).  I had decided not to play football my junior year, but to train for track year-round. When I told the football coach that, he was NOT happy. But as he was also the track coach, he didn’t say too much. During my sophomore season, my knee was hyper-extended such that I could still feel it a year later (and a few years after that), and I did not want to risk any worse injuries, as running and doing so for life were more important to me than football, in spite of 2 uncles (Wayne and Morris) and 2 cousins (Renny and Scott) having played for BYU, and cousin Layne Van Noy’s son Kyle Van Noy now starring at BYU, and Alan, Reed, and Duane being all region or college gridiron greats elsewhere. Such a collection of relatives is the best I can do for a claim to fame in football.

            School-year life consisted of school, workout, homework, dinner, then finish homework, and to bed at 9. It sounds boring, I know, but I liked it, all except for half of school. I loved math, physics, and chemistry, but did what I had to for English, literature, and history. I enjoyed reading history, but not trying to read teachers’ minds when tested on what they think the significance is of this, that, and the other.  In math and science, you can figure out the answers. But in literature and history, the interpretive parameters are so globally limitless that the probabilities of hitting on what the teacher has in mind seemed narrow at best. 

            The sophomore basketball coach was my PE teacher that fall of my junior year, and in PE we simply played basketball most days. I came to Utah hardly knowing what a basketball was. The Hawaii and California neighborhoods I grew up in only played football and baseball. I was quite good at schoolyard football—fast, quick, diving catches, etcetera—and mediocre at baseball, but somehow I never crossed paths with basketball until we moved to Utah. The first months of 8^th grade PE I was learning how to dribble and could not shoot worth beans. By my junior year, three years later, I was still a lousy basketball player, by competitive standards. However, I could run and jump, was quick, had improved my shooting some, and occasionally did something impressive. Anyway, I happened to be having a good day one day in PE, and the teacher-coach was noticing, unbeknownst to me. After class, he took me aside and in earnest told me to try out for the basketball team. Now keep in mind that this is Provo High School; they took state as often as any among those largest schools in the state.  I was a junior, so too late for preparatory or sophomore ball, I would be trying out for varsity. Since the sophomore coach thought I should, I decided to try out as he suggested.

            The day came and no less than 200 boys were trying out for Provo High’s varsity basketball team.  Coach Condie wanted to get it whittled down quickly to start basketball season and not waste time dealing with 200 run-abouts, so he divided us into 40 teams of 5. Each team played 3 minutes, twice. Of course, when there are only 6 minutes to show what one can do, half hog the ball and the other half never see it. So without touching the ball, I ran up and down the court for 6 minutes, and that was my Provo High basketball career. I was not too disappointed. Someone had to fill the ranks of the 180 cut from the tryout roster. Besides, if I had made the team, I would have had to learn how to dribble. Coach Condie did not know me, but we were probably related, since I’m descended from the pioneer Condies too, but I did not know that then, which was just as well. He probably did not want to know about a relative who couldn’t dribble, and with 100 cousins, I was not in dire need of any more relatives either, though I liked all that I had, that I knew of.  So moving on out of each other’s life worked well for both of us.

(p. 20)  Provo High had no cross country then, so I did my own cross country season year around: usually a grueling 8-mile workout in the foothills over Utah Valley, from my house in Provo to Provo Canyon and back.  Besides the 8 miles, the challenge was the grueling last 500 yards before the turn-around point. After running 4 miles to it, I’d run the steep 300 yards uphill, which left me feeling like I had just finished a race with a long kick already by the time I reached the top. I felt like collapsing at that point, but instead of stopping, I’d take off and sprint 200 yards on the level. So by track season my junior year, those 500-yard finishes gave me a kick that … well, Reed tells it best. My cousin Reed Gardner often came to watch Provo High track meets, and mingling among the athletes on the sidelines, he would overhear their conversations. As we milers entered the 4^th lap, one who had never seen me run would say, “It looks like our man is going to beat Stubbs this time.” But then someone else who had seen me run would say, “No, he doesn’t have a big enough lead. Watch when Stubbs hits that back straightaway.” Then, though the other guy might have a 10-yard lead, it was gone part way down the back straightaway, with the new gap widening quickly around the curve and more down the final straightaway, to win by 30 yards or so, though behind at gun lap. Some not-in-the-know would say I should run faster, if I had so much left. No, that’s not how it works. No matter the pace, my mountain workout enabled me to sprint the last 300 yards in about 40 seconds, no matter how I felt … unless I was sick or recovering from flu, which also happened.

