Ever since Coach Ben ordered me to take last Thursday off to rest my degenerating left Achilles and then held me out of the next day’s leg speed workout, I’ve been counting the hours to today’s tempo run, studying the coded description of the session on Final Surge (the website Ben uses to deliver training prescriptions) the way I once mooned over a certain remote control car in the 1980 Sears Wish Book. Fourteen miles on Lake Mary Road, including four two-mile tempo efforts at 6:25 per mile. I needed this run, mentally as much as physically, regarding it as symbolic of getting back on track toward Chicago.
At a dinner held last night at Pizzicletta in celebration of Matt’s twenty-ninth birthday, I asked Coach Ben to explain the purpose of the workout, which, like so many of the things I’ve done here, is unlike anything I’ve ever done on my own.
“It’s just another session that falls under the high-end aerobic category,” he said. “When I was running with the Hansons, they had us do a ton of this stuff in marathon training, and I thought I got a lot out of it. I’ve seen the same results with the runners I coach. There are any number of ways you can slice it—four times two miles, two times four miles, three times three miles—but the general idea is to do a reasonably large volume of work at an effort that’s a little harder than marathon effort. I like it because it’s fast, but not so fast that you can’t keep it up for a while. If you do enough of it, actual marathon pace starts to feel easier. In my opinion, too many runners, even pro runners, train for marathons the same way they train for 10Ks, except with long runs added in. They do mile repeats at 10K pace and say it makes marathon pace seem easier. Well, sure it does—for a few miles! But a marathon is twenty-six point two miles. It’s a different animal.”
“Guilty as charged,” I said.
Marlon Roudette’s infectious club banger “Everybody Feeling Something,” my chosen theme song for the fantasy I’m currently living, blared through the Fun Mobile’s open windows at an inappropriate volume for eight o’clock in the morning as I pulled up next to Faubs’s Outback and Veronica’s Nissan Versa in the dirt parking area adjoining Lake Mary Start, as it’s known. We were soon joined by Matt, Amy, Steph and Ben Bruce, Rochelle, Coach Ben, and my companions from Sunday’s long run—Sarah Crouch and Bob Tusso. It has come to my attention in the three days that have passed since Bob’s and my first encounter that he is something of a personality in the Flagstaff running scene, a universally liked and ubiquitous man-about-town whose nickname is a play on his surname: Too Slow. Only in Flagstaff is a 2:45 marathoner called Too Slow.
During the warm-up Bob made a seemingly casual inquiry about my workout, which I described with the zealousness of a religious nut seeking converts.
“Mind if I jump in with you?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said. “But don’t you have a workout of your own planned?”
“Uh, yes and no.”
Back at the parking area, the ritual change of footwear was performed, everyone swapping out trainers for racing flats, and this time I took part as well, having cadged a pair of Hoka Tracers at Run Flagstaff last week.
“I think I shot my wad in the warm-up,” I joked, addressing Ben Bruce, who sat on his rear bumper with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, lacing a shoe à la Mister Rogers. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through the actual workout.”
“Me, too,” Ben said, disregarding my tone. “Seriously. Some days, just getting out of bed is so hard I want to be done with it.”
“I know what you mean,” Faubs chimed in. He was standing nearby shaking a freshly mixed bottle of Maurten, a high-tech sports drink not yet available to the public that the team is testing. “I have days when I want to go down for a nap and never wake up.”
“Jesus Christ!” I said.
Truth be told, I wasn’t quite so appalled by my teammates’ morbidness as I pretended. Having been with them almost four weeks now, I’ve gotten used to the gallows humor that is routinely traded among the guys especially. Professional running is a relentless grind, no matter how much you love the sport. Two runs a day, seven days a week, forty-eight weeks a year, plus all the other stuff: strength training, tortuous massages, PT appointments, a burdensome need for sleep. For these folks, voicing the occasional unserious suicidal ideation just might be the only alternative to quitting for real.
As the slowest runner, I again had the honor of starting first. When I was double-knotted and ready, I gave Coach Ben the nod and he and Bob and I moseyed up to the stenciled yellow “S” that marks Lake Mary Start—the first of the sixty-four paint daubs Ben and Jen touch up every spring.
“Do we go when you tell us to or do we just go?” I asked Ben.
“Go!”
We went, Bob keying off me as I keyed off my watch, remembering the promise I’d made to Coach Ben after my last run on Lake Mary Road to not run faster just because I could. And I meant to keep it—I really did. But 6:25 per mile felt so laughably easy that, when Too Slow became restless and began stretching the invisible gangline between us like a sled team’s alpha dog, I allowed myself to be pulled along. We hit Mile 1 in 6:14, at which point Bob sped up even more and I reluctantly let him go.
“Too fast, Too Slow!” I called after him, pleased with my cleverness.
I completed the second mile a few paces behind Bob in 6:07, still feeling as relaxed as a tanned man in a hammock sipping from a tall glass of iced tea. Coach Ben was waiting for us at the two-mile mark with my bottle, which I grabbed on the fly.
“What was your time?” he called after me.
“Just a hair fast!” I fudged.
Bob and I jogged side by side for half a mile and then started the second rep. He pulled away from me sooner this time and finished several seconds before I did. Again Ben waited with my bottle, and again he asked for my time.
“Twelve twenty-four,” I confessed.
His head dropped. I was supposed to have run 12:50.
About a third of the way into repetition number three, I realized that Bob, although a few strides in front of me, was no longer running faster than I was. I sensed the tables turning, and, sure enough, over the next three-quarters of a mile I slowly eased past him. By the end of the rep, which I completed in 12:12, Too Slow was far enough behind me that I no longer heard his footsteps. Glancing back, I saw him dashing down a grassy embankment toward a stand of trees—the nearest privacy. Poor Bob.
“Time?” Coach Ben asked, again holding out my bottle.
“I feel great and my Achilles is holding up!” I deflected.
Ben laughed despite himself.
When I reached Mile 7.5 and the start of my final repetition, my workout buddy was nowhere in sight, so I took off alone. I was cruising toward a 5:59 mile and really feeling my oats when Matt and Faubs flew past, leaving me behind at about the same rate a scampering child leaves behind a dropped mitten.
“I hate you guys!” I shouted at their backs.
Only in the last half mile of the workout did I begin to feel a touch of heaviness in the legs. But my breathing remained under control, my energy abundant. The phrase Lake Mary Magic popped into my head.
When I reached Coach Ben this time I stopped, having completed my morning’s work, save for the cooldown, for which I would await a two-pounds-lighter Bob Tusso.
“What was your last mile?” Ben asked.
“Five fifty,” I wheezed. Ben’s face froze.
“Is that even possible?” he asked.
“Apparently so,” I said.
Another Bagel Run, another chance to talk shop for an hour with Coach Ben as we lagged behind the group. Ben is careful not to be too chummy with his runners, but I’ve thwarted his efforts to treat me just like any other member of the team by saying things to him that none of the real pros would, and I did so again as we skirted past the looming white bubble that is Walkup Skydome, NAU’s big sports arena.
“I have to say, you’ve assembled a really good group,” I confided. “I don’t just mean athletically, but character-wise as well. I like every single one of them.”
“Thanks,” Ben said. “I put a lot of emphasis on that in the recruitment process. There are a lot of talented young runners out there, but I look for guys and girls who will strengthen the team dynamic.”
We looked both ways and dashed across Pine Knoll Road toward a trailhead for Sinclair Wash.
“If I could build a team around just one of them, though,” I resumed, “it would be Scott Fauble.”
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because he’s a freaking animal!” I said. “That look in his eyes, when he’s really grinding? It’s like he’s about to kill and eat something. Or someone.”
Ben laughed noncommittally, neither endorsing nor disputing my judgment. Just then my watched beeped and we turned around. Four miles down, four to go.
“Oh, I talked to Asker Jeukendrup this morning,” I said in approximately the same tone one might say, “I tried Nutella for the first time this morning.”
Dr. Jeukendrup is arguably the world’s foremost authority on endurance sports nutrition, the author of more than 300 scientific papers, and a consultant to the likes of former world-record holder Haile Gebrselassie. I’ve picked his brain a few times over the years, and, with Ben’s permission, I reached out to him recently to ask if he would be willing to help me dial in my fueling plan for Chicago.
“Oh, good. What did he say?”
“He gave me some homework,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “He wants me to send him information about my weight before and after every long run, plus data on temperature, humidity, and elevation; what and how much I drink; and even how much I pee. The part that affects you is that he also wants me to practice drinking on the same schedule I will in Chicago, and obviously I’ll need some help with that.”
“No problem,” Ben said. “Just give me the specifics and I’ll pass them along to Ian or Veronica or whoever’s handling your bottles that day.”
I felt my whole body relax, as though a loud noise I was bracing for never came. A lot of coaches are territorial and take a dim view of what they perceive as outside interference. Ben doesn’t seem to be one of them. In a book he wrote for high-school cross country coaches, the revealingly titled Tradition, Class, Pride, which I read prior to coming here, he wrote, “It’s really healthy for a runner to hear about the sport from new angles not covered by their regular coaches.”
“By the way,” I said, remembering another question I’d meant to ask, “is my long run on Saturday seventeen miles or nineteen? It says seventeen on Final Surge, but when I add up the parts, it comes to nineteen.”
We went over the parts together: two-mile warm-up, four miles at 6:35 per mile, eight miles at 7:20 per mile, four miles cutting down from 6:35 to 6:00, one-mile cooldown.
“Huh,” Ben said. “I guess that does add up to nineteen. Well, then: nineteen it is.”
“That means I’m going to finish the week with eighty-seven miles!” I said, jubilant. “I haven’t logged this kind of mileage in years. How much higher do you think you’ll have me go?”
“Not a lot. What will change is not so much the number of miles but their consistency. You’ll be doing longer, marathon-specific workouts. You can run a great marathon on eighty-five miles a week if they’re the right kinds of miles.”
“I sure hope I run a great marathon,” I said, meaning a sub-2:40 marathon but still reticent to speak the number. “Have you considered what might happen if I totally crush Chicago? My blog is getting some traction. Aging dreamers like me will be beating down your door to get you to coach them!”
