Chapter One, Part 3: How To Describe My Dad

One thing that some people who knew my dad may not know about him is that he was very competitive, mostly with himself. He regularly set goals for himself in different areas of his life, probably most often in the sport of running.  His objective for events varied from race to race, whether it was to be among the top finishers, to run the race in a certain time, or to complete a race that was unlike one he had done before, like an ultra-marathon, an adventure race, or a triathlon.

Even with an objective in mind, though, Dad always tried to help other people who were also competing in the races in which he ran.  He often cheered people on in the middle of a race while he was running.  He thoroughly appreciated the spirit of competition and admired people who overcame adversity and challenges to rise to the top, especially when their success wasn’t expected.  On more than one occasion, Dad won a trophy or a medal in a race and then gave it to someone else who had competed in the race but who hadn’t won, often a child who had finished a race for the first time ever.

When I was a teenager, Dad took a couple of guys from my high school and me to a state park in Mississippi to compete in a small-town road race.  We left early on a Saturday morning, and, as we drove the last mile or so to the starting line, we saw a teenaged boy walking along the side of the road in basketball shorts, walking barefooted and carrying spiked track shoes.  The guys in the car and I laughed when we passed the boy because he seemed so poorly prepared for a race that was about to be run on a paved road.  Dad didn’t laugh, though; instead, he said, “You never know who’ll get the last laugh.”  We found out how true that was after the race when we found out that the boy had finished in second place overall, running on Dad’s heels with his spikes clicking on the pavement for the entire 5-mile race. 

From the time I started running, Dad often found out about races that were coming up in the area and registered me as well as himself in those events.  He and I ran in a total of roughly 100 events together over the years. One of his routines before a race was to size up the competition for himself and for me; in my competitive days, he gave me an honest assessment of how he thought I would fair in the field and if it seemed like I had “a shot at placing,” or finishing in the top three spots overall or in my age division.  Whenever possible, we drove the course ahead of time, with him pointing out any big hills or sharp turns along the way because, as he always said, those were the places to “make a move” to pass other runners just ahead on the route. In every race, he finished before me and then ran back to find me on the course, to cheer me on and give me advice, especially if he saw me struggling.  Once he had seen that I was ok, he would run ahead to the finish line to wait there for me to make it in. 

One thing that I think my dad learned from me after I had finished running competitively in high school is that there is a sense of pride and accomplishment that can come from just finishing a race, if that is one’s objective.  When I left home to go to college after high school, I went from running six days a week on a strict training program to running when I felt like it and when I could fit it into my schedule, a pattern which continued into my adulthood.  Dad told me many times that a runner has to “make time to run,” but he saw my priorities change and understood that running did not carry the same weight for me as it did for him. 

When I was in training to run my first half-marathon many years ago, I asked my dad if he would go on a long run with me so I could work on pacing before the race.  On the morning of the run, my brother-in-law drove Dad and me out into the country and dropped us off ten miles out of town so we could run back on mostly farm roads with limited traffic.  

I remember that I was wearing a running shirt that day that said "Run the mile you're in." After we'd gotten out of the car and started on the run, Dad looked at my shirt and said, "I don't get it - what else would you do besides running the mile you're in?"  That turned the conversation into a Who's On First-type of exchange that last for several minutes, until I said, "I think it's referring to the way that a person can choose to be grateful for what he has instead of thinking that the grass is always greener or that someone else is luckier than he is."  He thought for a second and then said, "I just don't get why somebody wouldn't do that, because, really, if you think you're lucky, then you are!"  

And that, in essence, was my dad.

Chapter One, Part 2: The Fabric of Our Lives

Not long after my youngest sister Nancy was born, my mom crocheted an afghan blanket that ended up being kept on the back of the couch in the den.  It was half decoration, half functional item, and it was part of the landscape of the various houses in which we lived over the course of the next twenty years or so.  The colors of the yarn in the blanket were those of popular décor back in the 1970’s, mostly different shades of browns.  Looking at the blanket, though, it was easy to spot the one color in the mix that really stood out, not because it took up the most space in the pattern but because it was the brightest, a brilliant shade of orange, like the tip of a flame in a campfire that has been burning for awhile. 

