The best traditions hurt you and everyone you love. Today, I’m limping, and this time, my twelve-year-old, Betsy, is, too. Pain is hereditary.
I’ve been doing races with the running club in my hometown since I was too young to know better. It’s hard to pin down the exact year I started, but I think I was in sixth or seventh grade, so I would have been eleven or twelve. I could have told you for sure by checking my vast collection of participation trophies, but I threw them all out. I was forced into it. Marie Kondo was shooting me death glares. My house is now clean, but that section of my running career will forever be blank. I checked online, and posted race results only go back to 1999. I literally began running before the start of recorded history. That’s fine with me. Assume I used to be really fast up until the year where the logs prove otherwise. The only thing that slows me down is evidence.
I joined the running club not because I was fast, but because I was exceptionally slow. I wasn’t anywhere near the top of the pack on the school’s track and cross country teams, but I also had far more endurance than I needed. I’m not athletic, but I am too stubborn to quit. For example, this is my millionth newsletter in a row. Also, I probably didn’t push myself hard enough during races, which gave the illusion that I had extra stamina. Slow and steady gets to the finish line without throwing up. Since I could keep going when better, more efficient runners crossed the line like they were dying, I figured I needed a longer challenge. When I heard that the running club offered three mile races, I jumped at the chance. Not literally. I was terrible at all track events that required my feet to leave the ground. But I did sign up for summer fun runs and, later, seven and eight mile races. There were four big ones each year, and I did them all. Often, I received age division awards, mainly because there were almost no other kids in them. If you’re under eighteen, a guardian has to sign your entry form, and letting a kid run that far is basically child abuse. In my parent’s defense, I really, really wanted to do those races. Also, they had a whole bunch of kids, and the house was a lot quieter when one of them was seven miles away.
I ran those races for years by myself. Okay, I wasn’t alone. There were hundreds of other people on the course each time, but they were all strangers, so they didn’t count. The obvious solution would have been to introduce myself to literally anyone, but that’s not how I operate. I could no more be an extrovert than I could grow wings and fly. Rather than making new friends, I recruited existing ones. After a brief hiatus in late high school and early college, I resumed the club runs, this time with reinforcements. I brought in my friends from my former high school team and anyone else who was too dumb or naïve to say no. We ended up with a large group at each race covering all possible skill levels. We had guys who got paid to run in college and guys who had never run a step in their lives. It wasn’t unusual for some of us to finish in the top ten while others barely made it in before the two-hour cutoff time. We were an inclusive bunch. All you had to do to be one of us was show up. Oh, and drink.
Alcohol was the one thing that brought us all together. Okay, you didn’t actually have to imbibe. In fact, the non-drinkers were the most valued members of all because they could drive the rest of us. At fancy races in other parts of the country, you might get a ticket for a drink or two at the finish line. That wasn’t how the running club I grew up with operated. They had six free self-serve kegs after every race, and people took advantage of it. As the saying goes, it was a drinking club with a running problem. I somehow missed that nuance when I started running with them at the age of eleven or twelve. But in my twenties, I finally took advantage of the full running club experience. So did the rest of our group. It’s easy to recruit a bunch of college and post-college age kids (in this context, calling them “adults” seems wrong) to do anything when there’s infinite free beer afterwards. Soon, we were out-partying the rest of the party crowd. As the old timers hit their limits and left, we’d keep going, pumping beer after beer into our exhausted, dehydrated, and overheated bodies. Predictably, there were consequences. Almost every single one of my “remember when we were drinking and…” stories comes from this era. In the most memorable incident, upon returning to my parents home for a family dinner after a race and all the associated beverages, my brother Mitchell threatened to fight my sister’s new boyfriend and my brother Harry accidentally tore a coat rack off the wall. I, meanwhile, made it upstairs to fall asleep, a classy move that should have kept me out of trouble. Not quite. My wife Lola was soon furious with me. She repeatedly woke me up, and I kept waving her off, telling her, “I’m fine.” In my less-than-intelligible state, I thought she was concerned with my well-being. It turned out she was tired and wanted me to wake up so she could drive us home. Forgive me for not correctly parsing the nuance of the situation after a seven-mile run in blistering heat followed by twenty beers. I’m not much better at figuring out that stuff when sober.
