The Summer of the Exchange Student

Here's something that most people I know don't know about me or my family ...

During the summer of 1984, in between my freshman and my sophomore years in high school, my family served as a host family for an exchange student.

Lots of people who have hosted an exchange student have probably had a great experience, one from which they greatly benefitted and something that they would recommend that someone else do as well.  Not so much in our case.

Corinne, with Mom and Nancy, in more clothes than I ever remember seeing her wear that summer

Our exchange student's name was Corinne.  She was from Nice, France; her father was a surgeon, and her family lived in a house on the French Riviera.

I have no idea how the match between her and my family was made by the exchange program agency.  It's possible they were desperate for placement families, or maybe they just used the exchange student's age and gender to pair the person with the family.  Suffice to say, though, that from Day One it was pretty obvious that the match wasn't a great one.

Corinne was between my sister Jennifer and me in age; one of the rules of the program was that the exchange student be given her own bedroom, and so Jennifer and I agreed to bunk together in my room during the summer and let Corinne have Jennifer's bedroom.  When Corinne got to our house, we excitedly showed her around, and she was silent.  No expression, no comments.  I thought it was a language barrier issue until later that day when she started saying things like, "OK, that's your room?" and "OK, you eat in your kitchen?" with a French accent and a condescending tone.  (Apparently someone had told her that Americans say "OK" a lot, and so she started off many of her sentences with that as a kick-off.) She went to bed really early that first night, which we thought might be because she was jet-lagged from the trip.  A week or so later, though, when she was still retreating to the bedroom pretty early on a nightly basis, we asked her if she was tired, and she said, "No, I'm just boring."  We laughed for a minute, until she clarified that she actually meant "bored."  Well ok, then.

The summertime weather in Corinne's hometown peaked out at about 80 degrees; the inside of our house was that same temperature because Dad was strict about the thermostat setting, and as usual the outside temperature in the entire state of Mississippi that summer was a hot, humid 99 degrees in the shade.  She came from a land of famous painters, sightseeing, and yachting; we had fun making pottery out of mud from our backyard, chopping the heads off water moccasins with a garden hoe, and canoeing in the lake behind our house.  She was used to fancy food and fine wine; in our neck of the woods, the menu consisted of Miller Lite for the adults and sweet tea for the kids to drink and something like beanie-weenies, grilled cheese sandwiches, or spaghetti to eat.

Some of the blaring differences in our lifestyles were actually kind of funny, although probably much more so to us than to her.  Our two dogs, who lived outside, often got ticks on them, especially during the summer months.  We thought nothing of pulling off a big, juicy tick we'd found on one of the dogs; the first time I did that in front of her, she was oddly fascinated - apparently she had never even seen a picture of a tick before.  Here's the really funny kicker to that: a week or so later, we went out to eat at a restaurant with a salad bar, and my dad put sunflower seeds on top of his salad.  When Corinne saw the sunflower seeds, her eyes got really big, and she asked in half amazement/half horror, "You put ticks on your salad?"

"You put ticks on your salad??"

One responsibility that came as part of having Corinne there that fell mostly on my mother's shoulders was policing the practices of grooming and decency of dress, both of which were obviously different in our house than what Corinne was used to.  Mom figured out that the best way to address the problem was to make a blanket announcement to my sisters, Corinne, and me.  My sisters and I had to bite the insides of our cheeks to keep from smiling or laughing whenever Mom said things like, "All girls in the house must shower tonight ... be sure to shave your legs and use soap in the shower and put on deodorant afterwards."  The first time Mom told us to get our swimsuits on to go to the pool at the Tennis Club, Corinne emerged from the bedroom wearing a string bikini that consisted of about one square inch of material in total.  "Girls, let's all wear t-shirts over our swim suits so we don't get sunburned," Mom called out, quick with the reaction.  "OK, I'm used to sun all over," Corinne informed her.  "It's a strict rule at the club," Mom told her and handed her a t-shirt.