The orange in that blanket is like the sport of running has been in my family over the years, something that stood out amongst whatever else was happening at the time, a mainstay or maybe even a theme sorts.  Not everybody in my family is a runner, but everyone in the family knows about running and appreciates the talent and the dedication behind it, because of what we assimilated through my dad’s enthusiasm for it. 

My dad started running when he was in elementary school; he said that he liked to race the bus to his house after school.  In high school, he was a competitive middle-distance runner on his school’s track team, and he was awarded an athletic scholarship to Troy State (now Troy University) in Troy, Alabama, after graduation from high school.  He continued to excel as a runner through his tour in Vietnam, which started a year later, and then again as a college student on the GI Bill at Auburn University. 

After he graduated from college, my dad got a job with Cook Industries, a company for which he worked for the next ten years, a time during which the company required my dad and my family to move many times.  Through it all and in the decades that followed, my dad ran, for sport, for social reasons, and for health and fitness.  I heard him say many times that he loved to run because it made it feel better, because he got to meet all kinds of people and see all kinds of things through doing it, and because he liked to have a goal.  “Plus,” he almost always added with a smile, “That way I can drink a few beers without worrying about putting on weight!”

Dad called on me to join him as a runner when I was in the fourth grade.  I’d run laps around the track here and there while I was waiting for him to finish his workout a few times in the past as a young child, but it wasn’t until I was in late elementary school that he thought I was ready for an actual training program.  With the two of us in training, there were always smelly running clothes and shoes and endless bottles of Gatorade around the house.  As a family, our weekends began to center around road races in the area in which we ran; occasionally my sisters joined in the effort too with Mom backing us up as Head Cheerleader/Nurse/Logistics Manager. This continued throughout my middle school and high school years, and then, when I became more of a recreational runner during my college years, it extended to the running days of my sister Nancy, who was also competitive in cross-country and track during her time in high school. 

During this time, Dad was typically running in excess of 100 miles per week, often in training for a marathon or some other big race in which he was set to compete.  Sometimes we cheered him on from the sidelines as spectators, and sometimes we joined him in his running efforts, whether training for an event or running in a race, always with him running along with persistence and triumph etched into the expression his face and a can-do attitude that, in victory and in defeat, through challenges and transitions, eventually also became one of the strands of the fabric of our lives as a family.

Prologue: A Little Background

It seems fitting to me that I am sitting here writing this with the sound of the Olympics on the TV in the background. My dad loved the Olympic Games, more than anyone else I know. He especially loved the events in the Summer Games, but he loved the Winter Games too. He always did his research well before the Games started, reading the personal stories of many of the athletes and deciding ahead of time which ones he wanted to “pull for,” as he put it. 

I don’t know why he didn’t ever try out for the Senior Olympics.  I feel sure he would have qualified; maybe he always thought there would still be time to do that on down the road.  He used to half-joke that if he ever became disabled he wanted to compete in the Paralympic Games; whenever he talked about the possibility of incurring a life-altering injury, though, it was always with the subtext that if something incapacitating actually happened it would be an injury he sustained from an accident that occurred while he was running or biking.

I need to give a little background to this: my dad, an avid runner since before I was born, was involved in lots of accidents over the years related to his workout regiment. So many that my family had become somewhat desensitized to it after so many near-misses and even a few "hits." My dad was hit by a car while running twice and three times while biking, not to mention the many emergencies like falls, sports injuries, and other things like heat exhaustion he'd had. Like a cat with nine lives, though, somehow Dad always ended up ok after something happened to him, although a few times he'd ended up with broken bones and needing stitches or at least debris picked out of his skin as a result.

