Peck Hill

My mind wanders.  There is a place and a time I return to with some regularity.  The place is Syracuse, NY and the time is the span of years between 1982 and 1986.  I attended the university that sits where the vale of Onondaga meets the eastern sky.  I went there to earn a degree, which I did.  But I did enjoy a full college experience. 

I joined the crew team in the fall of my freshman year, rowed all four years and earned a varsity letter.  The experiences I enjoyed are the lasting memories I have kept from what seems like a lifetime ago.  I recall the first crew meeting I attended in the fall of 1982.  About 50 wide eyed novices crammed into the small gym the team used (three of us would graduate together four years later and within a year we would attend our captain's funeral).  We watched a movie about crew and the coaches spoke to us.  They said the training would be hard.  We would row, lift weights and run.  I liked what I heard. 

We rowed, a lot.  At first, we rowed in old wooden boats built by George Pocock and pulled wooden oars.  We were spastic and scraped our knuckles on the gunwales.  In the winter we rowed indoors in ‘the tank’ which is a small indoor swimming pool with rows of seats down the center and oars attached to simulate a crew shell.  It is like something out of a Wagner opera.  We raced in sleek, lightweight fiberglass shells with wrapped fiberglass oars.  We rowed on Onondaga Lake and the Seneca River which are part of the Erie Canal system.

When I walked onto campus in the fall of 1982 I weighed 175 lbs, the same as now.  When I left campus at the end of my freshman year I weighed 215 lbs.  The ‘freshman 40’ was the result of intense weight training.  We did weight circuits and many, many squats.  My thighs were 24 inches around when I graduated.

The third leg of our training was running.  There were two workouts we did during the winter months.  One was running the stairs in the upper level of the Carrier Dome.  Typically we ran 50 flights.  From experience I can tell you there are 29 rows in each flight and they are labeled A through ZZ; the last six being X, XX, Y, YY, Z, ZZ.  To this day, over a quarter century after the last time I ran those stairs, I associate great pain with those three matched pairs of letters.  This twisted conditioned response explains why I hate ZZ Top.  After those workouts our legs would shake uncontrollably. 

We also ran on the roads around the university, which was so much fun.  A few days each week we ran about four miles or so.  Every Saturday we ran a nine mile loop called the Peck Hill run.  I never wore a watch, so I have no idea how long it took to complete.  Picture 30 Clydesdale division runners plodding along.  We wore cotton sweatshirts and cotton waffle knit long johns.  It often snowed and we came back from those runs soggy messes at risk of hypothermia.  I loved it.

When the last ice age receded from the area that is now Upstate New York, it carved out the Finger Lakes (Cayuga, Seneca, Otisco, Skaneateles, Owasco, Keuka, Canandaigua, Honeoye, Canadice, Hemlock and Conesus).  In its wake it also deposited hundreds of huge boulders, some 100 feet in diameter.  Over the millennia these rocks eroded and vegetation grew in the soil.  They became hills called drumlins.  When viewed from the air they look like someone placed objects randomly on a table and covered them with a green cloth.  Those were the hills we ran.

Every run ended with a half mile climb up Mt. Olympus Drive where my alma mater stands on her hilltop high.  It was from that vantage point that I wrote these lines:  The hills across the Mohawk Valley were undulating and tan with green veins running through them.  The sun had burnt the grass but the trees were evergreen.  I think of that place and time when the evening twilight deepens and the shadows fall.

On Sunday six of us (Tim W, Tim G, Scott D, Kevin C and myself) met for a run from Roxborough State Park, over Carpenter Peak and down Waterton Canyon.  It is a beautiful, but challenging, 12 mile circuit.  There is a vertical gain of about 1,000 feet over the first few miles, then the route passes through a few miles of rolling hills of scrub oak before sharply descending to the Strontia Springs Dam.  From there it is a six mile decent back to the Waterton Canyon trail head.  Carpenter Peak provides the best views of Roxborough State Park with vistas of the foothills and canyons to the west.  In the distance lies the Denver skyline and the famous rock formations that made this area a Colorado Natural Area and a National Natural Landmark.  It was a great outing.