When Friday Nights Weren't So Warm

I admit to a little gloating and goading with all these pretty pictures lately. But there was a time when I too finished February runs with a frosted heinie. And since I mentioned grad school earlier this week, I thought I'd share my take on a local running phenomenon that I wrote for a class called "Writing on Society." The focal character is the longtime director of the Cape Cod Marathon. And, far as I know, the Falmouth Fives still exist. If you are ever on the Upper Cape visiting, you should definitely show up. It's a great evening run.

Remembering The Friday Night Five (2000)

Sixteen men and women gather under the glow of a Falmouth Town Hall parking lot light, bobbing bodies and gently stretching hamstrings and quadriceps and calves swathed in synthetic cloth. Their Nikes and Sauconys pat down an inch-thick layer of snow left by plows. The air temperature is 14 degrees. The Weather Channel says with the wind it feels more like –30.

Ranging in age from early 20s to late 50s, runners chat and exhale short-lived white breaths. Then someone asks, “What time do you have? I’ve got 5:30.”

“I’ve got 5:26.”

“My watch says 5:33.”

Courtney F. Bird Jr., the master of ceremonies for The Friday Night Five, fumbles for his watch under a wool glove, long-sleeve cotton T-shirt, Falmouth Track Club sweatshirt, wind breaker, reflective vest and flannel shirt-jacket, which he wriggles out of at the last minute and tosses into his pickup truck.

“OK, let’s just go ahead and get started,” he calls out. A slapdash line forms in front of the windowless, near-empty Leary’s Family Amusement Center. “Most of you know the drill,” he shouts in a gravely voice. “The course is marked. Everyone keeps their own time. When you get back, record your time on the clipboard in the back of the truck…. Ready, set, GO!”

The group takes off in a cluster around Town Hall Square, heading out into niveous neighborhoods. Bird is still at the start, hunched over, trying to make the timer on his stopwatch work. The pack pulls away. He lets out an urgent sounding “Oop!” and sets off too, his gait exaggerated by the extra layers that make his 5-foot, 10-inch sinewy frame look heavier.

“Ho-ly smokes, it’s cold,” he says with delight, catching up. His gold-framed eyeglasses fog each time he breathes upward rather than outward, thanks to a thick red neck wrap (a “turtleneck without the turtle”) pulled up to his mouth.

* * *

This is the 119th time Bird has jogged the Falmouth Track Club’s weekly series, a run held no matter the weather for the last 135 Fridays. There are no fees, no T-shirts and no prizes. No water stops, clocks or official timer. So flexible is this ‘race’ that runners don’t even need to come at 5:30. The only stipulations are that entrants run on that day and follow the entire five-mile, wheel-measured course.

Bird’s wife, Carolyn ranks second in Friday Night appearances with 117 races. The series founder, Ken Gartner, is third with 115. Fourth is a character named Wally Ballou, on record as having run 95 times.

Other runners who gather in Falmouth each Friday are no different. Runners cling to routine. They struggle through snowdrifts and summer heat waves, losing weight, staying fit, maintaining streaks and setting personal records. Rituals provide stability and security; races, camaraderie. They tell of past long runs along a busy highway, bike path or country road. And when they are trapped indoors or injured or sick, they long to be in Courtney Bird’s shoes, which just passed the first mile and now round an icy corner onto Surf Drive along the waterfront.

Bitter air blasts off Vineyard Sound unblocked. A sharp gust rushes through a notch in a small dune, whistling. It slaps Bird in the face and pushes him back.

“Ho-ly shit!” he yells to no one in particular.

Then he turns up the next street where the air is less turbulent. Farther up, runners momentarily emerge under an incandescent streetlight, then again disappear into darkness. Residents along the five-mile route look out for the runners. Once a boy on Walker Street shoveled a safe pathway for the Friday Night crowd. Summer tourists toast them from their porches. On this evening, the soft light of a library lamp in one curtain-less window evokes warmth and comfort, now only two miles and, at Bird’s current pace, about 20 minutes away.

The runners trip the motion-sensored porch light on a ranch-styled, cedar-sided home, one of many on the route. They quicken when a car stops to pull into a driveway. The snow muffles the scuffles of running shoes brushing asphalt, allowing them to move oh-so-quietly through the night.

Everyone eventually lifts around another corner, back to Surf Drive. The desolate stretch is the most treacherous, with no light – not even the cloud-shrouded moon on this night – illuminating the path. It’s one reason reflective vests are mandatory in winter. Ten minutes later, Bird nears Town Square and makes sure a newcomer knows to circle the square again before crossing the manhole cover, the official finish line.