My family went to Biloxi, Mississippi, where my dad attended a business convention during the first week in August every year when I was growing up, and we did that year too, with Corinne in tow.  I remember the expression on Corinne's face when she first saw the beach there; I guess the Redneck Riviera didn't quite compare to the French one.  We had a blast, though, like we always did; we swam for probably at least ten hours a day there.  We were thrilled that the hotel where we stayed had a bar in the swimming pool, and Dad let us charge two Shirley Temples each per day to the hotel room.  By that time in the summer, Corinne had for some reason gravitated towards Nancy, who was about five years younger than she was, rather than towards Jennifer or me; Nancy entertained herself during that entire trip by pretending she could speak French and then telling Corinne to answer her back in "real French."  Quite entertaining, for us at least.

Don't get me wrong; we had fun that summer with Corinne there.  It's just that there's wasn't much, if any, of an exchange going on between her and us; pretty much all we learned about her country or her was that we were very different.  I wonder what she said about her experience as an exchange student when she went home; people probably thought she was exaggerating or fabricating when she told them about how we tanned on the roof of our house, drank water straight out of the hose, and ran around barefooted in the backyard all summer.  All in all, I guess it was an educational experience for her, although almost certainly nothing like the way she or her parents had intended for it to be, and for us, at least, it has provided many laughs over the years when we've thought back to the Summer of the Exchange Student.

Priceless Memories

Eight years ago, my sisters, our husbands, and our children traveled from our corners of the country to meet at my grandmother's house in Alabama.  The day after we had arrived, our group of eleven piled into cars and drove across the state line to Wild Animal Safari in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

When we got there, we found out that there were 15-passenger vans available for rent to drive through the park - and the vans were zebra-striped!  We knew it would be much more fun for all of us to be together in one vehicle to travel amongst the animals who roamed free over the many acres there.  We paid the admission and the rental fee and then headed towards our Zebra Van; as we were boarding, my brother-in-law Peter walked over carrying a giant bag of animal feed.  He said it was a better deal to buy in bulk instead of purchasing individual containers of food for each of us to feed to the animals in the park.  I will never forget the look of wonder on Grandmom's face when she saw Peter carrying that huge bag; she laughed excitedly as she took her seat in the van and then said, "The animals sure are going to LOVE us!"  

Somehow it worked out so that my brother-in-law David took the wheel in the van - some of the time with my niece Daly on his lap - and with my daughter Molly in the passenger seat in front.  The rest of us sat on the bench seats in the back with our windows rolled down, ready to feed the animals as David slowly drove along the gravel road, stopping frequently as wildlife approached the van.  

There was a great variety of animals in the park, from antelopes to zebras.  We all had a blast, including and maybe especially Grandmom, who smiled ear-to-ear the whole time that we were there and laughed hysterically when a big slobbery bison leaned in through the window and tried to lick her in the face!

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We had such a good time there that day that a couple of years later my husband, my daughters, and I went back to the park with Grandmom.  The second time, when it was just the five of us, she was moving much more slowly than the first, and we just drove through the park in our car since we were a much smaller group.  After we had driven through the safari part of the park on our return trip, we went in the gift shop.  Grandmom, who, as I've mentioned, lived on a very tight budget, thanked us for taking her and for paying for her admission, and then she said she wanted to buy a souvenir for us to take home.  Always the practical thinker, she picked out a pair of salad tongs with a zebra carved into the handle of each one.  When she gave them to me after she had paid at the counter, I noticed the price tag said $19.99.  That was a lot of money for a person of her income to spend on a non-necessity, I knew, and she knew that I knew it.  I looked at her, thinking that I should decline the gift and try to get her to return it, but then she said, "Thinking I was going to be able to take a vacation somewhere this summer, I had some money saved. Today has been as good as any vacation, and I don't need anything else, so please accept my gift."  

The zebra salad-tongs, today

A few weeks before, Grandmom had stepped into a hole in her backyard while hanging clothes on her clothesline and had broken her leg.  My dad had tried for years to get her to let him buy her a dryer, but she insisted that it was a waste of money and she didn't need it.  After all, she said, she had raised a family and had lived without one for eighty years, and who could argue with that logic?  When she had fallen, she laid in the yard, unable to get herself to a phone, for about an hour until her next-door neighbor pulled up in his driveway and saw her.  He had called the ambulance and then my dad, and my parents had come to be with her while she was in the hospital.

