Bob Allen writes a daily e-column for Crain’s Detroit.com, which reports on daily local business news. He’s an avid runner who qualified for Boston this year after years of trying. Here’s his Friday column. As a fellow “adult-onset athlete”, I very much enjoyed it. Hope it provides a little Friday entertainment:
About the time you normally get this column Monday, I hope to have crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon. In case you’re interested in finding out what happened, my bib number is 7760.
It probably isn’t a big secret that running Boston has been something of a goal of mine for, well, a embarrassingly long while. It certainly hasn’t been a secret to my poor wife, my family and friends and my co-workers, the latter of whom know me as the only person in the newsroom who doesn’t eat freebie treats. I think the phrase “health Nazi” has been used rather injudiciously over the years.
Among my many daily running routes, my favorite in recent months had been the path to the Chicago Marathon Web site, where I checked my race result more times than a person who wishes to be considered well-adjusted would admit to. Why this is important is that to run Boston, you have to complete 26.2 miles in a certain time based on your age. In my case, that would be no slower than 3 hours, 20 minutes and 59 seconds.
My official qualifying time at Chicago? 3:20:59 — or, according to my watch, 3:20:58:50. That’s right, one second more, and what runners call my “BQ” (Boston qualifier) would have been an R.I.P. Yet again.
The final couple of miles were nearly as difficult as the previous nine years of trying to qualify for Boston. I was nothing if not spectacular in my failure. Going out too fast, too rainy, too windy, too cold, too dumb, not enough training, training that led to injury.
The best way to understand why Boston is such a big deal for runners is to make an analogy a lot of you can understand: golf. Think of all the years, all the lessons and all the rounds of bad golf you’ve played over the past decade. Then the day after you shoot your best 18 holes ever, Augusta National invites you to play all four rounds of the Masters. And you get to trace the footsteps of the greatest golfers in the world. Smell what they smell. Hear what they hear. For those of us who aren’t born runners, Boston is how we determine whether, in defying genetics and conventional wisdom, we really have given our all. For this one moment, we have grasped something beyond our reach. And we start to wonder whether we can do this elsewhere in our lives.
So it’s about running. And it’s absolutely not about it.
After my father died this past June, I thought about dedicating a final effort to him. But besides seeming terribly melodramatic, it would have been completely out of character for him. He didn’t understand my running. But he often would ask whether I had run that day. I’d tell him; he’d nod and go back to the remote. Yet he never, ever made light of it, never said I was nuts, never told me my kneecaps would slide down to my ankles. He appreciated routine and duty and consistency. I guess he liked that I kept at it. And so I kept at it.
And that, ultimately, is what got me to Boston. Although running probably seems incomprehensible to most of you — and I won’t discourage you from thinking so, because it’s hard enough persuading you to read this column every day — getting good at running is about the simplest thing in the world. Just do it, as Nike says.
About halfway through the Chicago Marathon, a friend who had been running alongside stepped into the wall of spectators — but not before leaving me with these words: “Do it for your dad.” I then did something I never have done after all these years on the roads. I cried. Which, I must say, is something I would dissuade you from doing whenever breathing is important.
I cried again, afterward, after I had finished and hugged my wife. It just happened.
This has been an odd fall, winter and spring. I’ve trained with a real purpose. Yet a lot of the obsession of the past nine years isn’t around anymore. I get up, I run, I come to work and start writing this column. It’s a routine. I go home and do other things.
So what can a nonrunner learn from my experience? I suppose the value of persistence. Maybe not giving up on a dream, no matter how stupid the pursuit can make you feel. Maybe the only thing you learn from this column is that running really is as boring and inconsequential as you thought. And frankly, maybe you have a point.
You see, looking back on those nine years of trying and failing, I also did a lot of really stupid things and probably allowed myself to become entirely too monastic — my former coach calls us “adult-onset athletes.” I missed a lot of the richness of life and almost missed out on my soul mate. I can’t have that time back. My marathon obsession, ironically, probably made me less of a runner during those nine years. It certainly made me less of a person.
But would I like to have that time back to live differently, if it meant I would have to give up all that I learned from the experience?
Not for a second.