He ran every day until he got sick. I don't know when that started. Maybe before I was born. He'd put on embarrassingly short purple (why purple?) shorts, and a large race T-shirt that made it look like he hadn't put on the shorts, and he'd run. I went with him once, on my bicycle. I couldn't have been older than nine. By the end, he had to push me by the seat of the bicycle so I could keep up.
My memory fades and is replaced by dreams. The words "cancer" and "chemo" and "the chances are good" weave themselves through patchy sketches in a teenage mind of a sick father I didn't want to think about. A skeleton that lived on the couch and didn't talk like dad. I was afraid of him and afraid of losing him. I went about life as if he wasn't dying, and when he did, I felt like I'd woken up from a dream I couldn’t quite remember, to a life without a dad.
I ran a little before he died, but only a few miles, and I didn't do any real races until the 5k a couple months after he died. Even then I didn't run regularly until college and work forced me to quit dance freshman year. It started slowly, in the gym on the elliptical, until I discovered I could run three miles without stopping, and then 6, and then that I could keep up with the boys who ran distance in high school. I started to cling to it, but I didn't know why until the first time.
The first time I felt him was my freshman year of college. I decided to run with a friend and her uncle, Bill, and the running group he went to. She got tired and had to stop after the first mile. I wanted to keep going. I turned back so she wouldn't be alone, but I watched Bill get smaller in the distance, and felt that he knew more about dad then I ever would. I felt as if dad was running away from me to keep up with his friends in the desert. It was a strange, haunting sensation that I tried to ignore.
Three years later I decided to run the Las Vegas Marathon on a whim. I didn't do it for dad or because I thought maybe he'd wanted to do a marathon, just because I was bored and I wanted to stay in shape. During training I savored the words of the "coach", did what he said, and ran with a man through most of the training that was only a few years younger than my father. I was one of only two women in the group and by far the youngest member. I noticed that all of the men of the group treated me like a daughter or a sister if they were young enough, and I loved them for it. They were there for me, unknowingly, through a breakup, the hardest semester in college, and the most friend-less time of my life. They gave me some of the best advice I've ever known. "Look to the horizon mija" Jose told me one day, "never at your feet." At times that's all I need to keep going now.
Finally the marathon came, and around mile 24, I was alone, in pain, and nearly crying, willing my legs to keep moving. Somewhere down the stretch of arid highway I began to feel like something was pushing me, not forward, but up, like a mother dolphin pushes her new baby toward the air. Suddenly I felt protected and at peace. That was the second time.
A year later I was attempting to keep up my training in a new state, new house, new job, new husband, new life that was beginning to take its toll on me. I was bored, frustrated, and feeling trapped by the snow and dismal days that hung around the month of January in Minnesota. Driving home from a kick-boxing class I signed up for when I realized running in negative degree weather is nearly impossible, I decided what I needed was a coach. I could run faster maybe if someone were pushing me. I’d always done better with outside motivation. Unbidden a vision came upon me. I was sprinting down the long stretch of a track I knew well- a track outside the nearest high school to our old house in Vegas. My father leaned over the chain-link fence with a stop watch in hand, baseball cap pulled low over his dark curly hair. In the car I felt the dry breeze in my lungs and the sweat gathering at my hairline. I saw his finger press the button to mark the lap time, my toes dug in to make the corner and red dirt slipped beneath my shoes. He was younger than any of my real memories. He looked like the pictures my mother had showed me of when they were dating, well muscled, smiling, no hint of cancer. With my next breath I was back in my car sobbing so hard the green-light swam in front of me. The crunch of the snow beneath my tires reminded me how far I was from home.
The running groups in Minnesota are not the all-inclusive bunches that inhabit Las Vegas. Most of the runners are Boston qualifiers, and while they are genuinely nice people, if you aren’t a qualifier, their conversation topics are limited. Running with them is much like training alone, and the few friends I’ve made in these groups have either dropped out due to injury or become qualifiers themselves. I run with them faithfully though. I’m afraid that if don’t run with them I may stop altogether, and then, I’m fairly certain, my moments of remembering would also cease.
The most recent time was at Grandma’s marathon. Again I ran alone. As I crossed the finish line, tired and irritated that my time was 3 minutes slower than I was hoping for, a man placed a hypothermia blanket around my shoulders and a ticket for free beer in my hand. “Brewskies!” Dad’s voice rang in my ears. Behind my eyes I could see him jogging happily to the free-beer tent in his 80’s style short shorts and old race T-shirt. His old white Saucony shoes padded heavily on the pavement. I stood rooted to the ground feeling breathless, and the world spinning beneath me. The image disappeared.
Each time he gets less clear. Each vision is more faded, like the photograph I keep in my pocket. So I run, and hope that maybe this time, maybe today, Dad will speak or run or simply be there next to me, if only for another second.