(p. 24)  Rather than bore readers with the whole senior season, let’s skip to the end, since all this running stuff could make non-runners tired just reading about it. At the Southern Division meet of Provo High, Springville, Payson, Spanish Fork, and one other, I set a new school and division record of 4:37.  Toward the end of the meet were the relays. I was usually put to run the final half-mile leg of the medley. But this day the coach did something he had never done before and put me as the first quarter-miler of the mile relay (4 x 440). While most of the other quarter-milers used blocks, I was a distance runner and was not used to blocks, so at the start, I was standing while the others were crouching. The gun fired and we accelerated around the first curve. With the staggered start, I had no idea how I was doing amongst these speedsters until we approached the back straightaway, where I found myself 4^th out of 5. Not caring for that look, I hit my top gear to bring me between and even with the leading two. When they saw me come abreast of them, they hit their fastest gear as well, and the three of us were sprinting all out only 130 yards into the race. Nevertheless, though they were as fast, they could not maintain their speeds as long, and I began pulling away from them. By mid-straightaway I could no longer see them on either side in my peripheral vision. I just kept going as fast as I could, around the next curve, and my training enabled me to not let up through the final straightaway either. Not until I handed the baton to the next runner and stepped off the track did I look back and see that I had given the team a 35-yard lead. (Coach timed me at 50 seconds.) The other guys on our team saw that and did their best ever too and kept that lead three more times around the track, such that we won by a huge margin. Never had our mile relay team won by such a margin! My brother Eric, a sophomore on the team that year, said he noticed that some of the other teams had their best quarter-milers on the first leg. He is very observant to notice things like that, while I seldom do. After the track meet, the coach smiled, bowed and shook his head in disbelief, and said to the others nearby, “He trains year-round and it shows.”

Days before the region meet, I got the flu and barely made 3^rd place to qualify for state.  At the state meet, one week after region, I was still not feeling wholly recovered, but state meets do not accommodate individual bio-schedules, so I did my best, in fact, better than I expected to do that day: my best time of 4:35. It is usual to do one’s best at state (unless sick), because one tapers, rests, and peaks for that one race.  My best times my senior year were a 50-second quarter mile, a 2:00 minute half mile, and 4:35 mile.

(p.27)   One day, some of the missionaries began a contest to see who could sit against a wall the longest.  One had to apply enough pressure against the wall to keep from sliding down or from sliding up, both of which were easier than 90-degrees, but not allowed. Most did it a minute or two, and one missionary did it 3 minutes—the record to that point.  It didn’t look very fun and I was not really interested, but then they asked me to do it.  I took the position, and 3 minutes passed, then 5, 10, 20, 30.  It seemed I might go indefinitely, so at 45 minutes they said, “See if you can go an hour, then we’ll call it quits.” I was drenched with sweat, but finished the hour, mainly because I had figured out a trick, without which I could not have gone many more minutes than the others did. After a few minutes, I figured out that I could hold myself against the wall with the strength of one leg. So I would let one leg do all the work for 5 or 10 seconds, then switch, letting it rest while the other leg did all the work. Alternating legs, with each leg getting to rest 10 of every 20 seconds, enabled me to go somewhat indefinitely. Sometimes thinking can magnify performance (lesson 18). I later told them the secret. The superman status slipped a bit, but I was honest, not wanting any to think I’m more than I am … as if many suffer from that. 

(p. 44)  After my mission, I rode a bicycle to Arizona (“Decisions, Decisions” in Morsels) to get a job at a trading post.  During my days at Mexican Water Trading Post, the trader at Rock Point Trading Post had a community basketball team that played in tournaments all over, and he wanted me to play for his team.  I still was not all that good, but had gradually improved my dribbling and shooting a little over the years, but I could run and … well, we’ll start from the beginning and see if I can manage any semblance of humility.  No … scrap that plan. It hardly ever works. I’ve been trying to be humble all my life and have had so little success that I’ve about given up, and even if not giving up, a postponement of a paragraph or two seems negligible to a life time. Actually, I have managed some success at humility—am rather meek and low-key by nature, and if occasional accomplishments begin to encourage me to think I’m something, then all I have to do is stop and think how little, weak, and ditsy we are compared to God’s infinite love, humility, power, knowledge, and wisdom, and I’m right back on humble street. But an occasional detour from humble street to tell it like it is shouldn’t be thought too alarming for one so regularly imperfect as I.