It always seemed odd to me that Dad never saw his own toughness, his resilience, his extraordinariness, especially in the midst of his athletic endeavors. I remember once when I was about eight years old, I was playing in the front yard of our house when an unfamiliar vehicle pulled up in our driveway.  Dad got out of the car, thanked the driver, and turned around to face me.  He had blood dripping profusely down the side of his head.  

"What happened?" I asked.

"I was running across a 2-lane bridge and an RV that didn't have enough room to get over side-swiped me," he said casually. I didn't even know what side-swiped meant, but I figured it wasn't anything good based on the blood that kept coming and coming.  

"I was going to keep running, but I knew your mom would be upset if I didn't come straight home to get this cleaned up," he said, as he casually headed into the house.  

When I was in the seventh grade, my dad was running a marathon and, in third place 18 miles into the race, he was hit by an old lady driving a car who hadn't seen him because the sun was shining in her eyes. Her car hit him from behind, and he flew up over her windshield and landed in the road. She was screaming so much that he, while lying in the street with his bone sticking through the skin of his leg, had to try to calm her down until the police got there a few minutes later.

He was taken by ambulance to the hospital, where we met him after the police found us on the course, waiting at the 20-mile mark, where Dad had told us to wait to cheer for him.  When we got to the hospital, he wasn't at all focused on the pain from the two compound fractures in his leg but instead was concerned because the force of being hit by the car had knocked off one of his running shoes, which he wanted back, and because he wouldn't be able to finish the race.  

The orthopedic surgeon told him that he would be in a cast for several months and would not be able to run again for at least six months.  Four weeks later, Dad used a kitchen knife to cut the cast off his leg and was out on the road again, training for his next race.

And then there was the Big Bike Wreck that happened a few years before he got sick. Dad was on a long training ride, probably 75 miles or more, and was riding by himself on country roads in Missouri.  He usually didn't take his cell phone with him on bike rides, but for some reason he had brought it along on this one, even using it to call Mom right before he left to tell her he would be gone for a few hours.

At some point on the ride, a guy driving a pick-up truck wasn't paying attention and didn't see Dad on his bike in the road in front of him. The driver hit Dad from behind, and, again, Dad flew over the top of the vehicle and landed in the road, this time with his feet still clipped into the pedals of the bike.  He landed very hard on his back and immediately found that he couldn't move his arms or legs at all.  The driver had stopped but hadn't gotten out of the truck yet; Dad told us later that all he could do was lie in the road and yell for the guy to call 9-1-1.

Here's the really crazy part of the story: apparently, when Dad was thrown to the ground by the impact, his cell phone got bumped and the redial button was hit. Mom thought it was odd when she saw on her phone's Caller I.D. that Dad was calling back so soon after he'd started his bike ride, and when she answered, all she could hear was Dad screaming for someone to call 9-1-1 and saying that he couldn't move his arms or legs. She kept him on the line and then used another phone to call 9-1-1. She made it to the scene of the accident just as Dad was being loaded into the ambulance, and, by the time they made it to the hospital, Dad was moving his extremities again, although he had a major case of Road Rash and was understandably sore. He didn't even spend the night in the hospital that night, and - predictably - he was back on the bike within a couple of weeks.  Time and time again, he toughed it out, picking himself up and heading right back out on the road.

“I hope that when I go, I go out running,” I heard him say many times over the years, and, like everyone else who ever heard those words come out of his mouth, I knew he was serious. The strange thing is that that’s pretty much what ended up happening, although not at all even close to the way that anyone who knew my dad would have ever thought things would go down.

Circling the Drain

One of the many things that caught me off-guard about the grief process is how completely exhausting it is.  At first, I thought my fatigue was the culmination of the sleeplessness that came from caring for a critically ill person who, as in our case, almost never slept.  My mom, my sisters, and I were so far in the red on sleep it would have been understandable if that alone caused us to sleep for a week solid after my dad went on ahead.

But in researching and in learning first-hand about the grief process, I've found that grief itself is a cause of exhaustion, both physical and emotional.  Grief is hard work, whether we realize it or not; it's taxing in so many ways and on so many levels, even while we are sleeping or doing routine things like showering or driving to work.  