When I'd called the next week to check on her, she told me that she had a walking cast on her leg and that she would appreciate some help with a couple of things so she hoped we could come to visit her soon.  Of course, I arranged to get there as soon as I could, worrying that things must really be dire if this independent woman needed help taking care of herself.  When my husband, my daughters, and I got there, though, we found out what she actually wanted help with, and it wasn't technically self-care: she wanted assistance with pulling her refrigerator out from the wall in her kitchen so she could do her scheduled quarterly cleaning behind it and with cleaning up debris that had fallen into her yard.  Other than that, she had it covered, she told us, and so we did those chores and then decided to head to the Safari Park the next day.  (Side note: Grandmom had told us to put any limbs, sticks, or leaves from her yard on the curb across the street from her house instead of in her trash can, but I had dumped a bucket of semi-wet leaves in there anyway, thinking it didn't really matter.  As we walked out to the car to leave for the park the following morning, she cooly lifted the lid of her garbage can and peered inside, and then she said, "Somebody put debris in here!"  I had to admit that I had done it, and she said, "Well, next time remember to put all of that stuff on the curb where it's supposed to go; that's what I do!"  Ouch!)

We had a lot of fun on our return trip to the park, but not nearly as much as we'd had the first time when we had gone as a big group.  I have treasured those salad tongs since that day, though, remembering fondly both of our trips there with Grandmom and remembering how she so generously spent her vacation money to buy them for us.

Several years after our second trip to the park, Grandmom had a stroke, and her physical and mental decline began.  Many, many times when we visited her after she was in the nursing home, we talked about how much fun we'd had at the Safari Park; in fact, when her condition had progressed to the point where she couldn't carry on a conversation, we often described things from the day when all 11 of us went in great detail, in an effort to help her to remember that wonderful day and to help her to focus on a much happier time.  

On the night before Grandmom died, as my mom was sitting with her holding her hand, my sister Jennifer called Mom's cell phone and asked Mom to hold the phone up to Grandmom's ear.  Although Grandmom had been unresponsive for several hours before, as Jennifer again tried to use her words to paint a picture for Grandmom of that great visit, Grandmom smiled and her breathing pattern became more relaxed, and I have no doubt that that happy memory was one of the last things on her mind as she transitioned out of this life.

"Not too many people can say they've been kissed by a bison!" Grandmom said. 

Grand Canyon Memories

This is a guest post written by my mom, whom I asked to tell the story of when she and my dad went to the Grand Canyon several years ago on vacation ... 

One year, for our vacation, we decided to go to see the Southern Rim of the Grand Canyon. Wanting to absorb the full thrills of the National Park, Bill was really looking forward to running some of the trails along the rim.  After spending the night in the historic lodge at the top of the canyon, we planned to ride mules down the trail to spend the night at The Phantom Lodge at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and then to ride back up the trail the next day, a Bucket List item for me. 

Along the mule ride down, we had to wear hats that were secured so that they wouldn’t blow off and scare the mules or litter the park and loose clothes that would protect us from the sun but later be warm enough as the temperature would become much cooler as we approached the bottom of the canyon.  I was concerned about what to wear and the steepness of the trails, and so, for my security and peace of mind, early on the morning of our ride Bill ran the trail for about three or four miles down and then back just to check things out.  He came back with a report for me. (Side note: He often did this while we were on vacation or in a new place in order to locate playgrounds for the kids or interesting things for us to see and do.)  The trail was about three feet wide and gravel and the weather was great – about 75.  I was thrilled!

I was assigned a mule named Ida who was short and sturdy.  Bill’s mount was a gigantic gal by the name of Madonna.  He was placed near the end of the mule train.  Everyone was given canteens to hang on our saddle horns and a small switch that the cowboy leader called a “motivator”.  We used both of these items quite a lot. 

We began our adventure on the gravel trail just as Bill had predicted, but after the first few miles the path became very narrow with lots of stones.  The mules were very sure-footed, but the stones often didn’t provide much traction for them.  We had been told to never lean in the saddle and Bill found this impossible.  As he suffered from a fear of heights, he kept leaning into the mountain, away from the opening to the drop off into the canyon. His mule was much taller than any of the others, and it must have made it more difficult for him to trust her as he was sitting up so high.  We had to stop and cinch up his saddle a few times.  Eventually, the trail led many times to a switchback turn, which caused the mule to project its head out over the canyon in order to turn its body.  For an instant, it felt to the rider almost like hanging in space while the mule repositioned itself to go another direction.  Can you imagine how much Bill disliked that maneuver? Sometimes even I closed my eyes on that part of the ride. 

