BAR HARBOR – Seven days and six nights at the USA Track and Field Junior Racewalk Development Camp shares some common denominators with a week in the wilderness at Boy or Girl Scout camp or a summer stint with the Peace Corps.
You learn survival techniques. You discover that other kids might not look like you or talk like you, but in all the important ways they’re just like you.
Only, in this case, there aren’t many of them.
“Everybody in this room already knew everybody else,” Aaron Carroll of Gardiner said during a lunch break at College of the Atlantic. “If they’re a legitimate racewalker on the national level, you’ve competed against them. It’s definitely a close-knit fraternity.”
Carroll stopped shy of calling it a cult, but there is an enthusiasm among the faculty and 21 select campers from five states that suggests religious fervor.
These are teenagers, lest we forget, committed to a week of 13-hour days studying and practicing the fine art of, well, walking. Three of the five daily sessions are in a classroom. They’re sequestered in the boonies (breezy, salt-scented boonies, pleasantly enough) where the round trip to and from the nearest McDonald’s is a 20-kilometer, Olympic style journey. And there’s not a Game Boy in sight.
In charge of this immersion are two directors, a head coach and nine assistants whose challenge is to make a sport that receives less television time than synchronized swimming every four years seem worth the investment of the first half of the student-athletes’ adult lives.
“It’s not glamorous. If you say you’re going to a track and field camp, people understand that,” said instructor Steve Vaitones of Waltham, Mass. “You say a racewalking camp and people ask you two questions: What, and why?”
Vaitones graduated from the University of Maine in 1978 after smashing the school record in the mile racewalk.
Today, he’s vice chairman of the USATF racewalking committee and coordinator of the junior national team, challenged to develop talent and convince that talent not to seek greener, more popular pastures.
Camp directors Tom Eastler of Farmington and David Baldwin understand the loneliness, which is why they resurrected the camp for the first time in a decade and enlisted the help of a real-life instructor with Maine connections.
Six national team members and two Olympians, including Eastler’s son, Kevin, emerged from the coastal camp in 1993 and 1994. The faculty was alarmed at the thought that a new generation of racewalkers hadn’t been deputized to carry the torch.
“This is a chance for Maine kids to hang out with kids from Texas, Ohio, New Jersey and New York, and realize, You know, I might be the only person on my team or even in my entire league competing in the racewalk, but there really are other people who do this.'” Vaitones said.
No walk in the park Racewalking looks even more strenuous than running to the naked eye. Learning the proper technique to avoid being disqualified or injured takes practice and patience. By USATF definition, racewalking is a progression of steps during which the walker never loses contact with the ground. Also, the advancing leg must be straightened, not bent at the knee, from the moment of first contact with the ground until it returns to the vertical upright position.
Once that gait becomes second nature, the trick is learning to pace oneself throughout progressively longer races without developing delusions of grandeur.
“We teach them things like how to tell from just checking their pulse if they’re training too hard or not hard enough,” said camp head coach Gary Westerfield of Smithtown, N.Y. “A lot of them haven’t raced more than three to five kilometers. They start out thinking they’re setting this blistering pace. Then they hit this wall.”
Racewalking itself has hit a ceiling, but it isn’t alone. Every track and field discipline is dealing with stagnant numbers as the “running boomers” of the 1970s and ’80s retire without anyone to pick up their sneakers.
“They get out of college and they lose that fire,” Vaitones said. “As popular as distance running still is in high school and college, (adults) don’t even do the road racing circuit anymore. They might run something like the Beach to Beacon, but they’re not in a club.”
With virtually zero strength in numbers and a different age bracket for elite competitors, racewalking requires additional perseverance.
Unlike swimming or gymnastics, in which an athlete often competes in his or her first Olympics as a child, racewalkers rarely make it to the games until, like Kevin Eastler, they hit their early-to-mid-30s.
“The tough thing is it takes discipline,” Vaitones said. “As hard as they work over the summers, they get back to school and there are a couple of other things to worry about.”
At 13, Matthew Forgues of Boothbay is the youngest camper. When asked how soon he could see himself fulfilling Olympic aspirations, Forgues deadpanned “2008.” Then he laughed and conceded that 2020 is the earliest realistic target date.
Forgues’ older sister, Lauren, wore her Team USA jersey at the camp after attending her first international meet, the Pan American Cup in Lima, Peru, in May.
So much for that myth that racewalking offers no immediate gratification.
“I mean, who goes to South America?” Lauren asked.
Renewed passion
The camp, which began Sunday, concludes Saturday with the 5,000-meter USATF Junior National Championship race as its “graduation ceremony.”
Tom Eastler said the camp cost $15,000, much of it generated by private fund-raising. Tuition was $475 per athlete. Given the costs and the relatively small talent pool, Eastler said the camp probably will not happen again right away in 2006. But this year’s gathering should have a lasting impact.
“When you get together for a camp like this, it sort of re-ignites your passion for the things you do back home,” Westerfield said. “We hope that’s the case. We want them to stay in racewalking and keep advancing to the next level. Ten years from now, when we have openings at the international or Olympic level, we don’t want to have to reach out to racewalkers who are 50 years old.”
At the very least, kids return to their various hometowns in Maine or Long Island knowing where they stand and what it will take to continue climbing the ladder.
“You can go to a basketball camp every week all summer long or play pick-up games all day long and maybe you’re the best or worst player out there,” Vaitones said. “The fastest kids in the state and the country are all here.”
The walkers agree on two things: They’re tired, but that it’s the good kind of tired.
Padric Gleason of Dresden and Hall-Dale High School admittedly stopped training after the high school outdoor track season.
“This camp was a kick in the pants,” he said.
Carroll will play football in the fall and wrestle over the winter for Gardiner Area High School.
“I play a lot of different sports so I don’t get sick of it. That’s what I have to do, because with my personality, I know it can get tiresome for me,” Carroll said. “They put us through endurance tests that made me feel like I was going to drop. But now, at the end of the week, even though I’m beat, I feel like I could walk forever.”
The teachers hope he means that literally.
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