When you commit to running a marathon, your world shrinks. You
plan your work, your menu, your free time -- if you ever have any, around your
training. Your vocabulary changes. Words like hydration, proteins, carbs, foam
roll, ice pack, trip off your tongue the way words like cabernet, brownies,
frosting, cake, Nutella and sleeping in used to.
When you run Boston for a charity, you add in all the nuts
and bolts that endeavor requires and end up eating in front of the television a
lot because there’s no way you’re going to find the top of your kitchen table
until April is over, because in addition to the sleeping cats sprawled all over
the tiny patches of visible wood, it’s
overloaded with piles of envelopes, letters, thank you cards, stamps, and lots
of papers scrawled with phrases like “Go get ‘em champ,” or “Better you than
me.”
Fundraising, like
marathoning, takes a huge leap of faith and much effort. But hey, if you’re a
slow poke runner like me and you want to run Boston, you gotta suck it up and
do what you gotta do, right? You’ve got to get that annoying fundraising thing
out of the way if you want to shine on Patriot’s Day. After all, it’s all about the run, right?
Wrong.
I admit that the first time I ran Boston for a charity I did
it for myself. A lot of us charity
runners do start out that way. Maybe running Boston is our Mount Everest or
Moby Dick. Maybe it’s our way of proving to ourselves that we’re more than
others think we are. Maybe we’re just checking
off our bucket list. I know training for my first Boston was more about getting to that finish line than helping out others.
But for many of us, me included, things change. As you
train, you start meeting the folks affected by the illnesses your charity is
trying to heal. You meet grandfathers who nearly died on the operating table,
marathoners coping with Hepatitis C, living donor aunts and fathers, teary-eyed
moms who nearly lost their children, sons who lost their moms. You meet brothers,
sisters, cousins sprinting, jogging, limping along to Boylston Street so that
someday no one else will have to suffer the way their own family has.
Yesterday I did a training run on my marathon course. I started in
Framingham, intending to meet up with my American Liver Foundation friends who
were starting a few miles up the road in Natick. My timing was off, so I missed most of my Run
for Research buds by a good fifteen minutes or more. But I didn’t run alone.
There were hundreds of other runners out there, many of them charity runners
with Boston Children’s Hospital.
The ALF and BCH had water stops set up for all us runners,
manned in most cases by folks intimately involved with the life-saving work
both charities support. What a glorious day. I chatted with lots of great folks
out striving to make a difference, one step or one cup of water at a time. I got to chat for a bit
with some dear RFR runner friends. Some were running and some were
volunteering.
I got to exchange shrieks and hugs and kisses with my
friends Erin and Jeff and their son Jon, who were shivering in the cold but
smiling and handing out water, Gatorade, tissues, candy hearts at a stop in Wellesley.
When I’m not running Boston for Liver, I volunteer for the
team at the mile 13 hydration stop on marathon Monday. Erin and Jeff always
volunteer too. Correction. Jeff couldn’t
volunteer last year. He couldn’t afford
to take the time off from work. He was saving up his vacation and sick time
because that July he was going to be giving half his liver to Jonathan and he
needed at least six weeks at home to recover. Jonathan was diagnosed with
biliary atresia, an illness of the bile ducts, when he was just a few weeks
old. He’s spent his whole life waiting for a new liver.
Both Jonathan and Jeff came through surgery like champs,
though recovery was painful and long, especially for Jeff. Yesterday Erin said
Jeff needed to run for Liver next year. Jeff’s
back at the gym, doing all kinds of crazy boot camp workouts. I said I’d help
train Jeff if he wanted. We could start with some small races. Jeff says he’ll think about it.
Their son Jonathan reaches my shoulders now. He fit snugly on my hip when we first met
years back. Erin told me he’d grown two more inches since the surgery. I joked that she needed to stop feeding the
kid. He shrugged at the both of us, a little embarrassed by his mother’s
gushing. Typical teen.
I took off soon
after, headed with a smile for the first of Newton’s many hills. I exchanged
thumbs ups and way to gos with lots of runners on the course, and I couldn’t
help smiling as I remembered previous runs in earlier years. I stopped to say a
prayer of thanks with the statues of Johnny Kelley elder and younger. I smiled
at the bubbler for dogs and runners in front of the house near the Newton Town
Hall and remembered that most people are good.
As I crested each up hill, I
reminded myself to thank my friend Wendy for making me do that mountainous
Derry 16-miler a few weeks back. Those Newton hills were bumps compared to
Derry. On the down hills I mentally thanked every trainer I ever had for making me work
my quads, especially my dear friend Annie, who has a family member coping with liver disease.
As I started up the last hill, just past Center Street, I
thought of my parents because six of the seven times I ran Boston, they cheered
me on from the median strip along that section. I doubt they’ll be there this year. It will
tire them out too much. They’ll be with me in spirit though, that’s for sure.
My mind wandered back to Erin. I remembered talking to Erin
on the phone a few days before the living donor surgery. She said something
like this: “I’m just having trouble coping with the idea that in a few days, if
things don’t go right, I’m going to lose my husband and my son. I can’t accept
that. I just can’t deal with that.” Her voice trembled. I couldn’t even begin
to imagine her suffering.
As I began my downhill swoop past Boston College toward
Cleveland Circle, I thought of the year before that phone conversation. It was early
spring 2012. I was to meet up with Erin in Natick to volunteer at a training run
for liver. Just a few days earlier, my mom had been diagnosed with two completely unrelated types of cancer. On the drive in to Natick, my hands shook the steering wheel so badly I had to pull in to an empty parking
lot on Route 30 for a good half hour, cry buckets, and take many deep breaths
before I felt calm enough to get back on the road.
Before I started running and volunteering with Liver, I knew
no one with liver disease. The sad irony of it all, that my own mom was now
grappling with cancer of the bile duct, and that I was going to support runners
who were funding research to help her, and folks just like her? I wasn’t coping well.
I pulled into the parking lot at the training run water
stop, at the VFW Post on Route 135 (runners know the sign -- Meat Shoot Every
Saturday, 1:30 to 3:30), about the mile
nine mark. My eyes were stinging and my nose was raw. I was determined not to
cry. Erin came running toward me with her arms opened wide. I ran into her arms
and burst into heaving, hysterical tears.
And what did she do? This woman who’d been through hell and back since
her precious baby boy was diagnosed with biliary atresia at two weeks old, way
back in the previous century? She gave
me lots of hugs and calmed me down and told me it would all work out, one way
or another. And for her it did and for
me it will.
Yesterday, when I took that right onto Hereford and then
that left onto Boylston, I paused long enough to take a photo and acknowledge
the heavenly energy swirling around me. All of the Boston Marathon route is hallowed
ground. This I truly believe. And that last part. . . well, I can’t even begin to put into words
what that last part means to me now.
And looking back at what I’ve written today about the rest
of the run. . . that doesn’t do Boston justice either. But it’s a start.
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