My dad ran marathons when I was little. In fact, I was roughly the same age as my kids are now. (Just to be clear, my dad was only in his late 20's back then, while I'm in my early-multiples-of-20's now.) As a kid, it's hard to appreciate what running a marathon entails. As a spectator sport, it's pretty damn boring, as my brother (pictured below) expertly demonstrated. And my kids still have a pretty tenuous grasp on concepts like time and distance, especially when trying to combine them. "I bet I could run a mile in thirty seconds." At least that's my excuse for never bothering to ask about the details: I was a kid. Basically, I knew that he ran a few marathons, but that was it.
It turns out that he ran the Cleveland Revco marathon twice and the Detroit Free Press marathon once. The first Cleveland marathon was technically held in 1976 in Hudson, which would be a lot like holding the Boston marathon in Worcester. (Not that there's anything wrong with Worcester.) But in 1978, they moved the course to downtown Cleveland, and my dad was one of the 1,901 runners that year. His best time was 2:45, which qualified him for Boston. But work - he taught english and drama at Heights High, and was directing the school play that year - kept him from going.
(*I had actually convinced myself, until recently, that he actually had run the Boston Marathon. Possibly because we had the official Boston Marathon Board Game when we were growing up, and played it all the time, which I swear seemed perfectly normal.)
Anyways, he never ran Boston. "I've always regretted that." And then I got the following text from him on April 18th last year, three days after the 2013 marathon: "I have at least one more marathon in me. I would like to run the Boston Marathon in 2014. Training begins now. Love, Pops."
I think we both knew that this was a long shot. Not that you can't run marathons in your 60s, but my dad is into a different kind of fitness these days. As I mentioned in a prior post, he threw himself into CrossFit after retiring a few years back. Works out five days a week, became a certified instructor, and is currently ranked 51st in the world in the Master's 60+ division of the CrossFit Open. (I'm not making this up. 10 deadlifts, 15 box jumps, 15 deadlifts, 15 box jumps, 20 deadlifts, 15 box jumps, 25 deadlifts, 15 box jumps. In 7 min, 32 sec. CrossFitters are a different breed.) And while CrossFit certainly helps your running, you still need to put in a lot of base miles for a marathon, and that was always going to be a stretch with his knees. A marathon just didn't make sense.
But I've quoted him a lot this past year, with one small edit: "I have at least one
Let's hope I look half that good. 33 days to go.