Blue Sky Rain

In Any Language

They say the Intuit language (Eskimo) has dozens of words for what in English we call snow.  That makes a lot of sense.  Snow has a prime impact on their lives, near or above the Arctic Circle.  It even has an impact here.  Better to shovel “powder” than “slush”.  

But in my “side-profession” of track officiating, we have a lot of words for rain.  After all, outdoor track is a spring sport in Ohio.  I have been drenched, frozen, and sunburned – all on the same Saturday.   So, on this, my first Saturday off in a while, I encountered another form of rain:  “blue sky rain”.

What is “blue sky rain”?  It’s rain coming from the few random clouds that are scattered among the blue sky.  It doesn’t look like a rain-day, in fact, it looks like a blue sky day.  But then, there’s those pesky, adolescent clouds, primed to screw the whole thing up.  Thus, we have “blue sky rain”.

Tracking Weather

Now the weather is a serious concern in Track and Field.  And, in this modern age, I have all the tools to keep abreast of what’s going on.  There’s the paid subscription to the Weather Channel on my phone, and the direct link to NBC4’s viper radar.  I even have an app called “My Lightning Finder”. (Though to be clear, I don’t have lightning and I don’t want lightning!!)  It will detect lightning in a specified area.  

The Ohio High School Athletic Association defines ten miles as the “lightning zone” when competition must be suspended.  So “My Lightning” creates a ten mile circle of detection.  It goes off with a siren in my pocket, one that I can hear even during a tight finish of the 1600 meter run.   

Experience

But I’ve been on the track since 1970, so I also have a “sense” of what and when the weather will be.  Fifty-six years of getting soaked and frozen to the bone will do that to you.  My fastest 220 dash (yards back then, not meters) was in 1974, the day that Xenia got destroyed by tornadoes.  We were farther south at Reading High School in Cincinnati, but I remember having a “tail wind” all the way around the curve and down the straight.  That night, we watched eight different tornadoes dance up and down the hills of Cincinnati.

I sat in a car in a parking lot at Bowling Green State University’s track and watched lightning strike the light pole nearby. I stood near the woods at Watkins Memorial High School (out by the old discus pad) and heard a tornado building in the forest. That was when I yelled on the walkie-talkie – “Get those people the Hell out of the bleachers!!” It was the right sentiment, but my PA Announcer had the mike keyed up at the same time.  That dramatic announcement may well have induced a bit of panic in the crowd.  And then there was the tornado at the District meet in Dublin, when an assistant coach took the full brunt of the fold-up tent in her face.

I’ve seen the wall of a storm front moving in on a starting line of three hundred kids at the McGowan Cross Country meet. I even had the sense to cancel the race, before I sent them into the forest with the coming fifty mile an hour wind.  So, I guess I know weather.

Run ‘Em

And, it seems like for time in memorial, I’ve had that conversation with old track coaches as we huddled around the edges of the concession stand, watching the rain whip sideways and backwards.  Someone always says:  “Well, sometimes we run ‘em in this, and sometimes we don’t”.  I even had it hail in inch in the middle of the 110 high hurdles, a dicey proposition at best.  So I know a cloudy day from a rainy day.   And I know the difference between threatening weather, and just wet weather where the kids can’t hold onto their pole vault poles.

But today was a “blue sky rain” day.  The blue sky represented hope for reprieve, a day when maybe we might even stay warm.  But, the “adolescent clouds”, like teenagers all stormed up, might throw a wrench in things. They well might get it together and ruin the whole day.  So there’s hope, and threat.   

That’s the promise of “blue sky rain”.