After five and a half hours of awesome views of the Grand Canyon and the crossing of the Colorado River, we arrived at The Phantom Ranch.  We had a delicious steak dinner and slept in a cabin that fortunately had blankets on the beds as it was indeed very chilly. The next morning, the mules were ready early to leave for the ascent, but, as we were packing up our stuff, Bill told me that he just didn’t enjoy the ride down and would rather run back.  I told our cowboy leader that Bill wouldn’t be joining us, and so his mule was tied to mine. The rest of the group gawked as Bill ran by while they were mounting up. 

We stopped a few times along the ride to rest the horses, but not for long.  Bill said that he stopped for water once, but we didn’t see him until we got to the top.  He had already showered, changed clothes, and was waiting for me, Ida, and Madonna beside the mule corral.     

I Remember

• I remember running behind my dad along the side of a street for miles, trying to imitate how he carried his arms and watching him wave at the people in every car that passed by, whether he knew them or not.
• I remember how he brought a tennis ball for us to bounce and two pieces of gum - one for each of us - along on long runs so that he had something to distract and entertain me with when the road seemed long.
• I remember him handing me a stick of gum, with the wrapper stuck to the gum because he'd been holding it in his hand for over a mile as we ran along, and saying, "I just chew mine with the paper on it," and so I did the same thing.
• I remember being impressed at how he knew exactly what the minutes-per-mile pace that we were running was at any given speed, how he knew where every working public water faucet in town was, and how he always seemed to know the mileage along our route but then he'd insist that we drive the course to double-check after the run.
• I remember him telling my sisters and me to sit on his back while he did push ups.
• I remember when he ran to my track meet, ten miles away, and how the other kids on the track team said he was crazy when our school bus passed by him on the highway on the way to the meet.
• I remember when he ran from my grandparents' house in Nashville to Centennial Park, about 11 miles, in freezing cold weather and how when I picked him up in the car I saw that sweat had dripped down and frozen off his ear lobes and it looked like he had earrings on.
• I remember seeing the needle with the pain medicine being brought in to his room in the ER after he was hit by a car while running in a marathon and hoping the shot hurt him less than his broken leg did.
• I remember being so angry that I wanted to kill the old lady that ran over him.
• I remember the hopeful look on his face when he said he was too lucky to get cancer.
• I remember wishing there was someone I could be angry at then too.
• I remember turning my head when I answered him so he couldn't see the doubt or the tears in my eyes. 

Casting Our Votes

In my family, we have a running joke about voting that came from my dad, who always told other family members how he was planning to vote and then said "Don't vote against me!" (jokingly - I think). He always told my mom in particular not to vote opposite of however he said he was planning to vote; "We'll just cancel each other out if you do!" he quipped before every election.  (I'm pretty sure Mom still voted her own way anyway!)

I remember the first time I was going to vote after I'd turned 18; Dad, of course, sent me off to the polls with an encouraging pat on the back and a "Don't vote against me!" directive.  I think he was glad when first I and later both of my younger sisters were finally old enough to vote because he thought it upped his odds for having one person in the family vote his way, as he put it.

This week, his words came back to me - in fact, they popped right out of my mouth - as my 18 year-old daughter and I stepped away from our respective voting machines after we'd voted in the state primary election.  I got several glares from the poll workers (or whatever they're called) and others in the vicinity; I guess they thought I was seriously trying to influence her vote.  She recognized the source of the quote right away; she'd heard me tell about how my dad used to say those very words every time before an election, and we got a good laugh out of the whole thing.

Gramps would be SO PROUD! 

There really is always something there to remind me, and for that I am so very grateful.

Getting It Right

One thing that I always admired about my dad was that he never seemed to take the easy way out.  He never made excuses to avoid doing something or, as he termed it, to let himself off the hook.  He viewed anything that he wasn't naturally good at or that scared him (or both) as a challenge.


