Midlife Meditation

One of the many things that make this relay special: the finishers' medal puzzle. Back in my day, running in a race was a monastic discipline for me. I was on my own from start to finish. Even when I ran in my home town, there was hardly anyone on the course to root for me by name. I got anonymous support from the lovely spectators ("Great job!" "Go! Go! Go!" "You can do it!" and, of course, the always misleading "You're almost there!"), but it really didn't mean much to me. Occasionally I'd see people staked out along a course, waiting for a particular runner with personalized signs, calling him or her by name, cheering a father, mother, son, daughter on in ways I could only imagine. My family and friends were never that organized: if I was running locally, they'd be waiting for me at the finish line, and that was enough for me. Five of my seven marathons were also run as a single man, and in a way, this made...

Ouch. It's a misty morning in November, 1999, and I'm approaching the finish line of the Seattle Marathon. I've been running for nearly five hours, my slowest time ever for this distance. I'm 38 years old, with a receding hairline, a trick ankle, and plantar fasciitis, and my world is slowly turning itself upside down. My second marriage ended four months ago. On the drive home from this race, I will call a woman I've been seeing in Olympia, hoping to drop in, only to be told it's over between us. In two weeks, I will be in a major accident, nearly totaling the new car I can't really afford anyway. And in two months, the United Methodist Church where I am associate pastor will move heaven and earth to get me out. So why am I doing this to myself? With all the things happening over which I have no control, why am I willingly putting my body through one of the toughest ordeals in amateur athletics? Am I nuts? Kind of, but not really. My pre-race ritual...

    Marathons are storytelling gold. Here I am, posing next to my baby daughter Sarah (she's under the blanket in the stroller) just before my first marathon, The Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, Father's Day, 1989: And here's the after shot, again with Sarah, one of her blankets covering my badly sunburned shoulders, my aching feet clad only in socks, me barely conscious, she sleeping in my arms:   I had no idea what I was getting into when I signed up for that marathon. It was still early in my running career--I'd been doing it for less than five years, and had only run in one other race, a 5K--and I was still gauging the lengths of my runs (and the speed with which I ran them) by counting steps. In 1985, I had taken a few loops on the track at Willamette, and decided I was taking 700 steps to run a mile. I had no notion at all of the variability of stride length, and my experience in the 5K bore it out. Of course, running all out for twenty minutes, my...

Get a load of the quads on this guy. It's September 25, 2001, two weeks after the towers fell. Two days ago, I completed my seventh marathon, the Top of Utah, setting a personal record of 4:19. Today I hiked every trail at Bryce Canyon. Every single one of them. I will never be this fit again. Four months earlier, I ran my sixth marathon, the Avenue of the Giants, and spied a t-shirt on another runner claiming membership in the "50 States Plus One" club. That person had run marathons in all fifty states, plus the District of Columbia. I knew in an instant that this would be my lifelong fitness goal. I already had three states under my belt: Oregon, Washington, and now California. Utah was next. I got home from that trip, and began planning to add another state to my list. Perhaps Arizona, or New Mexico, or even Texas, someplace warm enough for an early spring marathon. I took my usual month off, letting the massive blisters from Bryce Canyon heal, and began easing b...