Did you ever go to a track meet? I’m not suggesting it or anything. They used to call what is now termed track & field, athletics and a day at a meet, watching people generally get out of breath and toss around weighted objects isn’t for everyone. I’ve been to high school meets (you too probably) and professional indoor meets and pretty epic dual meets between two collegiate teams, but I was not prepared for the alien life forms I encountered at a meet one day not so very long ago.

I got asked along with some other classmates to help out a group of people affiliated with Track & Field News during the U.S. Track & Field Trials in the run-up to the ’84 L.A. Olympics. We ushered them between the Coliseum where the events were taking place and their accommodations on the campus of USC. I was a journalism student at the time and the supposed journalistic hook was that we were to help them track down statistics and backstory research and, ultimately, assist them in getting their stories written and posted for publication.

These people, these track and field people, were singularly focused, freakishly similar physically and odd in a way someone who grew up alone in the forest is odd. They all seemed to be from Oregon, because way before Nike, people in Oregon knew it was their Oregonian destiny to run in the rain and that running and splashing through puddles was to Oregonians what horsey riding is to Texans and corn-shucking is to Nebraskans.

A huge herd of them occupied one whole section of the stadium, and they were in their seats before the first event of the day and until the final javelin was thrown late at night. Each and every one them was attired, not for attending a track meet, but for running in one. They sported the latest, uber-expensive running shoes, most looking like they were right out of the box. They had on those way short, thin running shorts, telling the world they needed to be aerodynamic at all times, and tight-fitting T-shirts and/or a warm-up jacket that was surely the top half of a coordinated, name-brand sweatsuit.

Around the white neck of one and all hung an expensive, multibuttoned stopwatch. I swear they were timing guys throwin’ the shot and the skinny girls competing in the pole vault, but what really seemed to float their collective boats were the distance-running events. Before the start of every heat, from the 10,000 meters to the waddling heel-toe, heel-toe of the walk races, they huddled together, exchanging muffled murmurs like Japanese on vacation. When the starting gun fired so did 179 stopwatches.

I wanted to tell them that, since these events were kind of a big deal, that they had officials timing all this stuff and that after the race they’d make the times public. Come to find out that for a track groupie, working the stopwatch was analogous to a baseball fan keeping score. Even though the time for every runner and the splits for every lap were being played out in real-time on the stadium scoreboard (and would be captured for posterity in tomorrow’s newspaper just like the baseball boxscore) these track & field weirdos wanted, needed, to time shit for themselves. As a well-adjusted observer of mainstream sports, I guess I didn’t get it, I just wasn’t in touch with my inner Oregonian.

Like gossips on a party line, after the race was run, they’d shake their heads, compare stopwatches, scribble stuff down in special programs and notepads provided by Track & Field News and generally act in the giddy way that normal people respond to a fifteen-minute guitar solo by Jimmy Page. They continued this obsessive “witnessing” for the entire fortnight of the trials, and when each session ended I watched them trudge back to the hotel, emotionally drained and physically spent as if they attended an all-night old-time Christian revival to save their everlasting souls.

I never wrote a single word, never really did anything even remotely journalistic, but what I think I was supposed to learn was how sporting events are covered by the sporting press (and the Oregon track & field nuts). What I actually took away is that Americans spend most of life looking for a cult to attach themselves to and they’ll willingly don the uniform and march with the pack, especially if they get to have a stopwatch.