As New York
City prepares for this year’s marathon, I look back on last year’s and remember
that among fathers and sons……
The leaves are falling, the weather is blowing hot and cold, and 50,000 long distance runners from 150 countries around the globe are descending on New York City for this year’s marathon. I knew at least two of those athletes, from one of those foreign countries, who ran last year’s edition. My friend Marty, who had moved to the U.S. from Ireland eight years earlier, decided to train for his first marathon so that he could run it with his dad. His dad is an accomplished runner in Europe, but this would be his first NYC marathon and Marty was determined to run it with him. They were also running for his dad’s brother, Marty’s uncle, who had died of leukemia.
My own dad was nearing the end of an even longer race, in his final lap after 96 years on the planet. I’m not sure if I was inspired by what Marty was doing with his dad, or perhaps jealous. It was probably a little of both, but I found myself starting to train with the same vigor, gradually increasing both my distances and my speeds. Not that I was ever going to run the actual marathon. I have way too much anxiety to run in big crowds like that. But I thought maybe I could just keep topping my own personal bests and getting closer. I had always been a casual runner as part of my workouts, and I got more serious about it after COVID shut down the gyms. But I really pumped up the volume on my runs once Marty started training for the marathon with his dad.
Marty’s younger than me, and his dad is actually closer in age to me than to my father. But our dads did have at least one thing in common: they had each endured and survived particularly harrowing times in history. Mine had dropped out of high school, first to work menial jobs to help support his family through the end of the Great Depression and then to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Marty’s dad lived through the violence and terrorism that claimed thousands of innocent Irish lives in the many years prior to 1998’s Belfast Agreement. This is a period that gets sadly overlooked in historical discussions about terrorism, but during which a climate of fear became so pervasive that entire decades are referred to in Ireland merely as The Troubles; as if a name more descriptive of the actual atrocities involved would be too painful for the nation's collective memory to bear.
It may have been his first marathon, but Marty is a lifelong athlete; an accomplished boxer and mixed martial artist. My dad and older brother were not runners either, but they were also athletic. My dad had a body sculpted by years of old school push-ups, sit-ups, and pick-up games of handball. My brother got a blackbelt in judo and had inherited my dad’s athletic genes the way Marty must have inherited his dad’s. But me? Not so much. I joined a gym and started working out as an adult as a means of managing my weight and anxiety, but as a child I had no athletic ability or interest whatsoever. I had a very disciplined upbringing; I liked to joke with Marty that I probably had an even stricter Irish Catholic family than he did. But no words struck more fear into my heart than my dad’s voice saying, “C’mon, let’s go play some ball.”
I tried as hard as I could, if for no other reason than that I could see the disappointment and embarrassment in his eyes when I hopelessly flailed my arms at whatever sport he tried to share with me. Baseball after baseball landed on my head instead of in the catcher’s glove. It was the same thing on the handball court, where that little rubberized ball found my face far more often than my hand. He even tried replacing handball with racquetball and bought us racquets – and my dad was not one to spend money – thinking it would provide a bigger target for me to connect with. It turns out there was no racquet big enough. Probably afraid of my mother’s reaction if I had landed in the hospital with a self-inflicted head injury, he finally just gave up. I remember feeling both relieved and sad when those words – “C’mon, let’s go play some ball” – slowly disappeared from his vocabulary.
My best runs were those where I fell into such a groove that my mind went completely blank; a naturally induced state of Zen where ideas and memories roamed freely through my thoughts. On one long run last year, I got stuck in a thunderstorm near Battery Park City. As I found shelter under a restaurant awning, I could feel time and space giving way beneath my feet. I was 12 years old again, and Battery Park had become Central Park. Not uncommon for a gay kid of my generation, I had been a huge Diana Ross fan growing up. The summer before I started high school, she gave her first free concert on the Great Lawn. I had begged my parents to take me, and it was my dad who agreed. A dangerous storm, with bolts of lightning blasting ever closer to the large monitors and sound equipment on the make-shift stage, caused the concert to be cut short after only a few songs. I kept hoping the rain would stop and the concert would resume, until my dad literally dragged me out of the park.
It's interesting to think I didn’t want to run an actual marathon because of my anxiety about large crowds. That anxiety would certainly peak for me many years later after my experience on 9/11, but all my life it had been a struggle; except for that one night in Central Park. It was utter pandemonium, with endless rows of people running for cover. The most conservative estimate I can find of the attendance at that concert is 350,000 people (with several sources putting the number much higher) – which is literally seven times the 50,000 runners expected for this year’s New York City marathon. But one of those 350,000 people was my dad, and he was next to me. He liked to joke that he took me because it was free, and there may have been some truth to that. But I can see now that he was also trying to connect with me. He was still trying to find a racquet that would be big enough to make contact.