Probably the most physically taxing thing I've ever done in my life, besides coping with grief, has been running a marathon. Each time I've done that, I've trained for months in advance, I've read about what I should be doing to make it to the finish line, I've put effort into visualizing myself completing the event, and I've been in very good condition going into the race.  None of those things were true going into my dad's illness or his death - or being plunged into the quicksand of grief that followed.  In fact, another thing I've realized that actually contributes to the fatigue and the sense of overwhelm is that, in grief, there is no finish line.  The emotions that come with grief may seem as if they are easier to take or even fading over time, but what's actually happening is that the person who is grieving is becoming more adept at tolerating the assault as they become more seasoned or even more hardened.  

For the first six months or so after my dad died, I tried my damnedest to dream about him; I felt (and still feel) such a desperate need to have any kind of contact with him.  I had a few dreams about him, which I wrote about here and here, but then I went quite awhile with nothing.  My conjuring powers were apparently shot, at least for that time period. What ended up happening after that instead was that I started dreaming that someone was trying to kill me, obviously a very disturbing and terrifying experience, one that easily reminded me - not so coincidentally - of how I felt in Real Life starting the second my dad got sick.

I've heard it said that dreams are often the mind's way of helping us to work through our troubles; I'm not sure that applies to this situation, though: I wanted to lose the feelings of powerlessness and terror and injustice, not to experience them again and again as I did each time a dream like that came to me.  I sometimes wonder if my brain was trying to desensitize me to that feeling - because, as I've learned from what happened with my dad - that's life, it's going to happen, and no amount of training or learning or otherwise preparing can actually help when things happen that cause the grief to bear down on us; I think the best we can do is to accept that it's going to happen and to have enough hope and faith that we will get through it, somehow.  

Father's Day 2013

This one's not the first Father's Day I've spent with my dad, but it's hitting me hard anyway.  There is so much stress and turmoil going on in my life these days related to my job that I don't feel like I am in "top shape" when it comes to being prepared to cope with the grief that still so often catches me by surprise, either with its timing or its intensity or both.

I looked through some old pictures today and found so many of my dad doing things he loved to do, whether it was sitting in a lawn chair in the sun reading the paper, running, sitting on the beach, or spending time with his family.  In all of them, he looks happy and healthy and as if he is perfectly content, and for that I am so grateful, except for a song that keep playing in my head:

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THAT SONG ...

Today I found myself thinking about how on the day after my dad had died, I stood in the shower in the guest bathroom of my parents' house, crying and crying, feeling so much like my heart was breaking that I thought I needed to hold my hand over my chest to keep it together.  Never had I imagined - or even thought to imagine - that a day like that day was coming, or like the days like the ones I figured were still to come.  I had no idea how I was going to get through even that first day without my dad there physically with me, much less through the rest of my life.  I felt like I was falling down a well in slow motion, and I knew that at some point I would seriously need to reconsider my world view and, in essence, myself.

So many times, I've thought back to the last night that my dad was in the hospital and to the way that he insisted on having all the lights turned out and for Jennifer and me to be on either side of him as he tried and tried to sleep.  I remember how he reached out in the darkness to grab my hand and Jennifer's without even looking, and, recognizing the trust, the love, and the vulnerability in that move, I quietly started to cry there beside him in the dark; I was so grateful that he was so sure that we were right there with him.    

What I wouldn't give for just one more day with him.  I wouldn't even care what we did together; I just have so much to tell him and to talk to him about.  It's like I'm the one now reaching out into the dark to grab a hand to hold, and I'm so grateful that I have people who love me (and tolerate me) enough to serve that purpose, but it's still something that's so much tougher that I could have ever imagined.

Happy Father's Day to the man who was the perfect father for me.
I miss you and love you more than I can adequately express.

