Fayetteville Observer Sports
By Stephen Schramm - Staff Writer
The Fayetteville Observer
BUIES CREEK - Evan Darm doesn't like the sight of blood. The Campbell senior distance runner admitted he doesn't have the stomach for it.
So when, minutes after his last college race, his team's trainer told him not to look at his mangled left foot, he's not sure why he did.
Covered in blood and dirt, it looked like roadkill.
"I was like 'Oh, gosh!'" Darm said.
After his shoe came off early in Saturday's Big South Conference men's 5,000-meter final at High Point University, Darm went the rest of the way with just one shoe. Leaving bloody footprints with each stride of the final laps, Darm suffered second- and third-degree burns on the bottom of his foot.
"I couldn't imagine running one lap without a shoe," Campbell coach Michael Kelly said. "The heat from the track and the rough surface. It's like running on sandpaper barefoot. It's just ... Gah! I couldn't imagine doing that."
Finishing seventh in 15:19.09, the race wasn't the finest of Darm's career. But with his foot battered and his mettle unbroken, it's the most telling.
"I'm definitely more of a lead-by-example guy," Darm said. "As I was going, I was like, 'I've got to finish.' That way, people aren't going to think about dropping out. That's not an option in a championship race. What the team needs is what should be done. I was willing to do that.'"
The 5,000 meters came late in the meet - Darm had already taken third in the 10,000 meters, so the runners were tired and edgy. With it being the final race of the conference season, the field was also extremely familiar with one another. The stakes were high and so was the tension.
When the race began, the runners were packed tightly. In moments like this, contact isn't uncommon.
At one point in the second lap, another runner stepped on the back of Darm's left foot.
"I don't know who it was," Darm said. "That's probably for the best."
His black and orange Nike Air Zoom Victories were laced tightly. With narrow feet, Darm knots the laces five times on top, loops them underneath his foot and ties them once more. His teammates give him grief about it.
But when his foot got hit, the back of the shoe was knocked loose.
"The race was so tight, and I was stuck on the inside rail, I couldn't go anywhere," Darm said.
Darm raced a short distance more with his shoe hanging on. But when a handful of runners near the front of the pack sped up, forcing the rest of the field to pick up the pace, Darm knew the shoe wasn't going to make it.
As he passed the scoreboard on his fourth lap, it flew off. At first, he didn't think much of it.
"I'd heard of people running without a shoe before, I didn't think it would be a problem," Darm said.
For a while, it wasn't. Seeing Darm pounding away with his usual stride, Kelly didn't notice anything had happened until someone pointed it out to him.
As for Darm, he was focused on scoring. The Camels were in third place in the team standings. If he could finish third, which was where he thought he'd likely end up, it could help boost his team up one spot.
But with two laps to go, he began to sense something wasn't right.
"My cadence was starting to get a bit rough," Darm said. "I looked down right before the last lap and noticed that my foot was covered in blood and blood was spurting off. At this point, I was like, 'Well, I'm one lap away from finishing, there's no other option.'"
Hard-earned resolve
After a difficult college career, Darm's resolve was hard-earned.
As a sophomore, he collapsed one night after a grueling training run, ending up with a concussion. Kelly said it took six weeks before he was back to his old self.
As a junior, he was slowed by a stress fracture in his leg.
His senior season had been his best yet, finishing seventh in the conference cross country meet and setting personal records in the 3,000 and 5,000 in the indoor season as well as the 10,000 outdoors.
With a reputation as one of the team's hardest workers, those in the Campbell program reveled in his success.
"All these other coaches were like, 'When did Evan get so good?' " Kelly said. "We had to say, 'No. He's been good for two years, we just kept having things ruin his season.' "
With the condition of his foot worsening, Darm wasn't going to let something else stop him. Quitting never entered his mind.
"This is the end of my college career, I knew I had to get across that line one more time for my team and the hard work that we do every day," Darm said.
Once he crossed the line, he fell into the arms of a team trainer, who pulled him into the infield. After taking one look at Darm's foot, he called for a cart. Darm saw that there was blood on top of his foot. He could tell by the looks on the faces of those around him that the bottom was much worse.
"People were walking by saying, 'Oh, my gosh, look at that kid's foot!' " Darm said. "... Someone said 'Do you think he's going to lose it?' I was like, 'Don't tell me that!' "
At the track, the trainer carefully cleaned the foot, picking out pieces of material from the track and small rubber pellets from High Point's artificial field. Next, he went to a nearby urgent care facility where a doctor cleaned the wound again and gave him a tetanus shot.
Before long, he left on crutches, his foot wrapped in gauze.
Darm graduated from Campbell earlier this month. He's headed back home to suburban Chicago today and hopes to soon start down the path toward a coaching career.
His big toe is still black, his showers now involving two trash bags duct taped around his foot, and he's going to spend the next month on crutches. But he's already got the makings of one pretty epic motivational speech.
"At one point, it'll be a great teaching lesson," Darm said.
Staff writer Stephen Schramm can be reached at schramms@fayobserver.com or at 910-486-3536.