It is sad but also comforting when you realize that the absence of someone reveals more about them than their presence ever did. When you start piecing together the clues of love and understanding that were always there even if they could never be spoken for any thousands or millions of reasons. I can accept the fact that my father would’ve preferred another son like my brother, or a son like Marty. But I can also acknowledge that he figured out how to love the one he had in me. Contrary to popular belief, love is not always unconditional. It often comes with qualifiers. Perhaps my dad loved me despite who I was, and perhaps I loved him despite knowing that. I can be hurt by the qualifiers it came with or just grateful that the love was there. I have certainly felt both sides of that blade, but I now choose to lean far more into gratitude. Maybe that’s the wisdom of age, or a lesson of loss, or merely the acceptance that running further into love and further away from resentment is the only road to a happy life.
I sometimes wondered where Marty’s and his dad’s minds took them when they hit that ‘runner’s Zen’. Perhaps his dad was processing the childhood he lived in the shadow of The Troubles; or filtering the grief of losing his brother through memories of happier times they had shared. And Marty? Perhaps he was revisiting the challenges he faced when he first moved to the U.S.; completely alone and forced to take construction jobs when his vast athletic achievements and qualifications in Ireland were initially unappreciated here and lost in the vacuum of our Instagram-ready fitness culture. Marty would prove soon enough he was better than all of them and become one of New York City’s most elite personal trainers and coaches. I know he and his dad are proud of that, and they should be.
Sometimes you get to the end of a long run and can’t believe how far or how fast you made it. There may have been moments of pain or exhaustion along the way, but they get softened by the pride you feel looking back. Life is like that too. Time has a way of collapsing in on itself, and experiences from long ago can feel closer than ever, and better than ever too. Pain is immediate and so it’s of course what we focus on when we are going through difficult times. But from the comfort of distance, we just get an amazing view; the kind you see from a plane or the top of a mountain where everything looks so breathtaking it’s hard to imagine there could be anything but beauty below. We just have to travel those emotional miles to get high enough and gain that perspective. Easier said than done, but so worth it when you arrive.
I did finally work my way up to a marathon-equivalent, 26.3 mile run – I call it a Quinathon because I basically just ran up and down the Huson River until I hit that goal – and I did it in under four hours. It’s admittedly much easier than an actual marathon, where you are navigating hills and valleys along the way rather than running a mostly flat, even surface like the one along the river. Marty liked to teasingly remind me of that, but I was still proud and I know he was too. Walking home gingerly to stave off cramps, he was the first person I texted.
Days later I got to cheer for him and his dad as they completed the actual marathon, running together as father and son to bridge the generation between them and shrink the globe that separates them most of the year. There were some brief moments of panic when they became separated but they found each other at the finish line, just as my dad and I had eventually found each other too. Little more than a week after the marathon, my dad finished the final, 96th leg of his life’s race and we laid him to rest the day before Thanksgiving. Marty was one of the first friends I texted that news as well, as I waited with my sisters in our childhood home for the funeral staff to collect the body.
Blocks away from that house still stood the catholic elementary school I attended as a kid. Every year they had a mandatory ‘activity day’ that parents had to attend with their children, kind of like a school fair without a budget. One of the inevitable activities was the awkward, two-legged potato sack race that was often set up in father-son combinations. My dad and I certainly never won any of them, for which I assume full blame. I mean, I wasn’t going to win any athletic contest as it was; did they really have to add a simulated disability? But I like to think we made up for it when it counted. Life and death are the ultimate two-legged race, and perhaps the only one we can both lose and win. Nobody beats death of course, but a life well-lived most certainly outlasts it.
The universe also tends to place people and experiences in our paths when we need them most. I sadly can no longer run due to a severe hip injury. When I first received the diagnosis, I was angry and blamed myself for pushing my body too hard and too fast. But I’ve realized I ran enough of those emotional miles to right-size that perspective. I looked in that magical rearview mirror and saw just how much running had given me. It helped me through the isolation of COVID. It helped me see the beauty of the lower Manhattan skyline for the first time since it had been obscured in my mind’s eye by the events of 9/11 more than 20 years earlier. It helped me feel powerful and calm all at the same time, even in the face of grief. How can I be anything but grateful for all of that? Maybe running is no longer part of my life’s journey, but it was there for me when I needed it the most.
And so was Marty. He and I don’t see each other as much anymore; the roads of life have a way of diverging and taking people in different directions. But we are still in touch, and we will always have that uniquely shared experience from last year when all those roads intersected. The leaves were falling, the weather was blowing hot and cold; he was running with his dad, and I was running for mine. And we all crossed the finish lines we were meant to. We all were, and still are, long distance runners.
And winners.