How It Feels

I didn't go into politics - or even business, for that matter - for a reason; one that, if you know me, you probably already know: I do not have a poker face.  I am not at all good at, as they say on Saturday Night Live, strategery.  I don't like office gossip or sneakiness or favorite-playing.  The way I prefer things to be in my work place is when, as my dad used to say, it is what it is - because what else would it be??

Unfortunately for me and for a whole lot of other people who live and/or work in the same school district I do, though, we have been involuntarily drawn into a situation over the past couple of years that has come to involve a lot of the undesirable aforementioned things.

As a result of the citizens of the city voting to give up their school district and the resulting imposed adoption of that system by the county school system, people in my area are talking about budgets and politics and outsourcing and other things that have regrettably become a very large part of the equation in public education.  One thing I haven't heard much talk about in meetings or in the media, though, is how it feels to have been swept into this maelstrom.

This has been the most difficult, most stressful year of my nineteen-year long career with the county school district.  I am proud of the efforts of many of my coworkers as we've entered into what can only accurately be described as a battle.  At times, I've felt sure that I want to do everything in my power to stay with the district, to continue the work I've started, and to try to control what I can in hopes of protecting my coworkers and friends - and ultimately, the students.  But, at other times, increasingly as the actual date of the change approaches, I feel as if I am in danger of going down with the ship.  Like a lot of my coworkers, my health and my personal life - and my overall happiness - have suffered a lot during this past school year because of the impending "merger" - a term, by the way, that really gets to a lot of us on the receiving end of the punches.  To merge means to join forces, to unite, or to team up, and to me that implies that an action is taking place between two roughly equal bodies, a situation which, in my opinion, this is not.  Always a fan of running metaphors, I liken what's going on here to a runner that has dropped out of a race who later asks an accomplished runner if he can train with the better runner.  One of them needs improvement; one doesn't.  One needs help; the other was fine on his own - and, in fact, is likely to be slowed down if the less skilled runner joins him on training runs, even though the faster runner may still be willing to take on the job of coaching the slower one.  It isn't a merger; it's more of an adoption.

In the district of people who did not get a vote in this decision, our leaders and our administrators are scared for their own jobs, for their livelihood actually, and it feels like there's an "every-man-for-himself" mentality that I have never before felt in this job.  Watching the process unfold in slow motion over the course of this school year has felt a bit like Chinese water torture, and in many ways I am glad to see the year come to a close, although I feel a distinct sadness at the same time that my job and this school system - both things that I have loved and have put my heart into since I was 25 years old - will certainly never be the same after end of this school year.  

Everybody knows that educators in this country generally don't make a lot of money.  They don't win Oscars or Pulitzer Prizes or get big raises or promotions or even get much recognition by their bosses or their "customers," unless, of course, a scandal of some sort is featured in the media.  The rewards we get come quietly and often only if we are looking hard for them, but most of us are lucky (and diligent) enough to see them, and we are glad to have this as our chosen career.  We realize that there is no other profession that would allow us to have such a part in shaping the minds of children in this way and to impact their future on such a personal level.  Teaching is about so much more than teaching - and I don't mean politics and jerrymandering and elbow-rubbing; it's about the power of relationships.  It's about the connection that can be made between one person and another person or between a person and a lesson, a link that can only be developed when the learner knows that the teacher cares about him or her.  When a mutual respect has formed between the teacher and the student, that's when the best kind of learning occurs.

But in an environment when educators are scared for their jobs, when school staff members know that they and/or their coworkers and friends may end up on the chopping block at any moment, when program cuts aren't a "maybe" but a "when," it's hard to be positive every day.  It's hard to focus on the lessons that need to be taught - and on the children who are the most important part of the equation.  From either side of the argument about what's fair or who deserves what from the limited funding available in the district now, one thing is for sure: teaching and learning have been hindered, and that doesn't feel good to any of us.

This is mostly a blog about grief and perspective, but I guess it's also about enduring and overcoming life's challenges, and I guess that's what has to be done in this situation as well.

