Watching track is no simple matter

You look down at your palms. They're sweaty. Your throat is dry.
You look around and all you see are athletes and you just paid $5 to get in and they bilked you out of another dollar for a program that you don't even understand because so many events have preliminaries, which precede semifinals which precede finals and the finals aren't even for another four hours and you're stuck watching 18 different flights of girls discus semifinals before anything major happens.
Why does this seem so friggin' confusing? You've watched the Olympics. Run faster than the next guy. Or throw farther. Or jump higher. Or stick a pole in the ground, fall on your head and read about yourself in tomorrow's newspaper.
Pizza is healthy
You walk past a teen-ager eating pizza. You wonder if he thinks eating healthy means putting vegetables on his pizza and downing a bottle of Gatorade.
He does. You agree.
You buy some pizza. Without vegetables.
You get a blue-colored Powerade and grumble as you walk back to your seat because the school doesn't sell Gatorade because of some blasted contract with Coca-Cola.
You realize you probably shouldn't have sworn at the concession stand worker. She's probably a volunteer. She's also probably a nice person.
You head up to the stands to watch the 1600-meter run. You see someone nearly pass out at the finish.
You feel a little guilty for not running.
You take a bite of your pizza.
You watch the preliminaries of the 100-meter dash. You see someone named Tjawonkher Davis from Warren Harding win his heat. You decide to root for Fitch's Davanzo Tate because you can't pronounce Tjawonkher. Someone tells you the "j" is silent. Now you don't know who to cheer for.
Your brain hurts.
You walk down to the track. You pass a sprinter eating nachos between races.
You wonder how someone can eat nachos between races and not get sick.
You buy some nachos.
You see an Ohio High School Athletic Association official yelling at an athlete. Come to think of it, you see him yelling at quite a few athletes. You wonder if he coached girls basketball at Boardman in a former life.
You watch the boys 4x800 relay. You see Maplewood doing well. You decide you like Paul Moser's hair.
You eat your nachos.
Running easy
You watch West Branch's Lisa Davies run the 3200-meter. She wins. She's not sweating. She's not even out of breath.
You see East Palestine's Alex Casi, Maplewood's Christen Clemson and Boardman's Amber Bland. You remember they've all won state titles.
You wonder what it'd be like to win a state title. You decide that if you did, you'd give the reporter a lot of good quotes.
Especially if the reporter was that Joe Scalzo guy from the Vindicator. You like him. Even though his column picture makes him look like a 12-year-old grouch.
You see an OHSAA official telling a runner to take out her earrings. Then he tells another runner to take out his earrings. Then he tells someone to cover up the three centimeter swoosh on the lip of a turtleneck. And to remove his watch, and his ring, and to trim his mustache, and to tuck in his shirt.
You shrug. You buy some Laffy Taffy. You read the joke. You don't laugh. You tell yourself that it's not because you don't have a sense of humor.
You're just training to work for the OHSAA.
XJoe Scalzo is a sportswriter for The Vindicator. Write him at scalzo@vindy.com.