Way too early (as Kellyn Taylor would say) on the morning after the 2017 Chicago Marathon, Coach Ben, who was already back in Flagstaff, joined me on a call with Final Surge podcast host Dean Oullette to discuss my now-completed adventures as a fake pro runner.
“So, what’s next for you, Matt?” Dean asked at the tail end of the hourlong interview. “Are you going to go after a personal best in the mile?”
My throat issued a gravelly rattle that started as a laugh and turned into a cough, sending daggers through my throbbing brain.
“No, I think that would be a mistake,” I said. “This has been a truly magical experience, but it wasn’t meant to last forever. Now I just want to take a step back from running, give away some fitness, and prioritize my work and my wife and some other things. I’m always going to be an athlete, but I don’t want to try to hang on to yesterday. I’ll let the next goal come to me on its own time, and it will probably be something very different from a personal best attempt in the mile”
Aaron and I caught the same flight out of O’Hare a few hours later, landing at Pulliam around five in the afternoon and parting at baggage claim with plans to meet up again the same evening for a little hair of the dog. Nataki picked me up curbside in the Fun Mobile and squired me back to Matt’s house, where I stepped through the front door to find a congratulatory helium balloon floating above the dining room table, its string tethered to a clear-plastic takeout container with a hunk of chocolate-peanut butter cake inside. Silent at first, the room suddenly exploded into sound, thumping club music issuing from a wireless speaker positioned near the 500-calorie reward, and in the next instant the orchestrator of my homecoming surprise popped out from his hiding place in the kitchen, arms outspread and that Pepsodent smile lighting up his face. I gave Matt a double high five followed by a hearty embrace. As we stepped back from each other, his face assumed an expectant expression, an apparent invitation to say a few words. Unprepared, I spoke the only words that came to me.
“Well, I didn’t blow it!”
When the sun rose the next morning, Nataki and I were already hustling to get our stuff packed ahead of the team’s arrival at Matt’s place to bid us farewell and then get on with their young lives, running together up to Fort Tuthill while we embarked on the long drive back to reality. With novelistic symmetry, Faubs was the first NAZ Elite member to appear. I met him in the driveway, in a familiar pose, kneeling on an exercise mat with a rubber strap looped around his knee.
“So, what’s next for you?” he asked, repeating Dean Willett’s question from the day before. “Boston? London?”
“Nah, I’m retired,” I said. “I’m not even thinking about other races right now.”
“Seriously? You’re not going to do another marathon?”
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” I said. “Just not anytime soon.”
The rest of the team (minus Aaron, who was sleeping in) rolled in while Scott and I chatted. Ben Bruce strode toward me purposefully with a gift bag in hand. I plunged a forearm into it and withdrew a long-sleeve NAZ Elite top in powder blue wrapped around a bottle of imperial stout.
“That’s a strong one,” he cautioned.
Coach Ben passed around a Sharpie and an eight-by-ten print of the photo Jen had taken of me with the team the week before and everyone signed it.
“How’s your body feeling?” Kellyn asked, scribbling her name as close to her image as she could get it.
“Fine,” I said. “I could probably run now if I had to.”
“That means you didn’t race hard enough.”
Receiving the autographed print back from its final signatory, Futsum, Coach Ben stuffed it inside a simple frame and presented it to me with touching formality.
“I know I speak for the whole team when I say it was an honor and a pleasure to have you with us these last thirteen weeks,” he said. “You brought a lot of positive energy to the group and I hope your example stays with us as we move forward.”
“I can’t believe you’re thanking me!” I said. “All of you have given me so much—more than I’ll ever be able to repay. I just hope the story I tell rewards you in some small way. I promise I’m a better writer than I am a runner!”
“Oh, I’m sure your book will be two thirty-eight material, at least,” Ben Bruce said drily.
I hugged everyone and then watched as my (now undeniably) former teammates shuffled away in a loose pack, descending toward Pullman Drive, crossing over to the far sidewalk, and bending left to begin the ascent to the park, my eyes fixed on their backs until they were out of sight, just in case someone glanced behind and gave me a final wave, but no one did.
Nataki and I had been home for all of two weeks when, against my stated intentions, I abandoned my plan to put running on the back burner for a while and signed up for a spring marathon in New Orleans, convinced I could exceed my Chicago performance— despite a few more gray hairs—with better weather and a more cooperative left hip abductor tendon. In pursuit of this, I replicated as much of my Flagstaff formula as I could (purchasing the NAZ Elite Advanced Marathon Plan from Final Surge, keeping up with my form drills and rehab exercises) and did without the rest (coaching, altitude, endless trails, teammates, weekly sports massage, daily physical therapy, a sports psychologist, etc.).