“Well, there are worse problems, I suppose,” Ben laughed. “But that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m not looking to be that world-famous genius coach everyone looks at like some kind of oracle. There was a time when I kind of thought I should want that, but not anymore. I’ve come to realize I’m just not that guy. When it comes down to it, I’m not a genius who knows all the science. I’m a culture builder and a motivator. And I’m okay with it.”
The other day Matt Llano told me something about Coach Ben that I hadn’t known. Five years ago, he took a huge risk, selling his stake in a successful running retail store in St. Louis and moving his family to Flagstaff, where he hoped to make a go of being a full-time elite coach despite having few connections here and no reputation to speak of. Genius or not, he made a good first impression on some of the top local runners, including Matt, whom he started coaching the following year. Around the same time, the one existing professional running team in town, coached by Greg McMillan, lost its sponsor and disbanded. Ben took on some of its former members (among them Ben and Steph Bruce) and before he knew it, he had an elite group of his own, but no funding. Over the course of 2014, he and Jen dumped $40,000 of their savings into the team—pretty much all they had. The couple was a few short steps away from food stamps when Hoka came on board in January 2015.
Not all great coaches have larger-than-life personalities or prodigal IQs, but in my experience, all great coaches give everything they have to their athletes. Ben Rosario just happens to have done this quite literally.
Shannon Thompson receives her clients in a borrowed meeting room located inside NAU’s Lumberjack Stadium. A sports psychologist affiliated with both Hypo2 and the university, she has worked with several members of NAZ Elite, including Matt, whose birthday party she attended the other night. Seated near each other, we had a lively conversation about whether one needs to be slightly crazy to be a successful runner, and though Shannon made no overt effort to press her services on me, I left the restaurant with an appointment. So it was that I found myself seated across from her this afternoon at one end of the giant conference table that dominates her make-do workspace.
“I have three types of clients,” she began. “Some athletes come to me because their coach made them. Others have a specific problem they want help with. And the rest aren’t really sure what I can do for them, but they’re open to various possibilities. Which type are you?”
“Well, as Matt mentioned when he introduced us,” I said, “I’m here in Flagstaff to experience the life of a professional runner. Like any real pro, I want to do everything I possibly can to improve, and I believe that working with you is one of those things.”
A laptop sat open on the table in front of Shannon. She squinted at the screen briefly before turning her attention back to me.
“Did you get the athlete introduction questionnaire I emailed to you?” she asked.
“Yes. I filled it out and sent it back to you yesterday.”
“Really? I don’t remember seeing it.” Shannon bit her lower lip as she searched her inbox. “Ah! There it is. I’m so sorry. I really need to get more organized.”
I took a mental stab at guessing Shannon’s age. Thirty-five, maybe? Everyone in this town, it seems, is at least a decade younger than me.
“If you don’t mind,” she said, shutting the laptop decisively, “I’ll look at this later and maybe we can talk about it when we meet again.”
I didn’t mind. In fact, I felt I’d already gotten something out of answering the form’s (literal) twenty questions, each of which invited introspection in one way or another.
3) What about you might cause those who love you to be concerned?
I push myself very hard and I burn the proverbial candle at both ends. I suspect that some of the people I love, my wife and my mom especially, worry that I will push too far in one direction, or that my motives for pushing are not entirely healthy.
Near the end of the form (Question #19), I was invited to name the question I’d most like to be asked when Shannon and I met. She now asked me this very question, her lips cocked in a mischievous smile that let me know she had not read my mind but had simply glimpsed my answer in her brief scan of the form.
“What am I most afraid of?” I repeated. “Failure. No, scratch that. What I’m most afraid of is letting my fear of failure ruin this experience. There’s a lot at stake for me here. If I run poorly in Chicago, or if I don’t even make it to the start line—which is all too likely given my history—it will be more than just another disappointment for me personally. I’m not doing this for mere ego gratification. I really want to inspire other runners to see how far they can go with whatever amount of talent they have. But nobody will be inspired if I hit the wall in Chicago and finish in three nineteen.”
“That’s a lot of pressure,” Shannon said.
“Which I accept. After all, the real pros are under tremendous pressure, too. Running pays their bills. I want to taste that kind of pressure because I think it has the potential to bring out the best in any athlete. I just don’t want to make the mistake of worrying so much about how it all turns out that I miss out on the journey, on simply being here and living this incredible opportunity, because it’s the only thing that will matter when I’m ninety years old and all I have is the memories.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” Shannon said, removing her elbows from the vast slab of wood separating us and sitting back. “One thing I would suggest—which may seem counterintuitive—is that you don’t even try to suppress these fears you’re having. I don’t know how familiar you are with eastern philosophy, but from this perspective, perhaps the best thing you can do is accept your fears and observe them without judging. You may find that by doing so consistently whenever they come up, they lose their hold over you. Does that make sense? Or did I just totally weird you out?”
“No, not at all!” I said hastily. “My older brother Josh is Buddhist, so I get the whole mindfulness thing. And it makes sense. I mean, shoot—how can fear ruin my experience if I embrace it as an integral part of the experience?”
“Exactly!”
After glancing at her phone to check the time, Shannon proposed that we begin to work on a mental performance plan, a tool she uses with all her clients because the one thing every athlete wants, ultimately, is to perform well. Receiving no objection from my side of the eighteen-seat table, she opened her laptop again and fiddled around until she had the right document in front of her.
“First of all, tell me about your best race,” Shannon said, facing me again. “The reason I ask is that a good mental performance plan is not one-size-fits-all. In order to help you, it has to be based on you—you at your best. So, what does that look like in your case?”
My first thought was that I had never run a “best race,” which is half the reason I’m here in Flagstaff. But as I cast my mind back over my twenty-seven-year racing history, I realized something.
“Now that I consider it,” I said, “almost all of my best races have been surprises. They were races I went into with modest expectations that I exceeded. But every time I’ve started a marathon feeling one hundred percent ready to crush it, I’ve fallen apart.”
“That’s interesting,” Shannon said, glancing again at her phone. “Unfortunately, we’re going to have to continue this another time. I’ve got another client coming in two minutes.”
I reviewed the appointment in my mind for the rest of the day. Not until I was winding down for bed with the corrective exercises AJ gave me (which are actually kind of relaxing) did I make the connection between the fear I’d discussed with Shannon and my fear of sharing my Chicago Marathon time goal with anyone. If I’m serious about not letting fear ruin this experience, I realized, I’m going to have to put that number out there. When I do, those three digits will acquire one more layer of meaning and become a symbol of not being afraid to be afraid.
For a fleeting moment this morning I felt what it’s like to be a world-class runner—not a good-for-his-age runner who happens to be training like a world-class runner in the company of world-class runners but a bona fide elite myself, a genetic lottery winner at the height of fitness. It happened on Lake Mary Road, my new favorite place on earth to run, midway through another lunker of a workout: a nineteen-miler with eight easy miles wedged between a four-mile tempo and a four-mile cutdown. I was alone and in the zone, clicking off 96-second quarters with metronomic steadiness, when I began to experience my body in a way I never have before, a hard-to-describe sort of weightless potency that felt almost like flight. My feet did not so much land on the asphalt beneath me as tap it. My lungs seemed suddenly to possess oceanic capacity, as though with one great inhalation I could suck in every last molecule of air from the vast open day around me. I pictured myself striding beautifully down the middle of a broad urban avenue, chasing a crowded press truck flanked by two flashing police motorcycles, the Kenyans trailing far behind me. This is it! I thought. This is what the real pros have—and now I have it!
Just then I heard footsteps approaching from my rear. Moments later, there they were, the usual culprits, Matt and Faubs, gliding past me, inexorable as aging. Within a few short minutes they were out of sight up the road. I still felt good, but not as good.
Mile 8, my finish line, came into view minutes before I reached it, marked by two or three vehicles and a cluster of humans. Faubs and Matt stood sipping from squeeze bottles, done for the day. Sarah Crouch, who’d just wrapped up a solo workout, awaited her husband, Michael, a 2:21 marathoner coached by Ben. The other Sarah, Sarah Cotton, had her ever-present video camera trained on me. And Coach Ben himself counted out loud as I bore down on the cluster, having completed the first three miles of the cutdown in 6:28, 6:13, and 6:01, and now letting it all hang out.
“Five forty-five,” Ben droned, “five forty-six, five forty-seven.”
I slowed to an unsteady walk and laced my fingers together on top of my head, breathing in huffs. Forgetting about Michael for the moment, Sarah Crouch stalked after me like a zealous Capitol Hill reporter demanding comment from a passing senator.
“Dude, I’m telling you,” she said almost angrily, “you’re going to run 2:35 in Chicago!”
An hour later, back at Matt’s house, Nataki and I had just sat down to plates of baked tilapia with sautéed okra and zucchini when my phone signaled the arrival of a new text message. It came from Sarah, who, evidently, wasn’t quite done with me:
Okay, here’s the thing, Matt. You’ve come up to Flagstaff to train like an elite runner, and that’s exactly what you’re doing physically. But mentally, pro runners set massive goals. Matt Llano said he was fit enough to run 2:08–2:10, and people thought he was crazy. And sure, he ran 2:12, which is kind of a “shoot for the moon and you’ll land among the stars” scenario. But landing among the stars is far better than floundering around on planet earth looking up at the sky and just wondering. I honestly believe that if you are hitting your goals more than 10% of the time, your goals aren’t ambitious enough. I get that it’s scary to put a time goal out there, but you have to have one in front of you to chase. There is a reason that 2:29 is written at the top of every page of my running log. I’m training FOR that. I’m training TOWARD that. The guy I saw finish that workout today is NOT a 2:40 guy. I couldn’t have done the workout that you did today. I just want you to go all in mentally, obsessively, to pick a crazy, unrealistic time goal and just chase it like there is no tomorrow every day for the next 9 weeks, not because you’re writing a book, not because I said so, but because this may be the only window in your life where you are able to do that without distraction. Okay, rant over. Recover well, you smashed it today.
I try to avoid texting during meals with Nataki, but in this case I couldn’t hold back. Setting down my fork, I let my fish cool as I thumbed out a reply.
I appreciate this, Sarah, not only because it’s good advice but also because you care enough to offer it. And I am receptive. My only resistance comes from my sense that there’s impossible and then there’s IMPOSSIBLE. The idea that I could run 2:35 at age 46 in my 41st marathon after running no better than 2:41 in the previous 40 marathons and no better than 2:49 in nine years is, to me, reality-defying. But my intention is to leave not one scintilla of my potential unrealized on the streets of Chicago on October 8th, whatever that translates to time-wise. Thanks again for the rant.