To legitimize our shenanigans, we created a traveling trophy. It was a giant beer stein that we awarded based on time handicaps from the prior race to level out the competition. Basically, if last race you did really bad, while this race you did less bad, you were likely to take the stein home with you. We aggressively punished consistency for some reason. We also had Shamus, the teddy bear of shame, awarded to whoever got worse by the largest margin according to the same handicaps. That one often went to Harry, who out of the blue decided to do these rugged trail runs barefoot. He went from the middle of the pack to dead last overnight. He didn’t care, though, because he was in great shape and looked good running shirtless. Going slow just gave people more time to look at him. Vanity trumps performance any day.
At our peak, we had ten to twelve people in our group per race, and going home with either award was quite an accomplishment. Then life intervened. As my friends got further from their college years, they all moved away or, in some cases, simply found better things to do than running, which isn’t hard since in most parts of the world it’s considered a form of torture. A few years, even I didn’t show up. My party days were behind me, and I didn’t feel like having my knee swell up for a week after running a race I definitely wasn’t prepared for. My body can only handle so much ibuprofen before it melts into a puddle or explodes. Full disclosure, I didn’t read the list of side effects.
Recently, though, I started trying to rebuild the group. At first, it was just me and my friend Bryant, who still lives in my hometown up the street from my parents. It was a huge mistake for him not to move and block my number. The next year, I recruited my new friend Kyle, who presumably won’t be my friend anymore after I tricked him into running with us. That kind of treachery isn’t easily forgiven. This year, I went a step farther and brought in my own flesh and blood. It was Betsy’s time to shine.
She just finished sixth grade, which was her first year of school sports. She did the 2400 meter run in track and the 3000 in cross country. I’m still not sure what those distances are in American, but they seem far. I ran with Betsy in the fall, and I often had trouble keeping up with her. I’m not sure if that says more about her or me. She’s intensely competitive, which I never would have guessed. She certainly didn’t inherit that from me. I’m exceptionally good at not caring about things I'm bad at, which includes all sports. Betsy was fast enough to make the varsity cross country squad and run at the state meet, despite only being twelve. Logically, I decided to punish her achievements by having her do running club races with me. Never let people know you’re good at things. It only leads to more work.
Saturday morning, I loaded Kyle, Bryant, and Betsy into my minivan to carpool to the race. Not exactly a party on wheels. It was surreal to have Betsy there as part of the group. I still remember when I was twelve doing these races, and now I had a kid of my own that age who was probably going to beat me. I didn’t do myself any favors going into the big day. To train, I ran three times, two of them with Betsy, which defeated the entire purpose of trying to get better than her. On my third run, I went without her, but afterward, my calves hurt so badly that I didn’t run again until race day. That didn’t bode well. Betsy, meanwhile, was coming off a track season where she ran daily for months. She was definitely in better running shape than me, but I’m a foot and a half taller than her, which should have given me an advantage. On the other hand, I’m twice her weight, which slows me down everywhere but going downhill, when I can engage runaway truck mode. Adding to the pressure, my friend and Betsy’s honorary uncle, Greg (The guy I cursed with a mountain lion last November]), promised her twenty dollars if she beat me. I, on the other hand, would get nothing if I won, and I also had to pay for both of us to do the race. Fatherhood is a scam. Pass it on.
Betsy was nervous as we approached the starting line. Up to that point, the longest race of her career had been a bit under two miles, and this one was over seven. Still, I told her she had nothing to worry about. Unless she fell and nearly broke her leg, forcing her to walk the last two miles in excruciating pain, which was my exact situation the year before. But what were the odds that would happen two years in a row? For whatever reason, my pep talk failed to reassure her. Conversations with me are where motivation goes to die.
As the seconds ticked down to the start of the race, we all delivered our litany of excuses for why we were going to suck. Bryant and I were out of shape because we didn’t train; Kyle claimed he had a limp because he trained too much; and Betsy had never run this course or distance before. The key to a good race is lowering expectations. Then the race started. Betsy took off in front of us. I was worried she would go out too hard and die, but she held on. I think she just wanted to get away from us during the one part of the race when we had enough energy to talk. Humans mostly evolved land speed to escape embarrassment. After the first hundred yards, Kyle took off toward the front of the field, his excuse having been a total lie. Some people have no honor. Meanwhile, Bryant and I caught back up to Betsy before the end of the first mile. She was settling into a pace, and I hoped she’d be fine. A better dad would have stuck with her, but I had to stop Greg from rewarding her for crushing me. I took off like we didn’t know each other.
