Running for Your Life: Why Run II

The life of Kate, my daughter, (the touch in the rain, below right), is a great lesson of love to me. From the beginning, from her first breath, Kate has been her own person, and if we, as parents, see our role as doing the best to guide her from odds-on danger, our utmost to show our love for her so that she is as close to us today, going on a quarter-century, as she has ever been, then there is a better than average chance that she knows what love means.

My parents’ love is enough, too, so that I have felt safe in my choices, in my impulses. So that I’m able to feel, if not know, because that is too much to ask, that I am born to write, to read and to run.

*

The sixty-year-old Swede was the rage the summer before my eighteenth birthday; years earlier, as a high school freshman, I’m four-foot-eleven and eighty-nine pounds. The Swede advertisement, all fifteen seconds of it, which appeared only six times during Canadian Football League games in 1973, for thirty-seven years awaiting anointment to the Canadian Advertising Hall of Fame, proof that a perfect idea pre-exists, that with very little exposure, only 1:30 of on-air time, it can bloom to captivate an audience, to divert and even shape a culture.

The physical education of “Youth” was Mr. Nichol’s business. The Phys Ed czar, Mr. Nichol, and his courtiers, were big on the 12-Minute Solution. “On the track, people! I want to see you run. Not run and stop. Keep your knees up, your legs moving, moving for twelve minutes. Try and get three times around. Do it!”

We all could run in those days. Fifty yards, one hundred, but then like puppies, we slow down, look around. Bored.

“Keep going! Your legs up. O’Connor! O’Connor!!!”

“When’s the whistle coming? Has he put it in his pocket? Twelve minutes .¤.¤. Are you kidding me? It must be twelve minutes now, just around this corner and I’ll stop, but then no I won’t. I’ll keep going, feel the taste of blood in my lungs. Or where does that come from? So stop already.”

Others give up, stop to walk, and I pass them all, alone now, on a straightaway, where we must be in the thirteenth minute, lucky thirteen, maybe Nichol’s whistle is broken, he’s teasing me, pushing me beyond any reasonable limit, I’m thinking, as I veer around a gaggle of farm kids, only to feel, suddenly, the weight of a truck piston, heavy and hard, square in the middle of my back and for the life of me I don’t know how I keep my balance but I do to see our school track star Jerry Bouma whiz past me on a time trial; he’d straight-armed me because I’d drifted into his lane, and I watched as he steamed ahead, a locomotive whose power I’d felt in a way that I’ll never forget.

*

My friend Greg scored a GOLD in the Youth Fitness Challenge, but he did his at Hillcrest Public School when we didn’t know each other even though his house was only three stones’ throws from mine but halfway up the escarpment, not the crest of the hill but close enough to be in the district of our rival school and no skin off my nose because my school, Dufferin, had characters, and a good reputation in my dad’s day, which was good enough for him who had no idea and I didn’t tell him that half of my graduating class in Grade Eight was on probation.

I lived on a dead end street. Greg was our paperboy. We started our lifelong friendship when, as a high school freshman, he delivered our paper one day when my brother and I were playing hockey on our sideyard ice rink that my dad built. After his route, Greg was back with his skates and his stick, he asked if he could join us, we said of course and that was that.

I might have had an edge on the ice, but Greg was Gold as a runner. That spring we paced out fifty yards on the dead end street and raced each other – Ready, Set, Go! – again and again, and although I got close a few times, in my mind’s eye beat him at the last second, pushing my chest out so that I crossed the imaginary line first, but no Greg (“Bone” in the Miramax film, “The Lookout,” with Jeff Daniels and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was always first because, man, he could fly.

But I never stopped trying to match him, thirteen years later, in 1983, when Greg was starting his actor/writer career, me, my daily journalism one, he in Prince Edward Island and me in Brockville, Ontario, when we pledged in the post (real letters!) to train to run our first big one together, the National Capital Marathon at Ottawa in May. We put in the miles, the hours of training, writing to each other about how it was going, in those long hours on the road thinking that I’m matching him mile after mile, if only I’d saved the letters to prove it, but they’re gone like the Silver badge in Why Run?, the previous post, and I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fact that here too, Greg was Gold, in his first marathon he broke four hours, whereas, yes, I finished, could say that I had completed a marathon but again behind Greg, maybe as much as ten minutes, twenty minutes, I don’t know, because I blanked out after hitting the wall at the twenty-mile mark, slowing and then near-stopping, my leg muscles in the worst kind of pain, like fist-sized screws turning into my thighs, while Greg loped ahead and even today I couldn’t tell you my time when I finally crossed the line that day. Only that I was second. Second, again.

Running for Your Life: Why Run III