Things went okay at first. In mid-December I won a local 5K, proving I hadn’t lost everything I’d gained in Flagstaff, but two weeks later I hurt my groin again, and that was the end of that. Lacking access to AJ Gregg and his cold laser, I was still less than fully healed in July, when Nataki and I made our first visit to Flagstaff since we left, fulfilling a promise I’d made to return for Stephanie and Ben Bruce’s running camp (as a regular paying customer this time).
Retracing the same route we took the year before, we arrived just in time for a 6:30 dinner date with James McKirdy and Heather Szuba, who were now living in Flagstaff full-time and engaged to be married.
“So, how does it feel to be back?” James asked me after a toast to friendship.
“Honestly, kind of painful,” I said. “When we were cruising along the strip just now I felt this hopeless yearning to go back in time and do it all again.”
James and Heather’s relocation and betrothal were not the only changes that had occurred since Nataki and I had been away. Eric Fernandez was now married to Angela Gavelli and making strides in his new career as a financial planner. Craig Lutz, Rochelle Kanuho, and Matt Llano were no longer members of NAZ Elite, Craig having moved to Santa Barbara, where he worked as a marketing intern for Hoka; Rochelle remaining in her native Flagstaff but training on her own without a coach or a sponsor; and Matt still struggling to regain his 2014 form against a litany of recent diagnoses—asthma, severe allergies, something called paradoxical vocal chord dysfunction—and a small but scary setback with his surgically repaired left hip. Ben Bruce had transitioned into an assistant coaching role but was still racing a bit, his abdominal injury having turned out to be something else entirely. (“Joke’s on me,” he wrote in an email. “I asked you if you broke your penis and meanwhile I was running on a fractured pelvis.”) To offset the attrition, Coach Ben had added a quartet of talented young women to the team, including Kenyan expatriate Aliphine Tuliamuk, whose bar-raising presence had helped push Kellyn Taylor and Stephanie Bruce to new heights, Kellyn becoming the seventh-fastest American woman marathoner in history with a 2:24:28 victory at Grandma’s Marathon in June and Steph winning her first national championship title three weeks later at the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta. Unsurprisingly, Kellyn had also passed her firefighter test on her second attempt.
Travel weary, Nataki and I declined dessert and parted from James and Heather with vague plans to meet up again before we returned to California, then made straight for the local Best Western. When I woke up it was Thursday, a day I started as though I had never left Flagstaff, showing up unannounced at the Bagel Run, not to participate (I wanted to spare my groin for camp) but to have Aaron Braun sign the team photo he’d been unable to endorse on my last morning in Flagstaff. Three hours later, sticking to my former routine, I crashed the NAZ Elite team strength workout at Hypo2, where AJ Gregg, just like old times, pointed out a fault in my side plank technique. And my single-leg reverse deadlift technique. And my kettlebell swing technique.
“Are those the same cargo shorts you had last summer?” Faubs asked as I slipped them back on after the workout.
“They are indeed,” I said. “I’m flattered you noticed.”
Continuing the nostalgia tour, Nataki and I stopped for lunch at Kickstand Kafé, where we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to ambush Matt at his house. Having lived with him for thirteen weeks, we knew the timing was good, our 12:45 p.m. arrival falling in a gap between First Run and Nap in Matt’s normal Thursday routine.
A stranger—tall, slender, twenty-something, with a blond pompadour—answered the door. He gawked at us, and we at him, in mutual surprise, his expression reflecting my thought: Who the hell are you? Then Matt appeared behind the young man, gripping Harlow’s collar tightly in both hands. Tail wagging, Queenie’s old walking buddy whined and strained after us, remembering our scent, if not our faces.
“Come on in!” Matt said, grinning at 2,000 lumens. “We were just having lunch.”
We followed our onetime host back to the kitchen, where he picked up the bowl of grilled Sriracha salmon, roasted Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes, and faro he’d set down when the doorbell chimed and introduced us to the pompadoured stranger, whose name was Brannon and who was Matt’s boyfriend. The couple had met in February, which, by sheer coincidence, was around the time Matt’s health issues had begun. Since then his personal and professional lives had traveled in opposite directions: Matt fell in love, ran a series of mediocre races, invited Brannon to move in with him, quit NAZ Elite, and now had no idea what his next step was.
