Nights That Won’t Happen

The only outdoor running event worse is the 400m hurdles. Aside from that? Being told that an event is “basically an even mix of running and sprinting” shouldn’t inspire someone to want that. Sprinters and longer distance runners throw up doing it when cross-training.

And yet, in high school, that ended up being the thing at which I was most adept[1], or at least was most agreed-upon as being adept at by the track coaches. SCRunners and its sister sites are now account-walled nightmares[2], like basically everything you don’t hate on the Internet these days in some form or fashion; my best individual 400m time was something respectable, but nothing commendable.

Insofar as I can express them, these are my bona fides. I hate the 400m dash and was just below replacement-level at it, but I love it as a race[3]. I think most people who have ever run the 400m feel this way about it. While the 100m proves who is the outright fastest person alive, the 400m exists to prove something along the lines of “if a mid-sized predator attacked me in my sleep, could I get away and also maintain my leg?”

The 400m dash pretty much has to be an all-out sprint, the “pretty much” combining with the idea that you still have something left in the last 100 meters. Enter, on Wednesday night, in the hardest possible way that that race could produce: Quincy Hall.

Objectively, it was a bad start. He didn’t get out quickly enough in the first 20-30 meters and instead immediately fell behind. Grenada’s Kirani James and Trinidad and Tobago’s Jareem Richards made significant strides in the first 200m, and Matthew Hudson-Smith kept pace while not exhausting himself. It’s not where you want to be.

This is way down, below the ocean. It’s where you want to be:

Starting in lane 7, Quincy Hall, the former South Carolina Gamecock, had essentially fallen behind to something like a lane-adjusted fifth at the 200m mark. At just before the 300m mark, announcer Sanya Richards-Ross said that Hall was “fading badly at this point.”

From that point, Hall ran the coldest 100 meters-within-a-longer-race that I’ve ever seen. His effort defines what a kick in a race is: having exactly enough left in the tank to win. Legs cooked, eyes open, finish line in sight is the 400m mentality, strictly out of necessity. Quincy Hall looked up from fourth with the simplest, most grueling stretch in outdoor track running ahead of him and said, “Yes.”

---

[1] To the tune of being an alternate on a state finalist 4×400 team: I ran on the team that qualified against not terribly tough competition in York County and its bleeding edges, but I did not run on the team that finished something like sixth at states themselves. I was not at all a necessary component of this team.

[2] One where, even as non-members, you can sometimes view parents yelling at timekeepers in the comments sections

[3] A contributor to this site – I won’t say whom, but it was not yours truly – once showed up to a summertime cross country team’s practice that was not their own high school, gave a fake name in order to get in, and then had to run not 1, not 2, but 2-2-24 400s, all before 9:30 am on a Saturday in South Carolina. Good Bojangles breakfast and a gas station chocolate milk afterward for that person, that said.