Another orphaned post…
April 17 2005
Boston Marathon
Here I am, in Hopkinton, MA, on the third Monday in April, waiting in a pen just around the corner from the start line. I’m in the ninth such pen, the one for those with numbers between 9 and 10,000. About mid pack, as we’re all seeded by qualifying time.
18 weeks ago, I rounded the corner in downtown Sacramento, having slogged almost a full circle around the Capitol. By that time, I was convinced my legs had turned to mud, and my brain to pulverized granite. While I didn’t find the “wall” at mile 16, 17, or 18, as I had always done before, this time it found me about mile 23. My glycogen ran out, and I went from 7:47-7:55 minute miles – BAM – to 9 minutes plus for the last three. Running at the same effort level, but dropping substantially slower, I knew I was running on fat fuel alone. I was sure my time would fall into the 3:30’s from the 3:22 I’d been looking at for the first 22 miles. I looked up at the clock – 3:26 and counting!!! WOW. I’m going to break 3:28, be under an 8 minute mile average, and SMASH the qualifying time. I cramped my way across the finish, and came to an abrupt halt. If you’d put a gun to my head and said “Run!” I would have croaked, “So shoot me!”
I inched my way thru the chip removal, the bag pick up, and the mylar blanket. I made it to the Capitol steps, and started to call Cheryl. At that point, I realised how I actually HAD made good on my promise to myself, and, for the first time ever after a race, broke down and cried. I gave it a good minute or two, then found a sunny spot, and rang her up.
Now, here I am. So much has happened in the past four months. For starters, I guess, my mother died just after Christmas. She was living with us the last 8 months of her life. She spent less than 30 hours in the hospital before her body finally gave out on her. She was surrounded by all her family. Her granddaughters were already there, and her daughter and grandson (my son and sister) got there 12 hours before she passed on. She was feisty and inquisitive literally right up to the end. My last words to her were a discussion about/reading from a book called “Long Distance” by a journalist who tried a year’s worth of endurance training (for cross country skiing) to experience and learn. During that year, his father died, and he found out not only what his body was capable of, but also why one would want to try such a thing, to begin with. His goal? “I want to gain an intuitive sense of my body and how it works. And at least once I want to give a supreme and complete effort in a race.” The author (Bill McKibben) quotes University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman, “Running is basically an absurd pastime on which to be exhausting oneself. But if you can find meaning in it, you can find meaning in another absurd pastime: life”. My efforts at racing, my mother’s efforts at living – and dying – they were entwined of course. And my next race would take me back to where my mother and I first met – the city of my birth, and the city of my college girlfriend. Where I hadn’t been (except for a generic business meeting) for 35 years. With my wife, who’d NEVER been there – a California girl, who didn’t really have an intuitive feel for this oldest of American Cities – where It All Began, 380 years ago.
Our first view of Boston was all underground. From the airport almost to our hotel, we traveled under the bay and the old part of town at rush hour in a seemingly endless tunnel. We emerged at the Charles River between Back Bay and Beacon Hill, and took another 20 minutes to go five blocks to the old Boston Police headquarters, recently converted into Jury’s Hotel. For some reason, the bar at this place has become THE hangout for the twenty-something office workers, and each night (Friday and Saturday), it was filled to overflowing at high decibel level with young Bostonians on the prowl.
Our tour did not include the local meat markets. I was more interested in recapturing some scenes from my youth – riding the T, seeing Faneuil Hall, Filene’s basement, Durgin Park, Cambridge, Harvard Square, and … Radcliffe. There, I would visit my high school/college girlfriend on weekends, in her dorm room and (later) apartments. She’d show me all over the city, and I could feel like any one of the 50- or 60,000 other college kids cramming Bean Town. To us, there was only the Boston for students. We were all clothed in Navy Pea Coats, or, later, Army fatigue jackets. Funny, because we spent so much time fighting the war making machinery. At the end of my college years, I went on to Southern California, and she stayed behind to study at Tufts. Fifteen years later, she became a cancer victim.
In her memory, I wanted to see once again her freshman dorm, where I had to sign her out and bring her back unharmed. By her junior year, they’d loosened up “in loco parentis” to where she could live in an apartment. She and her two roommates lived just upstairs from where “Love Story” (a maudlin movie from 1970) was filmed. She had a director’s chair with “Ryan O’Neal” (the male lead) in block letters on the back. I wanted to recapture the walks we’d taken all over Cambridge from the Radcliffe Commons to Harvard Square and back. But either my memory had gone foggy, or the town had changed too much. No landmarks were familiar, and I never could find the exact dorm, or apartment building in which I remembered listening to “Abbey Road” over and over.
