I never considered any of those elevations to be promotions. Shoveling and wheeling manure on an icy January day in a barn full of 160 warm, gentle Holstein ladies had charms unavailable to my sophisticated brethren sitting in offices filing permission slips or tallying attendance records. From the apple orchard, redolent with the aroma of ripe fruit, to digging potatoes, to beating the feathers off newly killed chickens on a rotating contraption that would give an OSHA inspector today heart palpitations, it was all new, and thus fascinating, to this urban kid.

But most of all I remember walking alone across campus, swishing through freshly fallen dry maple leaves, and listening to the sounds from the athletic fields. Nothing else in the world sounds like a football being kicked on a gray October afternoon, the coach’s occasional whistle, and the thud of padded bodies crashing. From the soccer fields, shouts and more whistles. Those will always be to me the music of fall.

I played neither of them. Too skinny for football, and lacking besides the sanguine, beefy cheer of its ambiance, both on and off the field, I wasn’t attracted to it. Too clumsy and fumble-footed for soccer (and secretly uninspired by a foreign ball game where you weren’t allowed to us your hands), I left that to others, as well. But an upperclassman whom I knew slightly from our mutual home town took me along on a Sunday afternoon jog over the trails in the woods around the campus, and I was hooked. Cross-country was always afterward my sport as long as I still could run, which turned out to be about fifty years.

There were no whistles, no physical contact, no need for excessive nimbleness. You simply ran and exercised into the best condition possible and then, with others like yourself, competed to see who could fastest cover the distance set out, from a speedy 1.9-mile course (Choate School) to 4.6 miles (the famous all-comers Pie Race at the end of the fall sports season. Alum Frank Shorter holds the course record).

The trails through the woods were, of course, carpeted with leaves that covered roots and rocks, posing a hazard to our legs; but as far as I can recall, none of us ever seriously sprained an ankle. Our coach, an utterly unflappable and quiet veteran of World War II, was ideal. Never once did I hear a pep talk. We didn’t need to be told what we could, or had to. He offered low-key advice about running form and once, when I asked him how I could improve my uphill performance, suggested a couple of things that might – and did – help. One hint he dropped was that if you passed another runner going uphill, he was likely to bw permanently behind you. He was right, and as I learned from experience, for two reasons: the mental effect on the morale of both the struggling passer and the struggling passee.

If football was a game of strength, and soccer one of deftness, cross-country was one played out in the mind. You had to triumph over the pain in both your body and your psyche. This played out one day when an Englishman who taught us American history “from a different perspective” joined us for an afternoon practice wearing a very intimidating Oxford sweater. He was pretty muscular, so I judged him an also-ran. But three miles into the run (I was having a very good day) I heard steps behind me. I looked, and there he was! And with half a mile to go, he was gaining!

He taught me more than history that day. I hadn’t known till then how deeply down I could reach, how fast I could run the finish stretch, and the exhilaration of the revelation of both. His class in American history was next that afternoon right after the race. Ever the English gentleman, his opening words were, “Well done, Willy.” I’ll tell you: Running may be its own reward – I’d still be doing it if I could – but there are others, as well.