About eight others have gathered around the back of the Mazda pickup, its cab door down. Courtney picks up the clipboard and pencil and records his time: 51:10. His wife Carolyn, who ran earlier in the day, tells him to put her down for 55 minutes. Theirs are the slowest times recorded that week.

Bird’s still panting as he pulls off his windbreaker hood and wool cap, revealing a mop of wet gray hair that’s normally thick, with a slight curl. He has trouble reading the roster because of ice on his eyeglasses.

* * *

Two days later, the Falmouth Track Club sweatshirt, wind breaker, wind pants, wool cap and turtleneck without the turtle hang with Carolyn’s running gear from dining room chairs and stair railings at the Bird home off a meandering residential road.

Courtney sits at an oblong oak dining room table in his three-floor, 2,500-square-foot home. He sips a mug of orange-flavored tea fortified with two level spoonfuls of sugar. Carolyn moves between the kitchen and the dining room, getting ready to go to the market. Beyond them is a gorgeous view of a Cape Cod cove.

Bird is remembering when he was fast, back when quickness counted.

He ran 60 to 80 miles weekly and averaged three marathons a year, including Boston. He got up at 5:30 each morning back then, ran 7.5 miles and grabbed a piece of bread on his way to work. He came home and ran 7.5 more. On Sundays, he did 20 in the morning. He set his personal record, 2:56 in 1980 at the Cape Cod Marathon, having stayed up two nights prior with a runner friend drinking from a beer keg and blasting Beethoven. When the gun went off, he was peeing in the bushes. But he made up the time and celebrated his quickest 26-miler. Then he put in a third night with his drinking buddies. At 47, he ran a 3:07 in London. It was 1987.

Then he missed a long run. He missed the next two days, too. Days turned to months, approaching a year. He went to the doctor for his annual physical. His cholesterol was way up, as was his weight and blood pressure. His father, heavyset and a heavy smoker, survived five heart attacks, then suffered a stroke following surgery and died three years later in a nursing home, paralyzed and unable to speak.

“We all are gonna die at some point,” Bird says. “That’s part of the deal. But, you know, I don’t want to live that way. I don’t want to have the quality of my life impaired in that way.”

So now he lives for the Friday five-milers. And an easy six on Sundays, maybe more if he feels like it. Weekday runs, if he has the time. He still enjoys a beer, and, though he gave up his Camels and Lucky Strikes 25 years ago, cigars still get the best of him.

The Friday Night Five began in June 1997 when the Track Club’s Gartner couldn’t make a weekly night race in Hyannis. He thought Falmouth should have its own, similar series, but one stressing non-competition. They christened it The Quarterdeck Five, after a favorite restaurant-hangout. The name’s changed several times since then.

The first race drew 13 people. The first winter the number dwindled to four or five, including Courtney and Carolyn Bird, who broke their streak more than a year later when Carolyn was hospitalized. Results were printed each week in the local newspaper and the Internet. They noticed few women, walkers and slow runners participated. That’s when they found Wally Ballou.

“It was important that nobody suffer the embarrassment of coming in last,” Courtney explained.

Wally Ballou was one of Bird’s favorite characters from a 1950s radio program and started to appear in the Friday Night race results posted in the Falmouth Enterprise. His hometown and age varied weekly; his last-place standing did not.

“At one point, Kenny and I decided Wally should improve,” Courtney said. So Wally started to move up the rankings each week, while the mysterious Pat and Carol van Slovoot of Woods Hole weekly replaced the slowest of the slowpokes.

Wally gained on the leaders. Then a couple of newspaper columnists at the Boston Globe lost their jobs for fabricating characters and someone suggested something similar was going on with the Falmouth Five postings. “Wally fell into a terrible depression and quit running for awhile,” Courtney said. “When he returned, he came in last again.”

* * *

The next Friday evening, the air is warmer. It is 18 degrees, and only –8 with the wind chill. The same number, but some different faces, line up. The roads are clear tonight, so runners will locate the yellow double arrows on course roads. (Still, one woman who’s only run it twice before will get lost between miles 3 and 4 and take 7 minutes to discover this.)

Bird casts his flannel shirt-jacket in the truck once more and heads to the side of the line. “Most of you know the drill,” he yells. “The course is marked. Everyone keeps their own time. When you get back, record your time on the clipboard on the back of the truck, and then we’ll make sure you’re immortalized…. Ready, set, GO!”

The pack takes off around Town Hall Square, but Bird is hunched over – yes, again -- trying to get his watch timer to work. He looks up and sees the runners pulling away. He grunts, straightens his body and pushes off.

Why does he come here every Friday, every month, every year?

“It’s the camaraderie. . . . The fact that it’s kind of a habit. . . . And it helps you with your regular running,” he says between big breaths. “Besides, what else are you going to do at 5:30 on Friday night?”