Running for Your Life: Boston Beckons

Old Boston Garden. Bobby Orr. Noel Picard. Did you know “The Goal” was scored on May 10, 1970, almost 41 years ago? If I want to think of how old I am but not how old I feel, I remember what it was like at 14 years old, a Bobby Orr fan, if not a Boston Bruins one, that’s another story, to exult as Orr is in the act of scoring, upended by Noel Picard, soaring in flight over the ice as only he would, as only he could, and the shot by Ray Lussier, staff photographer of the bygone Boston Record-American, captures something of that moment but not it all because I close my eyes and I can still see him, as if time stands still, and Orr is suspended there, an angel, not a hockey player, this Orr, from Parry Sound, Ontario, on the other side of Georgian Bay, under the elephant’s tail (see RFYL: Why Run III), a place, home to another boy’s fancy, a Grade Eight speech in 1967, Orr’s rookie year in Boston, and a quote that resonates even now, and why I sit to watch, even the most banal of games, the Rangers vs. the Hurricanes, the Devils against the Wild, Islanders/Coyotes because there on that ice is a piece of home, where as a thesis graduate of Carleton Journalism, I return again, this time to write the script for a radio broadcast on the retirement of Boston’s hockey idol, Bobby Orr, with a memory of his brother, Ron, aboard the Zamboni, cleaning and flooding the rink at the Bobby Orr Community Centre in Parry Sound, and even in these mid-season games, the players show it to me again and again, so that if I can I won’t miss it; the quote: “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” You’ll see what I’m talking about when he shoots and scores. The boy in the sideyard rink that my dad made. Shooting, then leaping as Orr did. Again and again and again. He shoots! He scores!

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It’s part-dreamscape, my Boston. But now as the 100-day mark recedes (the marathon is 96 days away), there are new memories ahead. I’d like to think I can do better than my time in Steamtown, Scranton, Pa., where in October I surprised myself by running a 3:33 marathon, 12 minutes better than the Boston Marathon qualifying time for my age group, despite debilitating foot pain.

Since Steamtown, the pain is gone, and I’ve returned to a non-training regimen, recently (Jan. 6) was my longest run since then, a seven-plus miler, in the interim I’ve been going out every other day with Thurber, K’s puppy, who is now in Washington, DC, with K and J, and happily I’m told, so it’s just me and the road in the cold, wrestling with the Windigo (see RFYL: Why in Winter?), and now, finally, the roadways are clear. Or at least until the blizzard, tonight.

I’m on my way, not as much as I’d like to be, with the idea of Boston in April and the Brooklyn Half in May, (see http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/why-you-should-run-the-brooklyn-half-marathon/Content?oid=1905278 ) five reason to run the Brooklyn Half, but in less than two weeks time, the Manhattan Half, loops and glades and the Harlem Hill, around Central Park, and, while I have never run in the NYC Marathon, the idea of a Half in Central Park is fun to think about. So, yesterday, I registered to run in that race.

In December 1988, my first week in Manhattan, I ran the Central Park Reservoir in shorts and a T, most everyone else in Gore-Tex and fleece line, snazzy ballcaps with ear flaps, but I’m coming directly from the Near North, North Bay, Ontario, where in December cars left outside need to be plugged in to a heating source in order to start every morning, the very idea of cold seeps into my bones, informing my first book, Tip of the Iceberg (http://www.larryoconnor.net/books.html ), now, twenty-three years later after I came to live in Manhattan, a small apartment on West 75th Street, going back on Saturday, Jan. 22, with only a goal to finish, to run within myself, and then, 85 days before Boston, get a good long run in me, 13.1 miles with hills, while at the same time, M will be returning from India, a journey that has changed, is changing, her life, and mine too in consequence, and although I’ve only had the briefest of phone conversations since she’s been away, twice-or-thrice daily emails, I can tell from what I’ve heard, even sensed that – and as a medical survivor and someone who was there, a long city block away when the first Tower collapses, I’m not one to overuse this phrase – nothing will be the same again after India, as perhaps only India can shape for people who are open, as the tiger guide said to M after she had seen a tiger in the wild, against outsize odds she not only saw one, the She-Tiger came to inspect her, in a way that the tiger-man said, She would likely never forget M when she returns to the jungle with me, and K and J, that many people come to see the She-Tiger and they don’t see Her, but you came to see everything and that is why you saw Her.

I, too, will have India on that day that I run in Central Park after years of being away, and when I go home I will be with M and with the promise of knowing more than my wildest dreams.

Next: Running for Your Life: Boston Beckons II