I know Sarah well enough already that I did not expect her to allow me to have the last word, and I was therefore wholly unsurprised when my phone chimed again barely a minute later. But I, too, like to have the last word. And so…
Sarah: Not a big fan of that i-word, ha ha! If someone had told you a month ago that you would run what you ran today, you may have said that was impossible too. I just have that delightful spine-tingling feeling that you are going to surprise yourself in October, whatever that means time-wise. Heck, it may be 85 degrees and neither of us breaks 2:40. Who the hell knows? Anyway, I just like you and want you to succeed, that’s what it boils down to.
Me: We will continue this conversation. It would be kind of cool to beat you…
Sarah: Bring it, buddy.
Me: That settles it, you’re going down!
Sarah: We need to work on our trash talk.
Me: There’s time.
Last night I was trying to muster the courage to publicly share my personal goal for the Chicago Marathon, a goal that scares me. Less than twenty-four hours later, a professional runner I met less than two weeks ago is all but forcing me to do precisely this and more. In life there are some people who just have your number. But Sarah Crouch has my number.
I got a second blood draw today—the one that will determine whether training at high altitude is actually working. In truth, I already know it’s working because I’m running well and feeling great. Still, I’m curious to find out to what extent the lab results explain my improvement. Have my hemoglobin and hematocrit levels increased a lot or just a little? I’ll know in a day or two.
As with the first blood draw, I went straight from the phlebotomist’s office to the site of the team run, which was Woody Mountain Road on this occasion. Also like last time, I made a joke about the patch of gauze that was affixed to the crook of my left elbow.
“Just so you know,” I said to Faubs and Ben Bruce, “this is from a vitamin B12 infusion. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
A number of high-profile athletes, among them baseball star Rafael Palmeiro, have at one time or another blamed a failed performance-enhancing drug test on tainted B12 shots. Ben caught the reference.
“It’s funny you say that,” he said. “I just had an argument about doping with my mom.”
The disagreement began, evidently, when Ben expressed skepticism about the validity of Ethiopian runner Almaz Ayana’s astonishing forty-six-second victory in the women’s 10,000 meters at the World Track and Field Championships two days ago. Assuming the role of devil’s advocate, Mrs. Bruce suggested that perhaps it wasn’t drugs but a special East African genetic advantage that accounted for Ayana’s dominance in London. Her son then countered that there were seven other East African women in the race, all of whom got their asses handed to them by Ayana.
“It’s just hard to believe,” he grumbled.
Later, during the run, I trotted out the same B12 joke for Steph, Rochelle, Amy, and Kellyn, sparking another exchange on the topic du jour. The object of suspicion this time was Justin Gatlin, a sprinter who recently came off a four-year suspension for performance-enhancing drug use and who, now thirty-five years old—ancient for an elite sprinter—just won the men’s 100 meters at the world championships.
“People say, ‘Well, he served his time,’ ” Steph lamented. “What they don’t understand is that steroids change an athlete’s body forever. Even if Gatlin isn’t using drugs now, he’s still benefitting from having done them in the past.”
I told my companions about an interview I did with Justin back in 2006, in which he told me, “I think that people who feel they have to use drugs and manipulate their fans are criminals.” Two months later, he tested positive for testosterone and steroids.
“I was shocked,” I said. “He seemed so earnest and conscientious. I learned that you just never know.”
Too late, I realized I’d put my foot in my mouth once again, insinuating that my suspicions encompassed all elite runners, present company included. But the slip went unnoticed, Steph moving on to share her take on Icarus, a newly released documentary film by comedian turned investigative journalist Bryan Fogel, who somehow managed to embed himself with the sketchy (and largely Russian) characters behind international sports doping. No one else having yet seen it, Steph explained in some detail what she had learned from the movie about how cheaters beat doping tests. Kellyn, Rochelle, and Amy were full of questions—the kinds of questions you’d ask only if you’d previously had absolutely no idea how cheaters beat drug tests.
Before I knew it, I was only half listening, distracted by the sudden recollection of a weirdly charged exchange that occurred between Coach Ben and me at the end of our first meeting at Kickstand Kafé four weeks ago. We had just finished discussing the small matter of my goal for Chicago when Ben, the last bite of his chorizo burrito balanced on his fork, asked if I had any more questions, unwittingly handing me an irresistible opportunity to deliver a line I had planned days earlier.
“Just one,” I said. “When do I get my EPO?”
Ben dropped the utensil and looked me dead in the eye. Oops. I swallowed hard, scrambling for words to undo the words I’d just spoken. Seconds passed like hours as my coach’s gaze held mine. I was on the verge of prostrating myself in contrition when, seeing what he needed to see, he let me off the hook, his lips bending into a wry smile.
“Ha ha, very funny,” he said.
I had the distinct impression then that if Ben had discerned during those few seconds of unbearable silence that I was not 100 percent kidding around—that if even 1 percent of me genuinely assumed, as many fans of the sport of running do, that all of the top pros are doping, including Ben’s athletes, or that I was even 1 percent inclined to accept a few vials of erythropoietin and some syringes from him if he’d had them to give—he would have told me to get the fuck out of his sight and go back to California and never speak to him again.
Last night several members of NAZ Elite and a handful of their significant others got together at Tourist Home, a popular local hangout, for a patio dinner hosted by Josh Cox, who’s in town to present the terms of the team’s new contract with Hoka. The atmosphere was somewhat less convivial than it ought to have been, fouled by a vague awkwardness that affected our party of twelve like a bad smell whose source could not be politely acknowledged. On everyone’s mind but nobody’s lips was the jolt we’d received a few hours earlier, during a two-hour, PowerPoint-illustrated meeting at Flagstaff Aquaplex (a fancy swimming facility with lots of amenities, including meeting rooms), where Josh delivered the news that, for budgetary reasons, the team roster would be pared from thirteen runners to ten under the new deal.
It made me heartsick to know that three of the deserving young athletes seated around me would soon get pink slips. But my heart is only so big, and as the meal wore on, the preoccupied look I shared with the real pros at the table had less and less to do with who would no longer have a job in January and more and more to do with a matter that affected me more personally, and far more imminently, which was the next day’s workout: seven times one kilometer at threshold pace on a minute’s rest followed by a 1,500-meter time trial.
It wasn’t the Ks that scared me but rather the time trial. I hadn’t run an all-out 1500 since my junior year of high school, and I’d certainly never run one on tired legs at 7,300 feet. I like to think I can suffer as much as any runner, but that all-out effort promised to hurt in a way I’m not accustomed to. What’s more, Faubs and Matt would be doing the very same workout, which meant I would essentially be racing them over those closing 1,500 meters. In an effort to take my anxiety down a notch, if only by giving veiled expression to it, I took advantage of Coach Ben’s position to my immediate right, probing his expectations.
“So, what’s your prediction for my 1,500 tomorrow?” I asked offhandedly, as though this were one of several equally random questions I might have tossed out just for the sake of conversation.
I’ve been told that Ben is a man who can’t resist a wager, and his reaction to my question validated the hearsay. Setting his cheeseburger down, he shut his eyes and massaged his temples, suddenly far more interested in the little parlor game I had proposed than in the next bite.
“I really need to be in front of a computer to do this properly,” he hedged. “But for now I’ll say five fifteen.”
“That seems a bit slow to me,” I said, privately elated by Ben’s pressure-reducing lowball estimate. My personal goal was to break five minutes.
Later, back at Matt’s place, I received a text message from Ben, who evidently had consulted his computer: Sub 5.
Just like that, the pressure was on again. But good news awaited me this morning at Mountain Shadows, a development of newer homes situated on Flagstaff’s northwest outskirts that happens to contain a flat, horseshoe-shaped street of precisely 1,500 meters’ length. The moment I stepped out of Matt’s Range Rover (for once we carpooled), Coach Ben informed me he’d successfully recruited Bob Tusso to serve as my workout partner. Happy for the company, I was happier still at the prospect of perhaps not finishing the time trial dead last after all. A few minutes later, Bob showed up wearing the same long-sleeve royal-blue-and-yellow Boston Marathon commemorative shirt that I was wearing.
“I see you got the memo,” I said (because one of us had to).
The team warmed up in the forest that surrounds Mountain Shadows on three sides, Ben Bruce entertaining the rest of us—and taking my mind off my nerves—with a lengthy paean to the TV game show The Price Is Right.
“Playing miniature golf on television to win a car is my life’s dream,” he said at one point, his tone so perfectly deadpan that I couldn’t rule out the possibility he was completely serious.
The first part of the workout went off without a hitch, Bob and I taking turns setting the pace and averaging 3:35 per kilometer, well below our target. Having started five minutes behind us, Matt and Faubs closed the distance between our pairings with machinelike steadiness, torpedoes hunting tugboats, yet it wasn’t until we’d reached the homestretch of the final rep that I heard their footsteps. On a sudden impulse, I launched myself into a full sprint, driving my arms as if a gold medal were on the line, leaving an unconcerned Too Slow to be overtaken by his equally disinterested chasers inches from the finish cone, where I flipped around and backpedaled with my arms raised in mock victory.
Expecting laughter, I got nothing. Not even a smile. Only then did I recognize my mistake: These guys hate losing, and while we all knew I hadn’t really beaten them, my spontaneous hijinks had touched a sore spot, and they now couldn’t fucking wait to pulverize me in a true, fair competition.
After three minutes of recovery—time we spent walking in lazy circles, hands on hips, lungs playing catch-up—Coach Ben sent us all off together. Faubs and Matt exacted instant revenge, putting two steps on me with every step, if that’s even possible. Tuning them out, I focused instead on executing Ben’s instructions, which were to run the first 400 meters in eighty-two seconds and then speed up, a reasonable plan given that the course started with a 600-meter false flat into the wind and then got easier. Bob fell off quickly, but I sensed this only vaguely, my attention rooted on that first cone, which I passed at seventy-nine seconds, already sucking wind. I’d gone a full month in Flagstaff without ever really feeling the scarcity of oxygen. Now, all of a sudden, I felt like a lip-hooked trout thrashing on a cement dock, gills fanning desperately, coming up empty.