Memories and Exit Ramps

Traveling along the highway of life with a luggage rack loaded with grief, it often seems there are endless reasons and opportunities for taking an exit ramp, as situations and conversations bring forth memories from previous experiences related to pain and loss.  I try to keep my eyes focused only on the space illuminated by the headlights directly in front of me, but sometimes things on the side of the road or off in the distance catch my eye, and looking at and even following those sightings cannot be avoided. There are lots of things along the way that I didn't think I was going to have to face - some of which I hadn't even be aware before I'd traveled this very road - and, once I was and once I did, that we didn't think I was nearly strong enough to traverse. The triggers that force me to exit for pit stops can come from varying sources - reading about or hearing about someone else with a similar story, being asked for advice related to my own struggle, or even just watching others about whom I care go through a trial like my family has since the time when my dad got sick.

Interestingly, I think, at some of those exits are emotions that are strangely unlike those I felt while I was beginning my own journey down this rough part of the road, in this construction zone of sorts.  I remember the feelings of powerlessness, sadness, confusion, and anger from during that time, but, looking at it at this point through my "things may appear smaller than actual size" rearview mirror, especially if I am able to offer anything at all to someone else from this vantage point, makes me feel strong and useful, ... a Silver Lining I suppose, one that I hope translates into a benefit for someone other than just myself. 

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been slowed in the right-hand lane as I've watched my friend and her family bring her father to hospice care on Friday two weeks ago and then say goodbye to him on the following Wednesday, the exact time frame that my family had with my dad.  I remember how in my family's situation there was so much to do, an overwhelming amount of things in fact, and then there was nothing.  I know all too well the pain and the helplessness and the feelings of such utter loss and despair that they were feeling as they prepared for the funeral, and I remember how I thought things couldn't get any harder but then how in many ways it seemed like they did after I went home after the memorial service and found my job and other responsibilities waiting for me.  After my dad's illness and his death, it felt like the emptiness, the loneliness, and all the other emotions were something with which I didn't think I could cope or even survive, but somehow I found a way, as I know my friend and others in her family will too.

In addition to having the perspective from inside the rawness of the grief, I now have somewhat of an idea of what it felt like for those around me in those early days of peregrination; it feels like running in place or maybe like being on a scavenger hunt of sorts.  There is so little that can be done to ease the pain of those who have been forced to enter onto this highway; the best I can try to do is just to ease off the gas pedal in my own vehicle to let them merge into my lane, to give them a nod of acknowledgement, to let them know that they are not alone.

"There is a sacredness in tears" ~ Washington Irving

Thoughts on The Boston Marathon

I grew up watching, reading, and listening to news about the Boston Marathon; as a runner and a fan of the competitive part of the sport for nearly 35 years, I've always loved following the stories from races for both the top contenders and the back-of-the-packers.  As a current back-of-the-packer myself, I know that every runner has a story, and, especially for big events like marathons, every finish impacts each participant in many different ways.  

The marathon is the apex of the sport for lots of runners, the quintessential goal, the quest of the most dedicated amongst us.  And the Boston Marathon, or "The Boston" or just "Boston," as it is typically called in the athletic world, is the pinnacle of all marathons.  It's the world's oldest ongoing marathon, with this being its 117th year, and it's probably the world's most well-known road-racing event.  Boston is always run on Patriots' Day, the third Monday in April, which, unlike the majority of other marathons in the U.S., means that it's always held on a Monday.  Because of the many hills along the course and the tendency for the temperatures to soar into the 80-degree range during the event, the race is considered to be one of the more challenging marathons in our country.  The Boston Marathon is the only marathon in the U.S. that has a qualifying time requirement for entry, based on the gender and age of each runner, with the general rules stating that a runner must have completed a "qualifying marathon" within an 18 month period prior to Boston.  As a result of the strict qualifying requirements and the difficulty factor, Boston Marathon runners are generally revered by all other runners, or at least by those of us who have been involved in the sport for awhile. 

