On April 11, 1983, a gray, drizzly Monday, my dad ran the Boston Marathon.  My mom and my two brothers and I joined him for the drive down from our home in coastal New Hampshire very early on the morning of the race.  In rural Hopkinton, where the marathon begins, we hooked up with my dad’s friend Dori, a Bostonian who knew the greater Boston area inside and out and guided us to three or four good cheering points along the course.  At the first spot we got to see the race leaders, already far ahead of our patriarch, among whom were the legendary (in Boston, anyway) Bill Rodgers and future Olympic gold medal winner Joan Benoit.  The frontrunner, local boy Greg Meyer, sailed by faster than I could sprint.  We were awestruck. 

Our final stop was at 25 miles.  We waited and waited.  At last Dad came, in what looked like a slow-motion replay of his previous stride, his massive size fourteen feet landing heavily, his shoulders sagging, his weary eyes staring a thousand miles ahead.  As planned, my brothers and I broke from the curb and jogged with him over the last mile or so to the finish line, like three Navy cruisers flanking an aircraft carrier.

My brothers and I thought the whole event was the coolest thing ever.  Being cheered along by a seemingly endless, six-deep gauntlet of shouting spectators (probably half of whom assumed, against common sense, that the four of us had run the entire race together) as we paced our father toward the finish line in downtown Boston was for us a totally new pleasure, an electrifying indulgence of a kind we had never imagined, like the first ticks in our allotted quarter-hour of fame.  And although we had had no awareness of Bill Rodgers or Joan Benoit just yesterday, our youthfully impressionable minds made instant heroes of them at first sight as only kids can do.

The core of the thrill, though, was our pride in our pops.  We had known him already as something of a dragon slayer.  He and our mother and uncles had mesmerized us with stories of the crazy, solo long-distance swims of his early adulthood, including his epic crossing of lake Ontario—22 frigid, against-the-current miles from Kingston, Ontario, Canada, to his hometown of Cape Vincent, New York, USA.  We never tired of coaxing from him yet another retelling of his surviving the infamous “Hell Week” of the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training school.  Yet not until he ran his first marathon (he later ran two more) did we enjoy the opportunity to see our dad slay a dragon before our very eyes.  It mattered none that he finished in the middle of the pack, or that he himself had once swum further than the 26-plus miles he ran on that raw spring afternoon.  In our eyes, he was the toughest man alive, and his marathon finish proved it beyond any possibility of contradiction.  I suppose this was because the real basis of comparison was our friends’ and classmates’ fathers, few of whom could jog from the front porch to the mailbox.

So it was that, at the breakfast table, on the morning after the ’83 Boston Marathon, Josh, the eldest among us brothers by three years, announced that he was going to take up jogging, and I, the middle son, approaching my 12th birthday, did the same.  After school, we made good on our expressed intention, running our dad’s favorite six-mile route through the open, tree-lined roads, paved and unpaved, that snaked away from and always back to our two-story, clapboard colonial house.  Two days later, we did it again.  Twenty-five years later, I’m still at it.

In 2002 I decided to run the Boston Marathon myself, as an official qualifier (unlike my dad, who bandited). My training went exceptionally well. I set a big half-marathon PR, ran my first sub-16-minute 5K, and comfortably held sub-six-minute-mile pace in long, marathon-pace workouts. I was looking at a finishing time in the 2:36-2:37 range, barring disaster. Then disaster struck: Just two weeks before the race I developed a stress fracture that forced me to scratch.

I’ve had a monkey on my back ever since. Can’t catch a break. A maddening series of injuries plagued me for the next four years after my Boston disappointment. Through much of that time I doubted I would ever run another marathon again. But eventually I beat the injury bug and by last fall I was ready to try to wrestle the monkey off my back, which I define as running a sub-2:40 marathon. But race morning at the 2008 California International Marathon brought a steady 15-20-mph headwind that sabotaged my race as badly as an 80-degree air temperature would have done.

So I tried again this year. This time I aimed for the Sacramento Cowtown Marathon, which I had run the previous year as a workout and found to be a most PR-friendly course–even better than CIM. All went fairly well until early September, when a couple of minor injuries set back my training by three weeks–just enough to make it impossible to peak for Cowtown. So I scrambled to find another marathon I could run three weeks later and settled on the Silicon Valley Marathon. I knew it wasn’t a super-PR-friendly course, but it wasn’t Big Sur, either, so I went there last weekend with high hopes.

I wound up running 2:41, two minutes off my expectations. Shortly after finishing I walked back to the 26-mile mark to cheer in my brother, who was aiming to run under three hours. There was another runner-spectator there who was also waiting to cheer in a friend aiming for the same time. We got to talking and I found out he was a local marathoner who knew the SVM course like the back of his hand. “I would never try to run a PR on this course,” he said after I shared my disappointment. “It’s terrible.” Now I know.

So the monkey is still on my back. Before the marathon my brother (who finished in 3:03:47, by the way) had asked me whether I would be interested in running next year’s Boston Marathon. Confident then of getting the monkey off my back on Sunday, I told him no. I just emailed him to let him know I plan to send in my registration today. Our brother Josh is staging a bit of a running comeback too. Maybe he could be coaxed into joining us, and our dad and mom and Dori, who still lives in Boston, could come out and cheer us on.

As my dad, the reason I am a runner, is fond of saying, “The circle is the only geometry.”

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