Midway to the next cone, I saw Ben Bruce loping along on his own up ahead. Still dealing with his abdominal strain, he’d paced Matt and Faubs through their first 400 and then let them go. The closer I got to him, the surer I became that he would jump in with me, a service that a part of me desired, for the motivating effect it would have, and another part feared, for the burden it would put me under not to implode. I caught up to Ben at precisely 800 meters (split time 2:38), and, sure enough, he fell in beside me.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Time to pick it up.”
Expertly, Ben settled into a pace that was perfectly modulated to pull me along without quite dragging me over the edge. By this point my brain was so far gone to hypoxia that I had no idea how far I had run, which cone was next, or if I still had a chance of breaking 5:00. But Ben had that covered, too.
“That last four hundred was a seventy-five,” he said when we reached the next cone. “Kick it in! Come on! You have less than a minute to go!”
With these well-chosen words Ben peeled away, leaving me to fight my own battle. Ahead I saw the receding forms of Faubs and Matt racing toward a huddle of people (Coach Ben, Jen, Sarah Cotton, one or two others) waiting at the finish. They seemed very far away, like shore to a drowning man. My breathing had become a shrill cry for air, something between a siren and a scream. But I embraced it, all of it, and the nearer I came to that beckoning last cone, the harder I pressed, as if pain itself, not time, were the true measuring stick.
“Four forty… eight,” Coach Ben intoned matter-of-factly when I reached the finish cone, like he’d expected it all along.
Four forty-eight! Four freaking forty-eight! I wanted to pound my chest like a gorilla, cackle madly, quote Muhammad Ali, dance a jig, and pick a fight—all at once. And I just might have, if Faubs hadn’t run 4:08, Matt 4:19.
Back at the vehicles, post-cooldown, I slid my Boston Marathon shirt back on and also the raggedy old cargo shorts I wear over my running shorts to virtually every team run (a homely contrast to the stylish team-issue warm-ups the others wear). I was working the zipper on the latter garment when I noticed Craig smirking. I glared at him: Out with it.
“Dude, what’s up with the cargo shorts?” he asked.
The long answer was that I didn’t own any NAZ Elite warm-ups and I didn’t want to ask Coach Ben or Josh Cox for another handout and I didn’t want to show up to workouts wearing warm-ups with the wrong brand name on them. But I went with the short answer.
“Remember, Craig, I’m a fake pro, not a real pro like you. Gotta look the part.”
This afternoon I sat down at a glass-topped table on the back porch of Matt’s house with Andrew Cooper, a student athlete at Washington State University whom I met at last week’s Bagel Run. Andrew hosts a podcast aimed at his fellow college runners and is always looking for people to interview. His main interest, naturally, was the real pro in the house, who went first, impressing me (I listened in) with his deft handling of a curveball question about how he keeps his teeth so white. When his promised forty-five minutes were up, Matt fled the patio and I took his place before a microphone that looked like it belonged in a recording studio, complete with pop guard.
“What’s it like to train for a marathon with a team of professional runners?” Andrew began. “It must be brutal.”
“Honestly, not really,” I said. “It’s hard, but I’m enjoying myself so much that I don’t really notice how hard it is, if that makes any sense.”
Andrew narrowed his eyes skeptically, but he didn’t press, instead moving on to the topic of my background. I told him the same story I told Sarah Cotton about running the last mile of the 1983 Boston Marathon with my dad.
“How about your mother?” Andrew asked cautiously. “Is she still—?”
I cut him off, practically leaping across the table to assure Andrew that my mom is alive and well, saying nothing about the stroke she suffered two years ago. It was a mild one, as strokes go, triggered (according to her neurologist) by a medication she took for chronic migraines. A change in prescription has so far kept a second stroke from occurring, but her short-term memory has deteriorated markedly of late. Any stranger who talked to her at length would think she has moderate dementia, yet the tests say otherwise, and the prevailing theory in our family—what we choose to believe, anyway—is that the symptoms are related to cumulative brain trauma caused by the migraines themselves, nothing too serious.
In the evening, acting on a hunch, I looked up Andrew’s website and dug into his own background, learning from a page titled “My Story” that his father had suffered a stroke during Andrew’s senior year of high school, two months after Andrew won the state cross country championship, and died weeks later. “My dad loved my running,” he wrote. “I’m extremely grateful that I was able to accomplish something great for him while he was alive. Losing my dad made me realize how valuable life was and how important it is to attack every living moment.”
I stared at these last words for a long time. Attack every living moment. Like a surprise blow to the back of the head, Andrew’s account of a parent’s premature passing knocked the scales from my eyes, forcing me to see other possibilities. In two days I will fly to Portland, Oregon, to celebrate my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary with my family. We’ve gathered there every August for the past three years, a tradition that, for me, always includes participation in the High Street Hustle, a 5K/8K road race held in Salem.
Before today, my thoughts about the trip were selfishly focused on this race, my first chance to really test the fruits of living the life of pro runner. Now I just want to see my mom.
I felt like an unwilling streaker—naked in every sense of the word—as I performed an improved but still clumsy rendition of B skips in the shadow of the Oregon State Capitol before the start of this morning’s High Street Hustle. In fact, I very nearly was naked, clad in the skimpy racing kit of Northern Arizona Elite, shorts hemmed a good three inches above my tan line. But it was more than just the paucity of fabric on my body that made me self-conscious. Skimpiness notwithstanding, the uniform I wore was recognizably that of a major professional running team, and as such it drew interested looks from some of the speedier runners drilling and striding around me. Had I been sporting a sumo wrestler’s loincloth or Tom Brady’s game-day armor, complete with shoulder pads and helmet, I would not have felt any more conspicuous than I did, a feeling exacerbated by internal echoes of a text message Coach Ben sent me last night as I lay on an inflatable mattress in a guest room in my brother Josh’s home nearby: Make that uniform proud tomorrow!
The blast of the start horn brought a perverse kind of relief, a welcome transition from mental discomfort to physical effort. Tuning out the surrounding stampede, I focused on settling into a pace that I perceived to be just below “the line,” as Coach Ben calls it, which is to say a tad slower than the swiftest tempo I believed I could sustain for five kilometers. The temptation to consult my watch was strong, but I resisted for the first 700 meters, a straight shot down Court Street, stealing a glance only when I turned left onto High Street. The number I wanted to see was 5:18, give or take. The number I did see, with a pinch of annoyance, was 5:24.
No sooner had I shaken off this small irritant than I was confronted with a bigger one: The Hill (as Hustle veterans refer to it), a dome-like momentum-crusher rising fifty-four feet over a tenth of a mile that I remembered well from past encounters. Respecting Ben’s line, I let gravity have her way with me, albeit grudgingly, ruing the lost seconds. On the far side I was waved through a tree-shaded intersection by a yawning policeman who looked as though he’d rather be just about anywhere else. Hearing my watch chirp, I checked my split for the first mile and cursed out loud, wondering how the hell it was even possible that a 5:31 mile on fresh legs at sea level felt no easier than the 5:47 mile I ran a week ago in Flagstaff at the end of a huge workout undertaken at the end of a huge week of training.
Scott Fauble’s voice now entered my head, speaking the words he spoke to me at Walnut Canyon the other day when I asked him what it’s like to race at low elevation after training at altitude, as he himself had done two weeks earlier: You know, it’s funny. You might think it would feel easier, or at least different, but it doesn’t. You can just push harder.
We’d see about that.
The remaining distance to the halfway point consisted of a long false flat, one of those annoying 1 percenters that ramp up just enough to slow you down without seeming like they ought to. The terrain did at least offer the compensating advantage of high visibility, which I exploited to take stock of the competition. Of the five runners strung out ahead of me, three charged right past the traffic cone that marked the 5K turnaround, identifying themselves as participants in the longer 8K event. The next two, both teenagers, circled the cone, identifying themselves as my opponents.
Knowing exactly who stood between me and victory, I shot a mental harpoon at the back of the second-place runner and hauled him in, patiently though, still conscious of the line. I’d just put the kid behind me when my watch beeped again, like a video game marking a kill. I took another quick peek and discovered I had run the second mile in 5:30, one measly second faster than the first, and I said another bad word.
Then I remembered Matt Llano’s advice, given to me two nights ago, on the eve of my flight to Portland. I was upstairs with Nataki, trading foot massages, Matt alone downstairs, binge-watching Parks and Recreation, when I texted him on a whim to ask how I should approach my upcoming race.
“It’s simple,” he wrote back. “Just run faster than everyone else!”
At the time I took this response as a glib brush-off. But here in the heat of battle I understood what Matt really meant. For professional runners like him, race strategy truly is as simple as making sure everyone else is behind you when you cross the finish line. Not so for us amateurs, who just try to run as fast as we can, not faster than everyone else—a wholly different mindset. In his own way, Matt was challenging me, asking, Are you here just to train like a pro, or are you willing to race like one, too?
Something inside me snapped. Defying Coach Ben’s caution to wait for the top of The Hill to make my move, I punched it on the approach, attacking the sucker like a motocross racer hitting a launch ramp. As I came over the summit, the leader returned to view, closer than before, and a predatory instinct took hold of me, transforming the pain of my burning windpipe into sadistic pleasure, the exquisite agony of the straining cheetah closing in on her fleeing dinner.
Back on Court Street, some 500 meters from a finish line already visible in the far distance, I caught the little bastard. Mindful of our thirty-year age difference, I pressed even harder as I made the pass, hoping to shatter the young man’s will and forestall a neck-and-neck sprint to the finish, which I was sure to lose, judging by past experience. Running now with the fear of the hunted rather than the malice of the hunter, I put everything I had into the last tenth of a mile, my head flung back and my mouth gaping, not believing the race announcer when he announced my name to the waiting crowd, declaring me the winner of the 2017 High Street Hustle 5K even as I continued to grope toward the line.
But he was right; I did win. And if I was looking for proof that training with the pros was working, I now had it. My finish time of 16:54, a course record, marked a 44-second improvement on my runner-up performance last year, and I’d covered the last mile of the race in 5:02, the fastest single mile I’ve run in competition in fifteen years.