I felt great, but that’s what happened last year before I fell and hurt myself. Conditions this year were equally treacherous, though in different ways. Instead of standing water and mud in low areas, only the numerous hills were slick. I stutter stepped down each one, grabbing whatever unfortunate vegetation I could during my descent to avoid crushing everyone below me like the boulder in Indiana Jones. Deep in the woods, I found the spot where I fell last year. With less mud, I could actually see what I’d landed on twelve months before. I was horrified. The entire stretch was full of huge, jutting roots as hard as iron. There was no place I could have laid out my 6’2” frame without slamming into something considerably more durable than me. I’m lucky I only wrecked one leg last year and not my entire body. It seems my disasters have to be graded on a sliding scale. Also, I need to correct my newsletter from twelve months ago. I said that I slowly limp-walked the last two miles, but it was closer to three. Not that I can tell even now precisely where I was distance-wise on the course. I wore a watch this time not to know how fast I was going, but so I could make an educated guess for how much suffering I had left. Despite doing this course off and on for the last twenty-four years, I don’t have it memorized, and the miles aren’t marked. Roughly two-thirds of the way through, I realized I was either having a great race and only had twenty minutes left or I was delusional and had a full half hour to go. When you’re tired and out of shape, that’s a huge difference. I ran like I had twenty minutes left and hoped for the best. It seldom pays to be an optimist.
This was one of the rare instances when it worked out. Roughly twenty minutes later, I burst out of the woods and sprinted toward the finish line, although “sprint” was relative by that point. To outside observers, I’m sure I barely appeared to be moving forward at all. I managed to finish just outside the top ten, which was better than I had any right to do. I felt pretty good about myself until much later when Bryant pulled up his spreadsheet. Yes, those are the kinds of friends I have. He crunched the numbers for all our races going back to 2003 and said I was five minutes off my best. Nothing like running so hard to get worse. Then again, I beat my time from the year before by a full eighteen minutes. The key to being slightly less mediocre is apparently just to not catastrophically injury yourself in the middle of the race.
Kyle finished fourth because he’s fast and no one likes him. Bryant crossed the line a bit after me. Then we started to look for Betsy. I was becoming concerned. I hoped she hadn’t given up when I didn’t stay back with her. Worse, she could have fallen and gotten hurt. At least she was small enough for someone to carry her out of the woods. When I injured myself the year before, I had no choice but to hobble out under my own power because no one was going to carry out a large, sweaty man covered in mud. That’s bigotry in action. We began to walk the course backwards, but we didn’t make it far before Betsy came into view. She was pushing hard with a look of agony on her face. She was a real runner after all.
She finished with a great time for never having done a race like that before. Unlike the rest of us, she’s still at an age where she’s speeding up rather than slowing down. She’ll be a force to be reckoned with in a few years. Afterwards, multiple people came up to her and complimented her on her race. It seems she had some intense battles against runners in her part of the field. One guy said his daughter started doing this race when she was Betsy’s age. That kid is now my age, with children of her own. It’s the circle of life, and I don’t like it. Every important moment now makes me realize I’m a million years old.
Afterwards, we all sat around for the awards while pounding diet soda. Our party years were back in the days of the pyramids. I took home the stein by virtue of dropping a huge chunk of time from my career-worst run ever last June, but for next year, Betsy is the favorite. Shockingly, she’s looking forward to that race. The key to being a good runner is to never, ever learn your lesson. We might actually build up a new group after all. I have enough kids to nearly repopulate it by myself. One by one, they’ll reach running age in the coming years. Of course, then they’ll hit drinking age and party hard, tearing down coat racks of their own. Then they’ll mellow out and have their own kids, and the cycle will continue, all carefully tracked on Bryant’s spreadsheets. It’s not much, but it’s tradition, and that makes all the suffering worthwhile—or so I tell myself as I pop another handful of ibuprofen.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.
James
Our Most Dangerous Tradition