Of course, there are countless examples that I could give of this trait involving athletic pursuits.  But one obstacle that he had to work to overcome that didn't involve physical tenacity is something that may surprise some of the people who knew him, maybe some who even knew him well:  Dad had a fear of giving speeches.  At one point in time, having to talk in front of a group of people made him very nervous, and until sometime around the time that he took the job that would become his last, he sometimes let this fear get the better of him.  In fact, one of the details I remember most clearly about my wedding day is listening to my dad rehearse his "one line of the day," as he called it, over and over, and watching him stress out about potentially making a mistake when it was time for him to speak during the ceremony.  As usual, when he was nervous, he made jokes, and those of us around him during that time heard lots of entertaining renditions of what he jokingly hoped out loud he wouldn't say in error when the minister asked him his Big Question in front of everyone at the wedding, "Who gives this woman to be married?" 

"What if I freeze up?" he asked me, "or what if I accidentally say something like 'Me and her momma' or 'Her momma and me' or 'Your momma'?"  We laughed because we knew that he knew the proper etiquette of what to say.  But the more he kidded around about what he hoped he didn't inadvertently say, the more nervous he got about getting right what he was actually supposed to say, and it seemed the greater the potential for him to make a mistake.  By the time he and I were in ready-position at the far end of the aisle as the music began and all the heads turned our way, he had worked himself up so much about it that neither of us were laughing.  When we got to the Big Moment (for him, and for the rest of us who knew about his nervousness), when he was asked The Question, his eyes went a little wider and I saw him take a deep breath before he responded, but he pulled it off with his typical style: he said, "Her mom and I do."  Not exactly the line from the Miss Manners Wedding Day Book, but just right anyway, if you ask me.

Just a few months later, he told me that he was thinking about branching out in his career but that there was one thing he really needed to work on before he could really consider make a change: he said he needed to get better at public speaking.  And so, like every challenge I'd ever seen him take on, he dove right in, and he practiced until he got it right.  


As part of getting comfortable speaking in front of a crowd, Dad joined a group of people who also wanted to improve that skill; I'm not sure if it was the Toastmasters International Club but at least it was something similar to it.  Periodically, people in the group were given topics about which they were supposed to write and then deliver speeches, to practice and to improve their comfort levels.  One of the assignments was for each person to talk about how they'd gotten their name, whether they were named after someone, if they had a nickname, or whatever information related to that topic they wanted to share.  


Dad said that one came to him easily; he gave me the written out copy of his speech when I was visiting at my parents' house during that time period, and I was enlightened and entertained by what he had written:


Some people dream of singing in a rock band, winning the Daytona 500, or being a great warrior in an epic battle.  Myself, I have always wanted to be an adventurer.  I am afraid of heights, but I read every book I can find about climbing Mt. Everest.  I have dreamed about biking across the country in 14 days and winning the 48 hour run across Death Valley.  Sailing across the ocean has appeal for me, but it doesn't make my final cut for that list because I'm afraid of sharks.


At this point in my life, I have not failed totally in my search for adventure.  There are a few running and biking tales I could share with you, but I will spare you the details.  There is one outdoor adventure I would like to tell you about, though.  It wasn't my greatest, but it might have been my most memorable.  It took place when I was eight years old, and this is what happened:


For some reason my parents chose to name me William but decided to call me Billy.  However, I've always hated to be called by that nickname.  I think it's because when I was a kid my friends said it sounded sissified.  On my 8th birthday, I decided I'd had enough, and I asked my mom to please start calling me Bill instead of Billy.  I told her that if she didn't I would run away and never come home.  We lived in a small house surrounded by woods, just on the edge of town.  It was a good place to run away and hide, which is exactly what I did on the afternoon of my birthday when it became clear that my nickname wasn't likely to get shortened into the version I wanted. I tucked into a place I found in the woods where I could see if someone was coming but where I couldn't be seen.  As I remember, I didn't go unprepared - I took my silver canteen and something to eat along with me.


I had already figured out how to go to the bathroom in the woods.  My friends and I were often out of washroom range when we were playing cowboys and Indians, and we'd learned to make do when nature called by using leaves or moss or whatever was available at the time.  Unfortunately, that day I made the mistake of using poison ivy leaves for you know what.  It didn't take long for the itching to begin, maybe an hour or two, and not too long after that, I decided that maybe it would be best for me to go home - besides, it was getting dark outside.


