The Bonds Within The Throwing Ring

The Bonds Within the Throwing Ring

At a track meet, you can hear and feel the adrenaline of the running events. The roar of the crowd. Coaches looking at their watches, pacing. Fans screaming. Teammates sprinting alongside the track in the last few meters. The timers waiting in anticipation.

And then...there are the shot put and discus athletes, those who go and throw gently into those track morns - usually off practically in another area code. It's quieter there, much quieter - so much so you can often hear the kerplunk of the discuss as it lands, as you can just as easily hear the official saying 'mark' or 'scratch. 

You think you could hear that official while the 4 X 4 relay was going on? Think again.

"I always felt the throwers were sort of a team within the team," one former athlete said. "We're always off in the corner somewhere, even in practice, so you become pretty vested in the people you're there with. It's like a fraternity if you will, as we often even ride to meets together."

True perhaps, though it's also true that their points count every bit as much as the running ones do.

"Look at Athens Academy for instance," one coach said. "Their thrower got first in state in both the shot and the discus - that's a 20-point man right there. That guy put them in a very good position to win it all, and if the 4 X 4 relay had gone a tad differently, they would or could have."

Looking at the runners, a competitor often has eight lanes worth of people, sometimes two and three deep, to compare with, pace off of, strategize against in his or her event. The thrower - that's a different story.

"Our five seconds of work is worth their four to sometimes 10 or 12 minutes," one said. "You basically compete against yourself and generally, nothing really crazy happens. You know what your best mark is, and you try to be that."

And without the hoopla, the mayhem, the adulation, and the yelling. Even practice can be a mental exercise.

"It can be boring, particularly when you're out there by yourself," another commented. "You throw it, go get it, throw it again. All the while, you're just trying to chip away at what you think you can do, inch by inch."

A coach summed it up in a rather humorous way:

"If I didn't hear the discus clanging into our soccer goal every now and then, I'd often never know those guys and girls were out there. Still, when they get better and start slinging it across the field, things can get dangerous. Where you stand safely at the starting line for the runners in February, might become a danger zone by April or May."

Regardless of whether it's a team within a team, a loneliness that's often felt by distance runners on a solo run, or the tedium of playing fetch and toss by yourself, their work matters and counts, even though often so quietly.

And, as another coach so eloquently put it, "the throwers' climb to the top rung at the award's ceremony is just as high as the runners or the jumpers."

Ah, so true, even though the shot and discus people often have to take a long hike to get back inside the stadium just to get there...