Coach Ben phoned me a couple of hours later, by which time I had demolished a Starbucks breakfast sandwich on the way back to Josh’s house, taken an extra-long shower, and attired myself for the afternoon’s anniversary celebration.
“Take me through it,” he said, having learned the outcome already from a tweet I’d posted.
I took Ben through it, harping on the negatives, especially my mistake of running too far under the line in the first two miles and thus missing an opportunity to record a faster finish time.
“But you won!” Ben protested.
“Yeah, I know,” I sighed. “I guess I’d still rather lose fast than win slow. You might need more than thirteen weeks to beat the amateur out of me.”
In my twenty-seven years of running I have experienced more than a few runner’s highs, but none surpassing the sublime rush that stole upon me this morning on Lake Mary Road, an ecstasy of mind, body, and spirit that combined an intoxicating sense of inexhaustible vigor, the delight of blowing away my most sanguine performance expectations, the joy of running in a postcard-worthy environment, and the pinch-me thrill of experiencing all of this as part of a professional running team. I was on pace to close out what was inarguably the beastliest run I’d ever attempted with a 5:30 mile, having already knocked out a four-mile steady-state effort, a set of four half-mile repeats, a two-mile critical-velocity segment, and a set of four 400-meter sprints. Still visible on the road ahead was Stephanie Bruce, who had started the same workout two minutes behind me and who—surprised perhaps by how long it had taken her and pacer Nick Arciniaga to hunt me down—had chided me for running too fast when she finally slid past me (“Sorry, Steph,” I replied, not sorry). Gratitude swelled my heart to the brink of bursting as I entered the last quarter mile, a rapturous rush of thankfulness for the gift of being here, now, doing this.
ZAP!
A white-hot bolt of pain ripped through my groin, on the left side, at the crease between leg and crotch. Time slowed, as it does in the moments before an automobile collision. I knew something terrible had happened, but a stubborn instinct goaded me to keep running, to finish what I was so tantalizingly close to finishing. In any case, I was running too fast to have stopped instantaneously even if I’d wanted to, and when my left foot touched down again a second white-hot blast of pain triggered the same sequence of mental events: raw animal recognition of grievous bodily damage followed by a mulish insistence on continuing despite it.
A third shot to the groin brought me to my senses. Picturing soft tissue separating from bone, I staggered to a hitching walk, my mind weirdly empty, numbed by the dawning realization that it was all over. My fake pro runner fantasy was gone, just like that. There would be no sub-2:40 marathon. Not in Chicago, not ever. My last best chance to achieve a goal I’d hungered after for more than a third of my life had vanished in a flash, and at the precise moment it seemed most within reach.
Like a dazed soldier seeking the source of his bleeding, I probed the fingertip-size epicenter of pain radiating from my loins with a pair of fingers as I limped toward the spot where Jen Rosario (standing in for her husband, who was on a plane to Kuala Lumpur to support Rui Yung Soh, a Singaporean elite, in the Southeast Asian Games Marathon) waited with my drink bottle and a timer. I’d covered about a third of the remaining distance when Ben Bruce and Craig Lutz came jogging my way from Jen’s direction, having completed their workout.
“What’s the matter,” Ben joked, eyeing the hand on my crotch, “did you break your penis?”
Something in my face caused his smile to drop.
“Are you okay? Do you want us to have Jen bring the truck?”
I waved away the offer.
“I can walk,” I said lifelessly. “Go ahead and finish your cooldown.”
By the time I came within speaking distance of Jen, my 5:30 mile had turned into a 7:30-and-counting mile.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Hurt my groin,” I said. “It’s bad. I think I tore something.”
Jen handed me my bottle, as she would have done anyway, the mute gesture somehow communicating a sympathy she lacked words for. I received the Maurten-filled plastic cylinder mechanically, contemplated it for a second or two, then raised my arm overhead and slammed it against the pavement, punctuating its impact with a primal curse.
“Stay calm!” Jen pleaded. “I’ll text Ben.”
While Jen thumbed away at her phone, I paced back and forth, my thoughts racing. What the hell was I supposed to do now? Hang around Flagstaff for another seven and a half weeks, unable to run, pitied by everyone around me until their pity ran out? Unthinkable. Go home to California, to the prison of old routines, marking time until some new adventure came along? Whoopee.
“Ben wants you to see AJ or Wes as soon as possible,” Jen broke in, “and let him know what they tell you.”
“I have an appointment with AJ this afternoon,” I said, my voice once again drained of emotion. “It was supposed to be for my Achilles, but—well, whatever.”
I climbed into the front passenger seat of Jen’s truck for the ride back to Lake Mary Start. Faubs, Nick, and Futsum—whom Jen had quietly made aware of my misfortune when they returned from their cooldowns—squeezed into the back.
“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Faubs said from behind me. “These things sometimes seem a lot worse at first than they turn out to be.”
I knew better than to reach out for the lifeline of hope Faubs was tossing me. Nothing in my vast catalog of experience with injury encouraged it, and I understood all too well what hoping in hopeless situations gets you. But I grabbed hold anyway, powerless to resist the feeble succor of magical thinking.
We arrived at the dirt lot where everyone had parked, and the truck emptied out. I opened my door only to discover that Jen had edged too close to a ditch to allow egress on the right side of the vehicle. The obvious solution was to slide over to the driver seat and exit from the left, but this required that I raise my injured leg, which I couldn’t do. Too prideful to ask for help, I extricated myself by using my hands to lift my leg like a construction crane hoisting a beam, then slunk to the Fun Mobile unnoticed as my teammates traded stories about their workouts.
Two hours later I was in AJ’s office, lying faceup on the treatment table with my legs in a figure four, right leg straight, left leg bent and hinged outward. Having heard my account of the incident, AJ now sought a diagnosis, pressing down gently on the inside of my knee to assess the ability of the hip abductor tendons (AJ’s more exact term for groin) to stretch. He might as well have jabbed me with a letter opener. The muscles along the inner thigh clenched in automatic resistance and AJ yanked away his hand as though scalded.
“Okay, now try pushing against my hand,” he said. “As hard as you can.”
I pressed my knee into his palm, AJ adjusting his counter-pressure to match my force and keep my leg from actually moving.
“Does that hurt?” he asked.
“Not much,” I said.
“Okay, go ahead and sit up.”
I sat up, AJ straightening my leg for me with the gentleness of a hospice nurse assisting a goner.
“So, what’s the verdict?”
“I think it’s highly unlikely you tore something,” AJ said in his usual tone of monkish serenity. “We’d need an MRI to be certain, but I’m pretty confident it’s just a severe case of acute tendonitis. That’s a two-week injury. It will heal, I promise. But you may need to adjust your expectations for Chicago.”
Another lifeline. I clutched this one, too, almost hating myself for my inability to do otherwise.
AJ described my treatment plan: high-dose ibuprofen, alternating applications of heat and ice, a half dozen new rehab exercises, and daily lasering. After demonstrating the exercises, AJ ushered me over to a seat nearer the cold laser machine, which he switched on with a practiced no-look finger flick.
“Due to the location of the injury, I’m going to have you run the laser on yourself,” he said primly, handing me the wand.
“Any danger of singed pubic hairs?”
“Actually, yes,” AJ smiled. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
Coach Ben’s promised call came at midafternoon, catching me lounging in boxer briefs at Matt’s house with a newly bought heating pad wrapped around my upper leg.
“Bring me up to speed,” he said sleepily. It was 6 A.M. tomorrow in Malaysia.
Conscious of how quickly the thing that had happened on Lake Mary Road was becoming the story of the thing, I repeated to Ben everything I had already told AJ, but with more polish, concluding with AJ’s diagnosis and treatment plan.
“Let’s take three days off,” Ben said with characteristic decisiveness. “And I mean off. No running, no cross-training, nothing but rehab. And don’t do that runner thing where you test it five times a day.”
I laughed guiltily, having done this once or twice already.
“I know it sucks,” Ben said, “but I’ve seen the three-days-off trick do miracles. When Eric Fernandez was training for CIM last year, he hurt himself doing the same workout you just did. He was convinced it was another stress fracture. I had him take three days off, and guess what? The next time he ran, the pain was gone. When it’s all said and done, you might look back at this as nothing more than a speed bump, and I’m not just saying that. I believe it.”
A third lifeline of hope offered, a third taken.
I spent the balance of the afternoon updating my blog. No sooner was the news of my “broken penis” posted than I began to hear from my new friends in Flagstaff. Big Dog sent me a direct message on Twitter, inviting me out for a consolatory beer. Too Slow emailed me to extend his sympathies. Sarah Crouch texted me with orders to get my ass down to Flagstaff and see John Ball. Steph went so far as to call me up and invite me to participate in any and all non-running activities on the itinerary of her annual adult running camp, which begins tomorrow, as a way to distract myself from my situation.
“Stay positive,” she exhorted. “You can’t control everything, but you can control that much.”
After the call, I went back online and scanned the comments being left on my social media feeds by runners who, though strangers to me, had become personally invested in my journey as a fake pro runner, folks who wanted me to succeed not just for my sake but for the sake of what my success might mean for them, and who were now gutted by my failure.
I just wanted to reach out and say I’m sorry this happened. You were living the dream and you help so many of us live ours.
Oh, man. So sorry to hear this. As a 45-year-old, living vicariously through your experience was hugely inspirational. Get well soon.
Clearly well intended, these commiserative expressions only widened the circle of my disappointment. In the past, I failed only myself in failing. But this time I’ve also failed everyone who had a stake in my success. Or have I? My brain says yes, my heart says maybe not.
Don’t jump to any conclusions. These things sometimes seem a lot worse at first than they turn out to be.
It will heal, I promise.
When it’s all said and done, you might look back at this as nothing more than a speed bump.
Stay positive.
There’s no going back now. Hope will either see me through this thing or betray me once again.
Shannon could tell something was wrong the moment I sat down across from her at the same humongous conference table we’d communicated across in our first appointment. Perhaps it was my slouched posture, or maybe my subdued tone. I suppose I might as well have been wearing a sign.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m injured,” I said. “Shredded my groin in a workout on Wednesday. Coach Ben’s not letting me run for three days, and as you can imagine, I’m losing my fucking mind.”
“Oh, no!” Shannon said, smiling incongruously. “That sucks. I’m so sorry.”