On Tuesday, the day after Patriots’ Day, the day after the Marathon, Cheryl and I started our drive to visit Shaine, our middle-born, down in Connecticut. To get there, we hopped a cab to the airport, rented a car, and drove in the exact opposite direction, northeast, to Lynn Shore Drive, where I knew my parents had lived across the street from the ocean in a small apartment house. The day was crystal clear and perfect, warm but not hot; great for sightseeing, but of course not for running 26.2 miles. This section of the highway was about 2 kilometers long, and the only plausible buildings were located at the south end. I of course could not actually remember the place, as I’d left there when I was six months old (so I’ve been told). But I knew someone who might have the answer. I phoned a friend – my sister, actually
“Leigh, I’m standing here on Lynn Shore Drive looking at what I think is our old apartment house.” Why I believed that a place which must have been 30 years old in 1949 would still be around 55 years later, I don’t know. I was still around, so why not my first home? My sister just happened to have sitting on her shelf an old family photograph of the place with all of us clumped on a front porch next to my mother’s mother, who must have somehow come from Iowa to visit. We pieced together the clues and agreed on the correct grey three story structure. We snapped away with our cameras. The gentle Atlantic hissed a bit above the traffic moan. Cheryl fidgeted. I wanted to drive thru the north shore towns into Salem, locale of the hospital where I was actually born. I like telling people I was born in Salem. It’s reassuring to always get back some comment about witches. Cheryl is immune to this, of course, and wanted to see an actual witch house.
She was disappointed, of course, with the cheesy little re-enactment and desultory cramped trip down into a dungeon-like basement of some random renovated 17th century building (“not the actual Witch House, but an historically accurate re-creation in an original Salem settler’s home”). We moved on to the Lexington National Battlefield Park, where the Shot Heard Round the World was fired. We got the whole story: furtive meetings in the Old North Church, Paul Revere, his lanterns and midnight ride, the guerrilla ambushes on the retreating British slinking away from Concord’s armory, empty-handed, leading to the Siege of Boston the next winter, and the Declaration of Independence the next summer. The previous day being, after all, Patriots’ day, celebrating this very place and what happened there in 1775, it should come as little surprise that we showed up exactly 230 years after the events of that night.
I’ve always felt partial to our founding story, the plucky colonists resisting taxes, dumping tea, harassing the Redcoats, and producing the marvelous words of Thomas Jefferson, “When in the course of human events … we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is that pursuit of happiness that has most affected me. Any old government can commit to protecting life and liberty, or even property. But how many care about my HAPPINESS!? Who knew that trying to have a good time in life could produce such a powerhouse of a country? Or lead to the 109th running of the Boston Marathon?
Yes, the Marathon. The one I had just wanted to get into, then tried to train for while getting real serious about an Ironman. Can’t be done. To represent well in a marathon requires (for me, at least), 12-16 weeks of 45-55 mile weeks, 5 days a week running, speed, tempo and distance work, and enough rest in between the training efforts to recover for the next one. To do well in an Ironman requires excessive amounts of biking, 8-14 hours a week or more, and easier on the running, mainly low speed stuff with a lot of “running off the bike” (runs right after biking). I had to pick one: train up to my Sacramento pace for running for Boston, or train to a Kona-qualifying level for Coeur d’Alene at the end of June, nine weeks away. Being a triathlete first, and a runner as an adjunct to that, the choice was grim, but easy: bag Boston. On the grand scale of Life Achievements for me, Kona’s Ironman triathlon world championship is at the pinnacle, with Boston being a little cherry on top – fun to eat at the start, but quickly forgotten once the REAL sundae is engaged.
Which means, I had about 16 miles in me, not 26.2. I had hoped to parlay that into a 3:45 marathon (my age-group’s qualifying time), but global warming got in the way of that goal. By 1 PM, reports were the temperature was up to 79F along the route, not ideal running weather. The bright sun, and leafless trees didn’t help any. I would have preferred 50-55, and misty. I had fun anyway, mesmerized by the crowds, the screams at Wellesley, the antics of the runners and the spectators, the beer guzzlers and Red Sox fans once we hit the city. The only time I’ve seen more people in a day was biking from Malibu to Newport Beach on a sunny summer Sunday near the end of our week long California Coast bike trip. But it was a struggle and, in the end, just a very good excuse for a week-long New England vacation.
We finished up seeing my older daughter at college. Cheryl had visited her several times, but I had never been there to see Shaine.
Well, that’s not exactly true. I spent 3 and a half years there from 1966 thru 1969. For some reason, and no fault of mine, I’m sure, Shaine had fallen in love with the idea of going there, after visiting during a junior year tour of Northeast colleges. She has never regretted that decision, and likes being there even more now than when she started. Of course, her boyfriend Thomas, loyal to her these past two years, may play a part in that. Along with all her other friends.
I prowled the campus, looking for all my old dorm rooms. For some reason, all the trees looked bigger, and everything else looked smaller, and older. Except the sports complex, which wasn’t there yet when I attended, and therefore seemed huge and new. I found old photos of me on the swim team, and looked at the track team picture containing (all together) Ambi Burfoot, Bill Rodgers (both winners of the Boston Marathon) and Jeff Galloway, now a famous writer and trainer of the masses for long-distance running. Who knew then how famous and influential in the world of long-distance running those three would become? At the time the picture was snapped, they were all just second stringers, unsung and unknown, until 1968, when Ambi surprised us all by actually winning Boston. To us, he was just the guy who spent every afternoon running endlessly on the huge grass quadrangle surrounding the football field.
Shaine took us out to an Indian restaurant with Thomas. It was great to see her in her own grown-up setting in the same place where I’d spent college, but not re-tracing my steps at all. It’s like getting to grow up all over again, but without the heartbreak.