From The World Cross-Country Championship Archives- The Day Boomer Cadger Got Revenge

From The World Cross-Country Championship Archives- The Day Boomer Cadger Got Revenge

By Bart Webber

Boomer Cadger ran like the wind, was like the wind. I have tried to emphasize that in the various archival captions I have presented of late surrounding my own youth as a cross-country runner running up against a rival from North Quincy High School about twenty miles from North Adamsville where I grew up. I have also tried to cut him down to size a bit although not too much I hope since for most of my career I bit his dust. The only reason all of this even came up was that a few of us from the old days were having drinks one night at Jimmy Jack’s Pub and we got into the inevitable “who was the best you ever saw” in various high school sports in our time.       

Most of those present were “real” sports players like Tiger McPhee a football player who naturally picked our own Thunder Thornton from our high school who led the Warriors to a state divisional championship. Others like Bees Devine picked scoring machine Slim Davis from Reading High in basketball. I, of course, picked Boomer Cadger from main rival North Quincy even if with some still present resentment. When I went into the reasons the others were surprised about what I had learned about Boomer recently from his high school friend John Franklin who was something like the class historian at his school. John had told me that Boomer (real name William, Bill only recently learned from John) had been training on the sand at Adamsville Beach in the summer. This technique learned from the great mile world record-holder Australian Herb Elliott and his monster of a coach. It only gets more testing-apparently Boomer also subscribed to the great triple gold medal long distance Olympic champion Emil Zatopek’s regime of interval sprint runs, many of them to build up speed and endurance.              

According to Franklin Boomer did this on his own since his coach was some old wino who was just serving his teaching time grabbed since he was a World War II veteran with preference hanging around bothering young girls looking up their dresses and who knows what else. Connected but clueless about training track and cross-country runners. John said Boomer was always reading sports magazines so must have picked it up then when track and running got more play than today.

There is what I do know having raced against Boomer in both cross-country and track. Whatever drove him to excellent (or just to get out of what was a horrible home life) happened after eighth grade. You see I beat Boomer in the mile (the longest junior high school kids could go in sanctioned events) that year in a regional meet. Whipped his ass. Then the next fall in a regional cross-country meet he blew me away; I ate his dust. Thereafter he improved always more than I did and so      

this residual moan and groan. He would go on to a fifth-place finish in the world junior cross-country championships and then not much else. But he was like the wind in his prime. I wonder now whether that time I beat him in eighth grade didn’t spur him on, didn’t get him to the training magazines.