“It sucks on many levels,” I sighed. “Obviously, my goal is in jeopardy, and that sucks. But I’ve been in this position before, more times than I care to remember. What’s different this time is that I’m here. I’ve never enjoyed running more than I am enjoying it now and not only because I’m running well. Was running well. I just love being with the team, and I miss it already. Regardless of what happens with this injury, I go home in seven weeks, and it’s killing me that I’m missing out on an experience that’s going to end so soon.”
“That’s understandable,” Shannon said, no longer smiling. “One thing I always encourage my clients to do is turn obstacles into opportunities. That can be difficult if you’re just an athlete and you get injured and you can’t achieve a goal because of it. But you’re not just an athlete—you’re also a writer. Who knows? If you’re open to it, maybe you’ll end up with a story that’s even more inspiring than the one you would have told if you hadn’t gotten hurt.”
This was perfectly sensible advice, but it was predicated on the assumption that the death of my dream was a fait accompli, and I’d snatched up too many lifelines of hope to accept this just yet.
“Yes, I am a writer,” I said evenly, “but I’m still an athlete. And, as an athlete, I don’t want to let go of my goal. If I can’t bounce back from this thing and run well in Chicago, then, sure, I’ll need to find a way to write about my experience that somehow makes lemonade from lemons. But I’m not ready to give up. I want to fight!”
“I love it!” Shannon laughed. “Even as an athlete, though, you can turn this into an opportunity. I’ll give you an example. My brother Tyler is a rock climber and also a drummer. Last year he broke his right foot during a climb—the foot he uses to play the kick drum. While he was recovering, instead of not playing at all, he used his left foot instead. And guess what? When he was able to use his right foot again, he played better than ever!”
I got the gist of the story, but I didn’t quite get the take-home lesson, so I asked Shannon to name the running equivalent of drumming left-footed. She suggested visualization: doing exactly the same workouts I would be doing with the team if I were healthy but in my head instead of with my body.
“I know it sounds crazy,” she said, “but there’s actually some science to suggest it might be beneficial.”
“I guess I could try that,” I said.
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic.”
I closed my eyes briefly, searching for the right words.
“I just can’t believe it’s come to this,” I said. “Running in bed wasn’t exactly what I had in mind I when I came here.”
I was back in AJ’s office, lasering my loins for the fourth consecutive day, when the question I knew was coming and didn’t want to answer came.
“What’s your report?”
“Oh, it was fabulous!” I said with an overbright smile. “Nataki ordered the venison and I had the flank steak. We shared a salad of baby artisan greens with beets and fennel root and a cold smoked salmon tartine. Everything was divine. I would put The Cottage right on par with Coppa Café. You’re two for two!”
AJ has been my go-to source for restaurant recommendations since he helped me break my streak of bad choices for Friday date night by steering me to Coppa and a couple of other places.
“That’s great,” AJ laughed. “But I meant the report on your groin.”
“Ah, yes, of course,” I said, giving up the act. “Well, it hurt a little when I walked with Nataki this morning.”
“Then you’re not running tomorrow,” AJ said flatly.
The question of what happens after today—my third and last day of enforced rest—has been on my mind almost constantly since Coach Ben imposed the hiatus. Ben himself has said little on the topic, in part because he’s still in Kuala Lumpur but also because, in situations like this, it’s the doctor or physical therapist (or chiropractor, in AJ’s case) who assumes the role of coach, guiding the athlete through rehabilitation toward “return to play,” as it’s called. What’s certain is that I will take up some form of cross-training tomorrow to preserve my fitness while I ease back into running. It’s the running piece that is unresolved. During yesterday’s appointment, AJ and I discussed the possibility of my testing the groin with a short walk/run session tomorrow, contingent on the report I delivered today, which, as I had feared, AJ had given a failing grade.
When the lasering was done, AJ put me back on the treatment table and repeated the same tests he’d used to diagnose the injury. I bent my left leg sharply and swung it out to the side like a dog watering a fire hydrant. AJ then applied gentle hand pressure to the knee, his eyebrows raised inquisitively. I shook my head, so he applied a little more pressure. I shook my head again and AJ pressed down even harder.
“Huh,” he said. “Your range of motion is back to 100 percent.”
I pounced.
“What harm can it do me to run for a few minutes tomorrow, really slow, just to see how it feels?” I asked.
“None, as long as you stop right away if there’s pain above a three out of ten. You might even find that running loosens it up a bit. But to be straight with you, I’ll be happy if you’re running again in eight days.”
In the afternoon, I returned to Hypo2 with Nataki for a classroom session with attendees of Steph’s running camp. The subject of her talk was mental toughness.
“What I love about running is that it’s the only part of life where you get to choose how much you suffer,” Steph told the gathering. “And the more you are willing to suffer, the greater the reward.”
Ben Bruce chimed in from the wings: “It’s kind of a messed-up sport.”
“It is messed up,” Steph agreed soberly.
A camper named Amanda raised her hand and asked Steph what she tells herself during difficult moments in a race.
“Well, I’m a huge Rocky fan,” Steph confessed, lightly blushing. “I think maybe it’s because Sylvester Stallone reminds me of my father. Anyway, I usually think of lines from Rocky movies. For example, in Rocky IV there’s the part where Rocky draws blood from Ivan Drago and his trainer tells him, ‘See? He’s a man just like you!’ ”
At yesterday’s talk, held at Moses Cone Park, Steph shared her story, somewhat unnecessarily, as most of the campers are huge fans of hers and likely knew it already. Raised in Phoenix, she started running early—we’re talking preschool-early—and displayed an immediate and obvious talent for it. Yet something in her, perhaps a lack of self-belief, kept her from fully committing to the sport. In high school, Steph mixed running with a fast food–heavy diet and a fair amount of weekend partying, much to the chagrin of her father, James, who told her time and again that she could be truly great if she would only honor her gift.
Adding urgency to these paternal appeals was the fact that James was slowly dying of prostate cancer, a disease that landed him eventually in hospice care in New York City, where, on February 15, 2002, an eighteen-year-old Steph traveled to say goodbye. Before visiting the hospital, she squeezed in a run on Long Island, during which she experienced what she could only describe to us as “a weird feeling.” Upon returning to the home where she was staying, Steph learned that James had died at the precise moment of this weird feeling.
The loss affected her deeply, but not entirely negatively, especially where her running was concerned. As if James’s belief in his daughter had somehow transferred itself to her upon his passing, Steph began to aim higher and dig deeper. Come spring, she lowered her mile time from 5:27 to 4:58 and finished second in the state championship—and the rest is history, as they say.
To close out her talk, Steph picked up her phone and played a snatch of audio from her favorite scene in Rocky Balboa, where Rocky delivers some tough love to his son, Robert, after Robert tries to talk his father out of stepping back into the ring at age sixty.
“Let me tell you something you already know,” Rocky says in that marble-mouth baritone. “The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are—it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much can you take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers, saying you ain’t where you want to be because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that!”
Unexpectedly, and almost to my embarrassment, a righteous anger began to bubble up inside me as I listened, Rocky’s words enflaming the smoldering frustration I’ve carried the past few days. My mind began to cast about for enemies, targets of my sudden lust for vengeance. It didn’t take long. Yesterday I received an email message from a self-described fan of my writing who wanted me to know that he and some of his training buddies had placed bets on how long I would survive with Northern Arizona Elite before I got injured, and that he had won the wager, having chosen the exact date of my groin injury. His delight in my downfall was obvious, despite cursory efforts to sandwich his gloating between trite expressions of sympathy.
It’s a mean and nasty place…
When the meeting broke up, I burst from the room as though I were stepping outside a bar for a fistfight, my entire body buzzing with adrenaline, or testosterone, or some other ass-kicking hormone, my inner Rocky delivering some tough love to my inner crybaby as I limped along, my groin pinching warningly.
Are you just gonna lie down and allow this asshole and everyone else who expects or wants you to fail to laugh in your face? Or are you gonna find a way to make it to Chicago despite what happened, and despite whatever else might happen, and run the time you want to run, and RUB THEIR GODDAMN FACES IN IT?
They call it bulletin-board material—you know, “Tell me I can’t and I’ll prove that I can.” The real pros use it routinely as fuel for great performances. Why can’t I?
Nataki and I were enjoying an al fresco brunch at Josephine’s, an upscale bistro that sits on tier two of AJ Gregg’s local restaurant rankings, when my phone buzzed, the screen lighting up with Coach Ben’s name and number. After a slight hesitation, I went ahead and picked up, a breach of etiquette I privately justified by the fact that the call was coming from Malaysia, not to mention that it concerned a matter of far greater importance than my fellow diners’ desire for freedom from telephonic intrusions: my groin.
“Still remember how to run?” Ben asked.
“It’s like riding a bike,” I said.
Today was the day. I woke up early, tingling with the same nervous anticipation I feel on race days, though the test in front of me was about as unrace-like as a run could possibly be. One part of me wanted to march straight down to Matt’s garage and learn my fate (AJ had insisted the session be done on a treadmill), while another part wanted to put off the moment of truth as long as possible. So I compromised and stuck to my normal schedule, consuming my usual granola-and-coffee breakfast and then returning to the bedroom to ice and heat my groin and bang out my daily rehab exercises.
At quarter to eight, while Brauny, my fellow Chicago Marathon entrant, was getting ready for a long run on A1 Mountain Road that would have been on my schedule as well if I hadn’t gotten hurt, I changed into running gear and made my way toward the garage, still inwardly divided, half of me approaching the Precor C964i like a five-year-old scampering toward a merry-go-round, the other half dragging his feet like a condemned man being led to the electric chair.
AJ and I had agreed on a protocol at his office yesterday: twelve minutes of slow jogging broken into two-minute segments separated by walking bouts of equal duration. If at any point my pain level exceeded a rating of three out of ten, I was to stop immediately.
My right index finger tremored visibly in its wavering search for the machine’s START button. I set the speed to 3.0 miles per hour, or about dog-walking pace, and eased into motion, my eyes glued to the time readout as though it were the countdown clock on an explosive device. After two minutes I stabbed the SPEED ↑ button eighteen times in quick succession, gently transitioning from walking to jogging as the treadmill belt accelerated beneath my feet, my attention concentrated marksman-like on the afferent feedback signals emanating from the bull’s-eye of my injury.