As my mom always told the story, I was soon race walking around the house, and I couldn't have sat down if my life had depended on it.  I wound up with such a blistering case that I was taken to the local doctor for some kind of shot.  The doctor also prescribed an ointment that made the itching feel better, at least temporarily.  The bad news is that my mom had to put it on.  God, was I embarrassed.  Not at all the birthday that I'd imagined.


My mom keeps things forever.  She has a log of my childhood illnesses, and on October 26, 1951, the entry in her notebook says, "Bill - poison ivy, lower trunk, really bad."  Amen to that!  At least she'd started just calling me Bill though.

Dad, giving a speech, after he overcame his fear of public speaking.  (Note the guy who can't keep his eyes open!)

Don’t Look Back

In April of 2004, my dad and I traveled to St. Louis to watch the U.S. Olympic Team Trials for the Women’s Marathon.  Going to see the marathon trials was a Bucket List item for both of us.  We spent the night in a hotel near the start of the race the night before; we were both so excited that we could hardly sleep all night.  It was an early race start – 7 a.m. – but we wanted to be sure to have a good view in the crowd of spectators at the start of the race, and so we got there almost an hour early.  I thought it was extra-cool that the event started at Frances Field on the track of my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, which was also, incidentally, the site of the 1904 Summer Olympics.

Over the course of my life, I watched countless races both in person and on TV with my dad.  Because he was always much more up-to-speed than I was about the field of competitors, he typically told me which runners we should “pull for,” as he put it.   He didn’t have to tell me that day, though; we were both long-time fans of Deena Kastor and had been following her running career since before she was married, back when she was Deena Drossin.  She had run the fastest debut marathon for American women in 2001 and was the national champion in women’s cross-country.  A California native, she was a four-time SEC champion in track and field as a collegiate competitor at the University of Arkansas, which was where Dad had started following her running career in the news.  She held several U.S. records in running and was internationally ranked, twice finishing as the runner-up at the World Cross County Championships, the most important competition in international cross-country running.

Our favorite, Deena (or "Deener," as Dad pronounced her name), is sporting a #1 here.

As Dad and I sat in the front row of the stadium seats at Frances Field that day, we watched the runners stretching and milling around nervously before the start of the race.  Dad had a copy of the course map and had circled in red the points where he thought we should stand during the marathon to watch the runners go by.  The course consisted of 3.5 loops through Forest Park, a 1300+ acre park located in the western part of the city, and ended at the World's Fair Pavilion in the park.  The layout of the runners’ route made it an ideal race to spectate, and, as soon as the starting gun was fired and the athletes completed four laps around the track and then raced out the gate onto the street, Dad and I high-tailed it out of the stadium to claim our spot on the curb at the three-mile mark.

Exiting the track for the on-road portion of the race

A runner named Blake Russell took the lead early on and was about a minute ahead of Deena and four other women when they came by us three miles into the 26.2-mile long race.  Deena and a couple of the others were giving out occasional high-fives to some people standing on the curb as they passed by; Dad called out “Good pace; don’t lose touch” to her, just like he’d advised me in countless races of a much smaller scale.  She looked right at him and gave him a nod as she and the others in the pack flew by, and then Dad and I rushed to get back in the car so we could make it to stand around the 7-mile mark before the leaders got there.  

Just a few minutes after we’d staked our claim on our spot at that point, we saw the front pack racing up the hill in front of us.  Deena had closed the gap on Blake by about 20 seconds, but the rest of the leaders were right on Deena’s tail.  “Pick it up half a step, but don’t go all out yet,” Dad advised her in his regular-speaking voice volume as she sprinted by.  I didn’t think she’d heard him until I saw her flick her right hand out to the side in a quick gesture of acknowledgement and then noticed her get a little higher up on the balls of her feet in an obvious effort to pick up the pace.  