A masterpiece about Dad's first Boston by my sister, Jennifer

Growing up, I remember hearing my dad talking about Boston as if it were the Holy Grail of running.  Even before he had run it the first time in 1979 at the age of 35, I remember him telling my sisters and me about the course, which runs through eight different towns and finishes on Copley Square in Boston.  In the months leading up to his Boston debut, I remember him worrying aloud about Heartbreak Hill, the most well-known challenge in the race, even after he'd run up and down the levee alongside the Mississippi River literally hundreds of times as part of the 100+ miles per week he ran for months before the race.  I remember my grandfather, my dad's dad, coming to stay with my sisters and me for a few days while my parents went to Boston that April, and I remember my mom calling us after the race to tell us how Dad had done (his finish time was 2:46:04).  I remember standing in the kitchen of our house with my sisters, cheering through the phone line for my dad and then chanting his finish place over and over, so many times that the number was forever lodged in my brain.  In fact, one day, during the time when my dad was sick, we were talking about the many races he had run over the years, and he was surprised when I told him that I still remembered what place he finished in at his first Boston:  1,196th, which put him in the top 15% of finishers that year.

There are around half a million spectators and usually between 20,000 and 25,000 runners at every Boston Marathon.  The Centennial Boston Marathon, held in 1996, which was my dad's second time to run it, set a record for the most entrants, at around 38,000 runners.  

I remember Dad talking excitedly after he'd gotten back from the race the first time about going to the Bill Rogers Running Store and meeting Bill Rodgers, who had won the marathon for the third time that year, setting a course record in the process.  Dad commented that he especially admired the guy, "Boston Billy" as he was called, because of his modesty and his friendliness, which, ironically, were also two of Dad's strongest qualities.  The women's division was won that year by Joan Benoit, then 21 years old, who, with a time of 2:35, bettered the previously set record for women's finish time by 8 minutes. 

Joan, or "Joanie" as she was called, won Boston again in 1983, this time finishing in 2:22, breaking the women's world record by two minutes, and then she followed up by taking the gold medal in the Olympic marathon in L.A. in 1984, the year the women's marathon was established as an Olympic event.  She, incidentally, still holds the record for the American woman with the fastest finish in both the Olympic marathon and in the Chicago Marathon.  Yesterday, Joan ran Boston again to celebrate the 30th anniversary of her most recent Boston win, as did the men's winner from '83, Greg Meyer, who was in fact the last American to have won the race.  Joan, now age 55, was quoted as saying before the race that she planned to "go out fast," aiming to finish within 30 minutes of her winning time from 30 years ago, a goal that my dad would have absolutely loved hearing about - and one that she achieved with a finish time of 2:50.

To Joanie, from my dad and me: you're still a total badass!

Countless people - even those who have never even cared at all about the Boston Marathon before yesterday - watched the replays and read the recounts of the tragedy that unfolded after the bombings, the vast majority of people whom, I would venture to guess, realized that they could not even imagine the chaos and the terror than ensued on the race course and around the city, nor could they really comprehend the emotions  about the losses suffered by the runners and spectators of so many things: life, safety, trust, faith, and even reward for such dedication and effort on the part of the thousands of runners who trained extensively for the race over the course of the last six months or more.  

"To be a consistent winner means preparing not just one day, one month, or even one year - but for a lifetime." ~Bill Rodgers, 1979

"To be a consistent winner means preparing not just one day, one month,

or even one year - but for a lifetime." ~Bill Rodgers, 1979

My brother Lee has qualified for Boston twice and has run it once; he shares in the family's fascination with the marathon's history and with each year's competitive field.  No one in my family was at the Boston Marathon this year; however, on some level, we can imagine the turmoil experienced by those who were there yesterday because of tragic events that have affected us at other races in years past, which is a different story in its own right.  Like everyone else, my family feels so sad for everyone affected by the bombing; there is no understanding the evil that drives such madness.  The term Heartbreak Hill has a whole new meaning for all of the runners there yesterday and for those of us whose hearts go out to those injured and otherwise affected by the malevolence of those responsible.

In memory of Martin Richard