Immediate discomfort triggered a moment’s alarm, but my fright soon passed as I realized what I was feeling wasn’t pain so much as the threat of pain—perhaps a two on AJ’s ten-point scale—and it held steady at this level until it came time to walk again. My relief was great but incomplete, like that of a Russian roulette player who hears the click of an empty bullet chamber knowing he has another turn coming.
The pain climbed another notch—nosing right up to AJ’s limit—during the next jogging bout, and before I knew it I was praying, not to a higher power but to the injured tendon itself, pleading with it to spare me a second show-stopping nail-gun shot like the one I experienced out on Lake Mary Road. It worked. Or maybe it didn’t work, and the credit belongs elsewhere. Whatever the case, I was able to complete the session without any further escalation of symptoms.
Feeling more hopeful, perhaps, than circumstances warranted (the Chicago Marathon is forty-nine days away, I’ve run a grand total of 1.2 miles in the past four days, and I’m currently unable to run faster than ten minutes per mile), I pressed the STOP button, pulled the power cord from a waist-high wall socket to my right (Matt insists on this after every session), snatched my phone from its perch on the console, and was just about to hop down from the machine when I froze suddenly, contemplating the device in my right hand.
Should I or shouldn’t I?
Before I could change my mind, I typed a quick text message to Coach Ben:
I want to run 2:39 in Chicago.
Ben made no mention of this communication during today’s intercontinental discussion of my successful test run, nor did I bring it up again. No need. It’s out there now.
So soundlessly did Coach Ben creep up on me that I nearly leapt out of my skin when he addressed me through the Pilot’s open passenger window.
“How’s it going?”
AJ had cleared me to run outside today: thirty minutes total in five-minute chunks. It was hardly worth driving somewhere for, but Ben (who’s finally home from Southeast Asia) wanted to see me run, so he asked me to show myself at Kiltie Loop, where Faubs was doing a short fartlek before flying out to Flint, Michigan, to race the Crim 10-Mile.
“It’s going okay,” I said after recovering from my initial startle. “Still hurts, but not as much.”
Ben made no immediate comment, seeming at a loss for words.
“Yeah, but you’re running really slow,” he said eventually.
“Ten-minute pace, to be exact,” I said. “My new normal. If I tried to run any faster, it would be a problem.”
“Well, I call it a win,” Ben said, regaining his customary positivity. “Let me go check on Faubs and I’ll get back to you later.”
True to his word, Ben ran the last five-minute segment at my side, laying out his plan for me.
“So, here’s the deal,” he said. “The way I look at it, we’ve got a couple of extra weeks to play with. Normally, you’d start tapering two weeks out from Chicago, but when you’re coming off an injury and trying to regain fitness, that goes out the window. Once you’re healthy enough to do real workouts, we’ll have you run hard every three days right up until the marathon, and you’ll be fine. How does that sound?”
“I like it,” I said.
“What’s critical is that you get in one solid month where you’re able to train full-on. I’m sure people have been telling you that you’ve got plenty of time, and you do—until you don’t. That’s just reality.”
“Okay,” I said, consulting a mental calendar. “Four Sundays out from Chicago is September tenth. That gives me a little less than three weeks to get healthy.”
“Chin up,” Ben said. “We’ve seen how quickly you can get fit here.”
We had stopped moving by this point and were conversing face-to-face near our parked vehicles. Glancing down at my watch, I realized the timer was still running.
“Crap—I forgot to stop my watch!” I said, jabbing the red button. Only then did I realize how absurd my concern for exactitude was in my present situation. “Ha! Who cares?” I laughed mirthlessly.
“I know, it sucks,” Ben said.
Hearing a vehicle pull in behind me, I paused my stroll across the parking lot at Hypo2 and turned to see Brauny’s Subaru slide into the last empty spot. An almost queasy expression came over his face when he got out and noticed me waiting for him, as though I were some wayward second cousin of his who hit him up for money whenever our paths crossed. I took no offense, knowing how awkward it is sometimes to be around an injured teammate. You feel both grateful for and guilty about your own good health, and your instinct is to hide both emotions, an effort that inevitably results in stilted communication. Taking mercy on him, I spoke first as we entered the building together.
“Good workout for you yesterday, eh?”
Aaron posted a mildly self-deprecating tweet after yesterday’s 20 x 1K session at Mountain Shadows (another workout I would have done “with” him if not for my injury), evidence to anyone who knows his modest nature that he was well pleased with it.
“It was,” he said, trying not to sound too happy. “I felt pretty good aerobically the whole way. My legs just got tired toward the end—kind of like in a marathon, come to think of it, which I guess was the point.”
It’s a long walk from the front entrance of Hypo2 to the weight room, and there came a point in our journey down the main hallway where Brauny had no choice but to ask about my groin despite my obvious determination to steer the conversation in a different direction.
“I think I’m entering the anger stage of my recovery,” I told him glibly, “which is probably a good sign. It means I’m impatient to start running hard again, and I’m impatient because I’m feeling better.”
“Been there,” Aaron said. “You’ll feel a lot better once you get to do that first real workout and you see you haven’t lost as much fitness as you thought. And then you’ll start to see the bright side of taking time off: ‘Hey, at least my other aches and pains got a chance to quiet down. And I’m not worried anymore about overcooking myself before the race.’ ”
Aaron knows whereof he speaks. Imagine being twenty-nine years old, the main breadwinner for a family of four, and realizing your career—the only occupation you’ve ever known or loved—is probably over. That’s where Brauny found himself last year, a mysterious hip injury that defied every treatment known to man, including prolonged rest, having wiped out his 2015 season and threatening to do the same to 2016, an all-important Olympic year. His Adidas contract was set to expire in a few months. Aaron wasn’t naive. He knew that if he didn’t produce some results before then, he’d be out of a job. Desperate, he went to plan B, applying for thirty college coaching positions all over the map. Thirty rejections later, he went to plan C, relocating the family from their longtime home in southern Colorado to Flagstaff, scoring a last-chance contract with NAZ Elite, and consulting the oracle of John Ball, with whose help he has been able to slowly bootstrap his way back to 120-mile weeks. Brauny and I both have something riding on the Chicago Marathon, but for him the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“Hey, Fitz!” Coach Ben called out as we entered the gym. “We were just talking about you. What’s the good word?”
By “we” he meant himself and AJ, who stood at his side, and the “good word” he sought was a report on the five-mile run I’d done earlier in the morning at Fort Tuthill County Park.
“Pain level one!” I said.
AJ promptly handed me a workout sheet that, to my great satisfaction, included a couple of exercises (kettlebell swings, goblet squats) I’d been forbidden to do last week—another step forward.
It was a full house. Brauny was already down on all fours in the warm-up area, doing bird dogs. Next to him, Kellyn cranked out pistol squats like they were nothing. In the center of the room, Futsum modeled perfect front-squat technique. Above him, Craig was making hanging leg raises look easy. Over by the mirrors, Ben Bruce watched his reflection perform a set of reverse lunges. To his left, engaged in forward lunges, was Maria Elena Calle, an Ecuadorian native coached by Ben, who qualified for last year’s Olympic Marathon at age forty-one and is visiting from her current home in Virginia for a stint of altitude training. At the very back was Rochelle, doing goblet squats. And in the far corner, close to the dumbbell rack, Steph counted off weighted calf raises. But as I scanned the room in search of a place do my single-leg reverse deadlifts, I became aware of one notable absence: Amy Van Alstine.
It’s not unusual for a team member to miss the occasional strength workout—indeed, both Matt and Faubs were absent as well, but in their cases I knew why (Matt is recovering from the half marathon he did last weekend, Faubs is in Flint for the Crim 10-Mile)—whereas Amy’s nonappearance was unexplained. What’s more, I realized, I hadn’t seen her in some time. I could only hope the reason was something other than a worsening of her own injury.
Three hours later, Coach Ben sent an email message to the whole team under the ominous subject line “Roster Update,” and I had my answer. It read, in part, “Amy and I had a meeting earlier this week and we’ve decided it’s in her best interest and the best interest of the team to grant her a release effective immediately… The release is completely amicable and there was no incident. After nearly four years with the group she’s looking for other options moving forward and having the fall to explore those options is an opportunity we wanted for her.”
My mind leapt back to a moment from the team meeting we had two weeks ago, when we learned that three roster spots would be eliminated at year’s end. In sharing these grim tidings, Coach Ben had emphasized that no decisions had yet been made concerning who would be let go, but when the meeting broke up and everyone rose to leave the room, I noticed that Amy remained seated, looking as if she’d just seen a puppy get run over by a car. Reading the tea leaves, she must have decided to jump before she was pushed.
This is the other reason it’s sometimes awkward to be around an injured teammate.
Midway through a morning ride on Matt’s ElliptiGO (a seatless bicycle I’ve been using for cross-training), I stopped to pee in one of a pair of portable toilets generously positioned outside Lake Mary Country Store. As I stood over the hole, breath held and phone in hand, I opened an email message that had just come in from Josh Cox, then opened an attached PDF and found myself staring at an elite athlete contract for the Chicago Marathon with my name on it. My stomach did a backflip.
I should mention here that when I arrived in Flagstaff seven weeks ago, I was not registered to participate in the 2017 Chicago Marathon in any division, let alone the pro division, having missed the deadline to sign up. On learning of my predicament from Coach Ben, Josh told me not to worry, citing his “great relationship” with race director Carey Pinkowski. True to his word, he got me a bib.
But he didn’t stop there. I’ve known Josh since the early days of his own professional running career, when, acting as his own agent, he landed a role on Season 3 of The Bachelorette and scored a number of other lucrative opportunities that are beyond the reach of most 2:13 marathoners. After hanging up his racing flats in 2012, Josh put his persuasive powers to work for other professional runners, negotiating the most generous team contract in the entire sport on behalf of NAZ Elite. Hardwired to get as much as he possibly can for whomever he’s representing (even fake pro runners, evidently), Josh went back to Carey Pinkowski and asked him on my behalf to make a one-time exception to the normal qualifying standard for elite males (a recent sub-2:14 marathon time or the equivalent at another distance), arguing that it would be “good for the sport,” and good for the Chicago Marathon in particular, if he were to allow an Average Joe (who happens to be a writer) to experience what it’s like to compete in a World Marathon Major as an elite.