“I’ve gotten really into quotations lately,” he told us. “Recently I found one that I’m really hanging on to: ‘When it seems like things are falling apart, they may actually be falling into place.’ ”
Ben and Steph’s camp followed the same itinerary as the year before, kicking off with an afternoon run at Buffalo Park—a run I’d been forced to skip in 2017, having injured my groin the previous day. Refusing to sit it out a second time, I completed a single two-mile loop at the back of the group. This went better than expected, so the next morning I ran 4.7 miles with my fellow campers at Hart Prairie, elevation 8,500 feet. Surprised again by the tendon’s quiescence, I ran 12 miles at Woody Mountain Road on Saturday, accompanied by volunteer camp counselor Bob Tusso, who, despite having completed a 27-mile trail race with 4,000 feet of elevation gain just six days earlier, was, as always, up for anything. I felt unaccountably good—not merely pain-free but also 100 percent comfortable at a pace that wasn’t a heck of a lot slower than I’d averaged in my last long run on Woody Mountain Road, a week before Chicago.
“This place just suits me, man,” I told Too Slow. “I can’t explain it.”
That night we all gathered in Kellyn’s backyard for pizza, beer, a bonfire, s’mores, and a goal-setting exercise. I found Kellyn standing sentinel on the back patio, guarding the home’s rear entrance from unwelcome ingress by her guests, who weren’t really her guests at all but Ben and Steph’s.
“Thanks for letting us hang out at your place,” I said apologetically.
“You’re welcome,” Kellyn said. “I love people.”
The faintest hint of a smile crooked the corners of her lips, confirming something I had always suspected about Kellyn—namely, that although her prickly personality is no act, she is perfectly aware of how it plays, and is not unwilling to have a little fun with it on occasion.
“We’ll be out of here by eight,” I promised.
Steph appeared quietly at my side. She’d been going a mile a minute since camp began and I hadn’t had much time with her.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you how your mom is doing,” she said, lowering her voice.
I gave her a queasy look, which Steph mirrored.
“What can I say?” I said. “It’s a degenerative disease, and it’s taking its course. But I’ve been visiting her and my dad every six or eight weeks since I left Flagstaff, and that’s been good. Something you and Ben said to me on the day I learned about her diagnosis has stuck with me—that happy moments matter even if they aren’t remembered.”
Steph placed a hand on my shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze.
When everyone had eaten their fill of pizza, Ben kicked off the more formal part of the evening’s agenda by reading some remarks that Coach Ben (who was vacationing with his family in St. Louis) had written for the occasion.
“Hey, guys, sorry I couldn’t be with you in person tonight,” he began. “I was able to make it last year and I had a blast, so I wanted at least to have Steph and Ben share a few thoughts with you.”
Ben raised his eyes from his phone to his audience, as if to measure our interest. Appearing satisfied, he resumed.
“Show of hands: Who here has a running goal or goals of some kind?”
Twenty-three arms shot up (twenty-five if you counted 2016 Olympian Jared Ward and 2018 U.S. 5000-meter national championship runner-up Rachel Schneider, who had given talks earlier in the day).
“Okay,” Ben Bruce continued on Coach Ben’s behalf. “Now pare it down to your number-one goal. Raise your hand if that goal is associated with a time.”
An almost equal number of arms were lifted.
“Keep your hand raised if that time is one of the following,” Ben read: “a Boston qualifying time or a round number (meaning something that ends in a zero). I’m not there, but I’ll bet there are a lot of hands up.”
This was true.
“Okay, hands back down,” Ben went on. “We’ll do one more: Raise your hand if your goal is not associated with a time at all. Anyone? Again, I am not there, but I’m guessing there are probably fewer than five hands up.”
Ben paused to count. There were exactly five.
“That’s not a bad thing,” Ben read. “I’m not going to yell at all of you who have time goals. But I do think they can be a little bit arbitrary, and I want to explore a couple of alternatives and get you thinking about your running in a different way.”
Realizing that permission to drop their hands was not forthcoming, the five who still held them aloft did so by their own initiative.
“It occurred to me at the beginning of this year,” Ben read on, “that, on our team, the last thing we needed to worry about was ambition. All of our athletes had packed up and moved to Flagstaff from wherever they called home in order to pursue their dreams. This was as motivated a group of people as I’d ever known. Sitting down and talking about tangible goals—two twenty-five for a marathon for the women or two ten for a marathon for the men—wasn’t something we really needed to do. Winning national titles also wasn’t something we needed to talk about. Making the Olympic team wasn’t even something we needed to talk about. What I realized was that, if and when these things happened, they would simply be the byproduct of what, at our core, we all want to do in this sport, which is to find out how good we can really be. Since that time I’ve tried to focus on working with each athlete on something that seems simple: just getting better, one training segment at a time. Just being as fit as possible.”
Ben paused again to make sure we hadn’t all fallen asleep on him before forging ahead.