Blake (#4) in the lead at Mile 12

Our next planned check-point was at Mile twelve.  There was an aid station there with all different kinds of water bottles on the table, each marked with a different runner’s name and no doubt filled with a specific concoction of that competitor’s specifications.  While we waited, Dad and I joked around about trying a drink from the various bottles to see what was in each one, but, when he saw the runners coming around the corner, he got serious and started bouncing on the balls of his feet like he always did when he was nervous.  Blake was still out ahead about the same distance.  Deena grabbed her water bottle from the table and then side-stepped to get out of the way of the other runners coming up behind her as she stopped to take off her shoe; apparently, she’d felt a rock in there and wanted to try to get rid of it.  She quickly put her shoe back on, took a swig from her water bottle, tossed the bottle down, and then bolted ahead to get back in the race.  She quickly caught and picked off the other front runners who'd passed her except for Blake, who had increased her lead to about a minute again.

Dad and I raced to get to the 15-mile mark and were excited to see that Deena had lessened the gap to only about 20 seconds by then; “Keep it right there!  Pace yourself; you’re right where you need to be,” Dad told her in a conspiratorial voice.  She looked at him and gave him a quick nod as she ran past us.  It was so impressive to see how fast the turnover rate of all of the runners’ legs was as they went by; they made it look almost effortless, but we knew it was far from that at the pace they were putting in.

Next Dad and I positioned ourselves near the 19.5 mark, and a few minutes later we saw the women approaching.  Deena was in front this time, leading by just a few seconds over Blake, who was tailed by about 30 seconds by another runner, Colleen De Reuck, a 40 year-old South African native who became a U.S. citizen just after the previous summer Olympics.  As Deena got closer to where we stood, we saw her glance back over her shoulder a couple of times to gauge the position of the runners behind her, a move that I knew from my days in competitive running that Dad did not think was good strategy.  “Don’t look back – it shows weakness!” he advised adamantly as Deena flew by us, and again she gave him a right-handed sideways wave of recognition.  

After the rest of the front runners passed by, Dad and I decided that we wanted to go to the end of the course to try to secure a good spot by the finish line.  We parked and walked towards the big Finish Line banner, and we were thrilled to see there was room just past the tape near the media truck.  The race was being announced in a play-by-play fashion over the loud speaker, and we listened among the other spectators to hear.  At Mile 22, Deena was still in the lead by a small margin, and Colleen had overtaken Blake.  Over the next couple of miles, the crowd alternately grew quiet and cheered as we heard Deena’s lead being decreased by Colleen little by little, until #2 De Reuck became #1 and then continued to forge ahead to build her lead on Deena and the rest of the field. 

At the finish, thousands of fans holding little American flags lined the streets. Someone held out a big America flag on a pole to Colleen about 200 meters before the tape; Colleen grabbed it and crossed the finish line in first place, carrying the flag, with a huge smile on her face, setting a U.S. Olympic trials record with her time of 2:28.25.  (Her win qualified her for her fourth Olympics - pretty impressive at age 40!)  Deena was the runner-up and finished strong with a time of 2:29:38, followed by Jen Rhines, who had run in the lead pack the entire race and finished third in 2:29:57. Blake came in fourth with a time of 2:30:50.

Colleen De Reuck - winner of the 2004 Olympic Trials Women's Marathon

For the first time in history, the top three runners in this event all finished in under 2 hours, 30 minutes.  These three women were draped in huge American flags as they climbed up onto the awards podium a little while later to accept their medals and to claim their spots on the U.S. Olympic Team.

After the runners had come down from the stage and the frenzy had died down a little, Deena happened to look up and see us at the edge of the crowd.  With the flag still draped over her shoulders, she walked over and called out “Thanks for the advice!” to Dad.  “Sure!” he responded casually, as if we stood around talking to Olympians every day.  She gave us a wave and stepped off into the swarm of reporters, and we turned to find our way back to the car, tired but excited from our big adventure.

A few months later, as Dad and I watched the Olympic women's marathon on TV at our respective houses, I thought back to the Trials and to the advice he’d given out to Deena during the race.  Deena’s third place finish in the marathon in Athens was one of the highlights of the 2004 Summer Games.  She toughed out the extreme heat, paced herself just right, and made our country proud when she stood with the olive wreath on her head to accept the bronze medal.  As I watched her going the distance over the 26.2 miles she ran that day, I never once saw her looking back.  And now, remembering back to Deena's big win that day, I can’t help but think that, along with strategies of her coaches and the wisdom she'd learned along the way as a professional athlete, she also had my dad’s voice in her head, urging her on, telling her she was right where she needed to be, just as I have in mine each and every day of my life.