Back at the house I sat down to study the document, which appeared to be identical in every way to the one Brauny and other real pros had already signed except that it contained no appearance fee and no travel support. Most of its ten pages were made up of mind-numbing legalese, but I found a few interesting nuggets, including a clause requiring, in essence, that I not show up for the race weighing 300 pounds (“Athlete agrees to train, prepare for, start and use best efforts to complete the October 8, 2017, Chicago Marathon”).
I couldn’t wait to tell people about it, and in the evening I got my chance in the form of an invitation from Maria Elena to join an undefined “us” for dinner at Diablo Burger. At the restaurant, our hostess greeted us with her usual equatorial ebullience, crushing Nataki and me with ferocious embraces that belied her waifish proportions. Rochelle showed up a minute or two later and then Kellyn, trailed by an entourage comprising her husband, Kyle, their daughter, Kylyn, and three of Kyle’s relatives. Last to join the party were a couple of strangers (to me): Katja Goldring, a former NAZ Elite member, and her husband, Travis. After placing our orders up front, we migrated outside to a sun-bathed patio seating area and squeezed ourselves into a picnic table whose maximum seating capacity was definitely less than eleven.
All at once everyone seemed conscious of the fact that no single person among us knew every other person, and the conversation got off to a slow start. Seeing an opening, I took full advantage.
“So, I signed an elite athlete contract with the Chicago Marathon today,” I announced.
“That’s so cool!” Maria Elena gushed. “Congratulations!”
“It’s a very interesting agreement,” I said professorially. “It made me promise not to use performance-enhancing drugs, and I’m now officially eligible to claim prize money. I get $100,000 if I win and another $75,000 if I break the course record of 2:03:45.”
“Oh, wow!” Nataki said. “Do you think you can do it?”
Everyone laughed, assuming Nataki was joking, but I knew she wasn’t. After twenty years with me, my soul mate knows no more about the sport of running than I do about hairdressing (one of her great passions).
“I think you should at least try to win,” Nataki said to me later, privately, as we walked to the car. “I mean, why not?”
When Coach Ben sends out a team email on any day other than Sunday, I’ve learned, it’s more likely to contain bad news than good news. So I was expecting bad news when, as I made my slow way up the switchback staircase at Matt’s house on this Monday, ice pack in one hand, phone in the other, I received a team email from Ben, and all the more so because it bore the subject line “Bad News.” Heart clenched, I tapped it open immediately, braced for the cold touch of death, praying for something less, anything less—bankruptcy, divorce, whatever. But no.
Team,
I have some gut-wrenching news. You may already know but our friend David Torrence has passed away. I don’t know what else to say. I’m shocked. It’s the worst possible news.
Below this brutally economical bit of prose was a link to a report on a USA Today–affiliated website that I read on my computer in the bedroom while icing my groin. Thin on details, the brief article raised more questions than it answered, stating only that David was found early this morning at the bottom of a swimming pool at the condo complex where he resided in Scottsdale and that the local police saw no evidence of foul play. The presumed cause of death was drowning.
“Drowning?” Nataki repeated when I shared the report. “A thirty-one-year-old Olympic athlete? It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Hungry for more information, I went to Twitter, where already the running community was beginning to react. Those who knew David shared photos of him and stories about him that, in every case, captured the Category 5 joie de vivre that made me a fan of his long before I met him at Hypo2, where he pronounced himself a fan of mine in a gracious effort to soothe my battered ego after I’d made a fool of myself in my first strength session with the team. Then I thought of Matt.
Knowing just where to find him, I found him there, pacing dazedly between stove and refrigerator, oven and pantry, opening and closing cabinets and drawers randomly with an unfocused look in his eyes.
“Terrible news about David,” I said.
Matt continued to pull cooking implements from their storage places and put them back unused.
“I’m in shock,” he said eventually.
“How well did you know him?”
“We were supposed to have lunch together in Phoenix on Wednesday.”
“Oh, dear. Matt, I’m so sorry.”
He said nothing more, so I went back upstairs, but I continued thinking about David for the rest of the day and well into the night, taking a small measure of comfort in the belief that, if he had known even for one second that he was going to die before he did, he would have left this world with few regrets.
What about me? If I died tomorrow, would I go without regrets? I mulled this question over as I lay in bed at Nataki’s side, awaiting sleep. A few likely regrets came to mind. Not having been a better husband, for starters. Not having been a better son. A better brother, brother-in-law, uncle, nephew, coworker, friend. Focusing too much on running and writing and not enough on other people.
And, God help me, not having run a faster marathon.
Nataki and I were munching on turkey burgers at Matt’s kitchen table when my phone issued the four-tone jingle that heralds an incoming email message. Still chewing, I peeped at the screen just to make sure it wasn’t yet another bombshell from Coach Ben and saw that the sender was my dad, the subject “Your Mom,” the recipients all three sons. My stomach dropped through the floor.
I stole a glance at Nataki’s face, as though seeking confirmation that the seismic tremor I’d just felt wasn’t all in my head. Finding her contemplating her next bite, I opened the message, the mere length of which confirmed my worst fears before I’d read a single word. I must have forgotten to breathe as I sped through my father’s carefully chosen phrases, for by the time I’d absorbed the last of them (“We need you to be a key part of this whole deal”) I was woozy, gasping. Dropping the phone to the table, I blinked several times to clear my vision and resumed eating, trying my best to maintain a poker face, but without success.
“What’s wrong?” Nataki asked. “Did something happen?”
Saying nothing, I flicked my eyes in the direction of the TV seating area, where the newest occupants of the downstairs guest bedroom, Canadian runners Josh and Tanis Bolton, were lounging on Matt’s massive sectional, watching one of those critically acclaimed Netflix or HBO or Amazon series that I can’t keep straight because I haven’t seen any of them. Understanding, Nataki proposed—more loudly than necessary—that we take Queenie for a walk.
“My mom has Alzheimer’s disease,” I said outside, whispering needlessly. “I just found out from my dad.”
Nataki has an admirable yet also heartbreaking way of receiving bad news as though she were expecting it, and this instance was no exception.
“Okay,” she said simply. “Let’s pray on it.”
Nodding assent, I stopped walking, secured the handle of Queenie’s leash in my armpit, and offered Nataki my hands. As usual, she led the divine petition, asking God to heal my mother and to give our family peace and strength in the meantime. I mumbled “amen” and thanked my wife for the heartfelt words, but I felt no peace just yet. I wanted to do something, not just sit around waiting for a miracle. But what? Nothing came to me.
Then I thought of Steph, who had not only lost her father to prostate cancer as a teenager but whose mother, Joan, was now battling breast cancer. Resuming the walk, I texted her, requesting an immediate audience. Steph’s reply—an invitation to swing by her place in the evening, after the boys had been put to bed—came quicker than expected, interrupting my efforts to scoop up a steaming pile of fresh dog doo-doo.
Later, on our way over, Steph texted again, asking us to please not ring the doorbell and instead let ourselves in through the unlocked front door. We did as instructed, tiptoeing like a pair of cat burglars up a darkened stairwell to the main living space on the second floor, the home’s quirky layout familiar to me from my one prior visit, which, by sheer coincidence, occurred only this morning, when a small group of NAZ Elite runners met there for an easy run. The home remained in the same state of colorful disarray, the paraphernalia of two preschool children strewn everywhere. Steph greeted us with a token apology for the mess and offered us seats on a sectional that was relatively free of clutter, Nataki and I claiming one side of the L, our hostess the other. In the brief silence that followed these maneuverings, we overheard Ben’s efforts to tuck in his sleep-resistant young sons at the far end of the hallway that led to the bedrooms, his words indecipherable but his tone, playfully admonitory, pretty much telling the story. A smiling eye roll from Steph indicated it was more or less the same story every night.
“So, I just found out my mother has Alzheimer’s,” I blurted.
Steph stiffened as though stunned by a surprise slap to the cheek. Recovering, she began to say the sort of thing you’re supposed to say at such moments, but I interrupted.
“I know, it’s terrible,” I said. “I’m feeling completely gutted, as you would expect. But I’m also feeling a lot of guilt. I mean, here I am wrapped up in this fantasy life as a fake pro runner while the woman who gave me life is facing a death sentence. As a real pro runner, you have no choice but to make running a top priority. But you have a family, too, and your mom is also sick, and it seems to me you do a pretty good job of balancing your priorities. So, what I want to ask you, I guess, is how do I put running first without putting my mom second?”
“I don’t think it’s a matter of putting one thing first and another second,” Steph said. “I try to be the best runner I can be, the best mom I can be, the best daughter I can be, and the best wife I can be at all times. Sometimes it’s very challenging, but I’d rather fall short than lower my standards. When my mom was diagnosed with cancer last year, I was training for CIM, logging my biggest weeks. I took an active role in supporting her, but not at the expense of my running. I did workouts right from the hospital in Phoenix where she was being treated if I had to. When it’s important enough to you, you find a way.”
“That’s helpful,” I said. Thank you.”
“Let me just say one other thing,” Steph said. “Don’t allow anyone, including yourself, to trivialize what running means to you. It is very selfish, but if everyone pursued a passion they loved the way you and I love running, the world would be a better place. Your parents want you to be here, doing what you’re doing. Make the choices you need to make. If and when it’s the right thing to go see your mom or help your dad care for her, you’ll know.”
While Steph spoke, Ben entered the room quietly and took a seat beside her. By the time she’d finished, he was fully up to speed and ready to offer his two cents.
“Did you ever see the movie 50 First Dates?” he asked. Nataki and I both shook our heads. “It’s just a silly comedy, but it’s kind of deep in a weird way. Adam Sandler plays this guy who’s in love with a woman who lost her memory, so he has to start over with her every day. What he ends up learning is that all the nice, romantic things he does for her aren’t wasted just because she doesn’t remember them. I see the same thing with Riley and Hudson. They can have the funnest day ever one day and the next day it’s gone, like it never happened—but they’re still happy. That’s maybe something to keep in mind with your mom.”
We talked a while longer, drifting inexorably from the subjects of disease and love and family toward the magnetic north of running. When Steph failed to stifle a yawn, I thanked her and Ben again for their advice and stood, offering my hands to Nataki for the second time today, a day I wish I could forget but surely never will.