“And you know what happens when you do that? Instead of chasing the fitness, the fitness comes to you. And you know what else? It’s more fun. My high-school coach called it ‘enjoying the process.’ Now, I won’t make you raise your hands again, but I would bet an awful lot of money [here Ben Bruce inserted an aside about Ben Rosario’s affinity for gaming] that there are plenty of you sitting there who start each training segment, whether it’s twelve weeks, twenty weeks, or even a whole year out from your goal race, with a very tangible goal in mind. And I’ll bet that same amount that there are plenty of you who’ve done this only to become frustrated because you’re not hitting the times in practice that some chart says you should be hitting if you want to run that particular time. Am I right?”
Suddenly my mind flew back to last year’s bonfire. On that occasion, Steph asked each camper to write down three goals—a modest “C” goal, a more ambitious “B” goal, and an audacious “A” goal—on an index card and share them with the group. Unable to run at the time, I told my fellow campers that my “C” goal was to find a way to still race the Chicago Marathon in seven weeks. My “B” goal was, as I put it, “to run my fastest marathon since my fastest marathon,” which meant beating the time of 2:49:14 I’d run in Eugene in May. And my “A” goal was “to achieve something on the streets of Chicago that makes everyone here believe they can achieve their ‘A’ goal.” To me, this meant running 2:39, though I kept the number to myself, having not yet shared it with anyone.
One year later, as I listened to my former teammate deliver my former coach’s sermon on goal setting, I was struck by how deeply and uniquely human is this business of setting and chasing goals. It speaks, I think, to the ever-striving, never-satisfied, “to boldly go” nature of our kind. In setting and chasing goals we make the meaningless meaningful, the unimportant important. One does not set a goal to reap a good harvest or survive a harsh winter. These are things we simply must do. Rather, one sets a goal to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House or to have a paper published in The New England Medical Journal. Such nonutilitarian ambitions blur the line between play and real life, making play serious and real life playful. Does it really matter to sing at the Met or to have a paper published in NEMJ? Not if survival is all that matters. But if what matters is whatever we decide matters, whatever we choose to imbue with meaning, however far removed from mere survival it may be, then yes, these things do matter to those who hook their aspirations to them.
It’s a risky enterprise. Far safer is it to remain content with merely getting by. Chasing goals is hard work and often disappointing. There is also the risk of losing perspective, forgetting that, whereas it’s always preferable to achieve a goal, it’s better to have tried and failed than to have never tried. But as long as you can keep things in perspective, acting as though your very life depends on some semi-arbitrary number may lead you to a richer, more intense and textured experience of life than you would have had otherwise. I know it did for me, at least for the span of one enchanted summer in the autumn of my life.
The sound of my name jolted me out of these reflections.
“I’ll pick on Matt Fitzgerald for a second,” said Ben Bruce, still reading on behalf of Coach Ben. “One, because I know he can take it, and two, because he’s a perfect example.”
Twenty-five heads turned in my direction as the present Ben returned to the absent Ben’s prepared remarks.
“Last summer Matt came to Flagstaff to train with our group for the Chicago Marathon. He and I sat down and talked about the training he had been doing over the last couple of years so I could understand the context of where he was coming from and what he may or may not be able to handle as we prepared for Chicago. From the beginning, he was pushing to run workout times that would ‘prove’ he was getting close to two forty shape. But I resisted basing his workout times on those I thought a two forty guy could run, because I didn’t think he was a two forty guy—yet. Instead, I just wanted to see him hit workouts based on his current fitness, and then, if those became too easy (and they did), I’d write slightly faster workouts.
“It wasn’t until about three weeks out from the race that I thought he was in sub-two forty shape, and it had nothing to do with the fact that it was his dream goal. It’s just that his workouts showed me that’s what he was capable of. But I think, or at least I hope, that when I finally told him I thought he could run under two forty, it really meant something to him because I had been honest with him throughout the entire training segment. And guess what he ran in Chicago: 2:39:30—a PR at the age of forty-six!”
Someone whistled.
“But the moral of the story isn’t even his time,” Ben Bruce read. “It’s this—and I’ll risk all my hypothetical money once again by asking Matt if I’m right. I’ll bet that now, one year later, it’s not the two thirty-nine next to his name that means the most to Matt. I’ll bet it is the memories of the training sessions on Lake Mary Road, the camaraderie of meeting the group every morning, and the feeling he had coming down Michigan Avenue, knowing he was as fit as he had ever been in his life, that mean the most. Because Matt really and truly enjoyed the process when he was here. Matt: Am I right?”
There was a moment of silence as I searched for my voice.
“More than you know, Coach,” I said. “More than you know.”