About age 17, while playing basketball at mutual or wherever, I began noticing that I could get off the ground quite well. I could only jump 24” (two feet) from a standstill, but twice that on a running jump. I figured the 3 years of high-jumping in L.A. and the power uphill sprint training over the years since were combining to bless me with an unusual ability later in life. In the LTM, they let us missionaries play basketball 3 times a week. Other observers said that I would go in for a lay-up with my arm stretched out horizontal, yet as high as the basket. As Navajos loved to play basketball, it was an occasional part of our mixing with the people in the mission field too, and was the common form of exercise at district meetings among elders. During those games, I noticed often that two elders would stand shoulder to shoulder to block me out, but with a running jump, I could jump over their shoulders, and with legs slightly bent, my feet would go past their ears. I did that many times. Often people would say my head was higher than the basket. I was never taller than 5’10 ¾” so if the top of my head was higher than the basket, I was getting more than 4 feet off the ground, and with a bend of the legs, I could jump over five-foot shoulders. My hang time was such that one time I was running down the court, jumped about the foul line, shot while in the air, the ball hit the back rim and bounced back toward me, and I was still in the air to get the rebound and shoot a second time in the same jump. I weighed 160 as a senior in high school, but after the bicycle trip, I weighed 148, and the 400 miles of pumping worked exactly the muscles and motion of jumping. So during those Mexican Water days, I was 21, at peak strength and maturity, still training hard every day, and weighed less than ever, which allowed the same power in my legs to put me even higher. During one game in particular, I was getting off the ground higher than ever—perhaps 4 and ½ feet off the ground that night. Barry McGee was a witness and could hardly believe his eyes. He said, “Everyone else jumps up then comes down, but you just keep going up, up, up.”  For doubters, we can watch together the not-so-instant replays in yonder spheres.

Anyway, I played for the Rock Point team. Tournaments were quite regular, and the coach loved watching me jump … and he never gave up hope that I might do something else right too, or so I surmised by his occasional suggestions like “maybe you could hold onto the ball next time, too.” Good plan, coach, let’s do that play next. I’m exaggerating a little on the poor play; I wasn’t that bad—or not always.

            After five and half months, the novelty of working at a trading post began to wear off, and it began to sink in that attractive, temple-eligible Mormon girls my age were as numerous in Mexican Water as the palm trees.  I talked to the boss, he paid me my latest wages, and I passed by Monument Valley’s Valley of the Gods headed for the valley of the goddesses (Utah Valley). At a BYU 10-stake dance, my first weekend home, I met one Silvia Canelo from Argentina.

(p. 72)  I ran Monticello’s July 24^th 5K race 3 years in a row. At age 37, I ran it in 16:25, or 16:40? (ca. 5:20-25 per mile) and won handily; the next year was a little slower, but I still won, just not quite as handily, but not bad for pushing 40. The third year, I had not trained for it and did not feel ready to compete, but I was curious to see how my acquaintances in Monticello would do, so I went just to watch. The Jensen twins, who were good runners and later ran at the college level, competed 2 or 3 of those years, taking 2^nd and 3^rd, I think. But as I stood around in my jeans, flannel shirt, and tennis shoes, waiting for it to start, Joe Davis and others began needling me to run. “But I didn’t come dressed for it and I haven’t prepared for it this year. I just came to watch how you guys do,” I said. After a few more minutes of persevering encouragement, I decided to appease their requests. I was at least wearing tennis shoes, though new jeans do not bend well for striding easily. Nevertheless, I won again, but by barely this time, and a sizeable trophy was the prize. Arriving back home in Blanding, I walked through the front door with the trophy, and Shana burst out laughing, instantly figuring out what had happened. At age 40, I beat Micah Ewart just a week after he had taken 3^rd in state in the two-mile.

(p. 124)            Tom Wigginton of Monticello, at Shane and Tina Marian’s reception, said he heard a former Monticello high-school runner (Jensen) tell him that “when he ran in high school, there was this Stubbs guy who used to come and run in street clothes and cheap shoes and the first year he beat me good.  So the next year I invited my running friends to run the race with me and see if we could beat this Stubbs guy.  So a bunch of us ran, and he beat all of us again the next year.”   

The 2^nd year that I ran the Monticello July 24^th 5K race, Joe Davis told me, “Brian, you have to buy better shoes. When you come in those $10-Kmart specials with so many holes that they barely stay on your feet, and then you beat us all, it makes us look bad. Could you at least buy some new shoes?”

(p. 87)  The Grand Canyon’s south rim later became a favorite hike for Sheila and me. We would jog the 8 miles down from the top to the river, then walk the 8 miles back up at a good pace, doing all 16 miles in 5 hours. The park rangers would stop us and tell us that one should not try to go to the bottom and back to the top in one day; it should be a 2-day trip. We had to convince them that we did this regularly and that a half day was plenty for us to do what they wanted to make a 2-day trip. A 5-hour drive there, a 16-mile workout in 5 hours, then a 5-hour drive back had the 15-hour day putting us back in Blanding by bedtime. I found hiking to be a good alternative to running, since it was clear that I had lost my competitive edge in running. It came on gradually, a pound or two a year, but by now, at 220 instead of the 160 high school weight, I have slowed way down, but still jog a few miles every day and have done so all my life without interruption—living proof that exercise alone does not always keep the weight down. Until age 41, I could beat the runners of the county’s 4 high schools, but those days became past tense, and have slipped further into the past each year.