Running In Circles

I never really got track. As a kid, in fact I played them all. Had a great time. Running was a requirement for all of them, but track was the weird outlier: It was the only thing you did… the mindless thumping of feet. In high school I remember the basketball coach telling me how it was a good idea to run track to improve my conditioning. It didn't seem like a lot of fun. Running in circles. I did not really want to do it, but I agreed. For the next three months I regretted the decision. I remember dreams about quitting the team and awakening to realize I would not. I gave my word to participate and compete. Its just I had no idea what I'd signed up for.

Basketball involved bursts of running at varying rates for less than an hour. Time outs helped if you were winded. They would substitute someone for you at times. Football was a game played in 30 second intervals with another 30 second huddle. Track was just running. And running. The flapping cadence of feet punctuated by sharp exhalation. And that was it. I hated it.

The workouts seemed impossible at first... 28 miles a week (days of 4,8,4,8,4). The first day I though I would die, until I got to the second day and realized the first day was the short day. At first it was the physical discomfort that I disliked. But that went away after a couple weeks. It was the time alone with my mind that was hard. Country roads with dotted passing lanes crawling by were measurements of progress... I'd count them sometimes, or telephone poles until I got bored and finally looked at what was on my mind. I generally tried to avoid that, but it was impossible after a while. The 28 mile week soon switched with and became a 36 mile week (8,4,8,4,8). It meant an increase in the amount of time my mind wandered… and tried to avoid the things I didn't want to face.

Fears lived there, in the recesses of my mind. Fears of failure, inadequacy, of my best being insufficient, of letting people down. I could avoid these things in days full of homework. Not on the road. The roadwork was the hardest part of track. The conditioning was fine, the thinking was brutal and the track meets were fun. I enjoyed watching my friends compete. They were actually good, in fact there were state champions among them. I wasn't... In fact I was marginal at best but it wasn't why I was there.

My friend Chad was a year younger and was made for track. It was amazing to watch him. He was basically a pair of lungs on legs. Thin, sinewy, short. He ran leaned forward slightly like he was trying not to get blown over backwards. He was a star. There were a lot of people like him there. They all did well. He got leukemia and died, after battling it for a few years. It took his hair and left a pallor of death. It did not take his sense of humor or his determination. He never stopped running. Despite the chemo, the nausea, the weakness, he ran. The day before he died he went out and ran a half mile. It was all he had left. He still reminds me strength has nothing to do with physique. That lovable toothpick had all the might of Atlas.

He was on my mind today as I was on a track again. I forgot the feel of the cushiony asphalt under my feet. I hadn't been on a track since high school... when I mostly saw Chad and the other gazelles pulling away from me as if they had caught a tailwind that I had not.

The track was the lynchpin of the Relay For Life, a cancer fundraiser. The entire town turned out in tents, booths, and displays around the track and for 24 hours people would do nothing but laps around the track. Some ran. Most walked. Families walked together, pushing strollers, holding hands with their kids. Then they stood at some booth where they collected donations. My wife and daughter were at one such booth. My job today was to manage the boys. We walked laps around the track.

It was hard, honestly. I felt like crying about half the time and still have a hard time explaining why. Sometimes there's too much to absorb at once. A million thoughts I could not contain or repress. I'd not thought about Chad in a while. He would be old enough to have had a family of his own now. Kids about my age. Little lungs on legs... Just like their dad, with a sense of humor and a determination that only death itself could take away from him. It's just that those kids do not exist. I miss him. I wish I could meet those kids.

I thought about my grandmother, who died 15 years ago with colon cancer that metastasized and filled her lymph nodes, eventually closing off her air supply and ending her life. The most gracious and loving person I'd ever known, and who maintained humility by exposing herself to a series of hilariously weird accidents: The time she drove the car through the garage... The time she got stuck with one foot on the dock and the other on a boat floating off in the opposite direction. So many stories. So much love… so much fun. Hugs… cookies… love… she had it all. She gave so much that I even overlooked the bad plaid lunchbox in the first grade that got me so much ridicule when everyone else had Batman or The Six Million Dollar Man.

She got the cancer scare and changed her life around. She lost weight, ate right, exercised. She did the chemo. She beat it. She had made it to remission and the second to last scope showed no new tumors. She had a few terrific years before she got the news that it was back, inoperable, and terminal.

I look back and see moments I want back. Do over! I'm taking a mulligan on that one. Bring everyone back and lets try take two, people. Being on the track reminded me of a moment I would rather to forget. Grandma was walking 2 miles every day now that she'd been through the first round of chemo. She was determined to take every advantage of the new lease on life. I'd just finished my first year of track and wanted to not lose the conditioning I'd paid so dearly for over the last several months. I was stupid and arrogant and totally incapable of appreciating what it meant to be her at that moment. I scoffed at her two miles and said I'd run 4 in the time it took her to run two. She took that bet, saying we'd set up a course around the neighborhood that was a two mile lap. I'd go twice, she'd go once. We'd both keep our own time.

She slaughtered me… my ego was in better shape than my cardiovascular system at the moment, it seemed. I talked a big game, but frankly I was not great at the running thing. When I rolled into the driveway, ribs cramping, legs shaking, she was sitting there, looking at her perfectly painted nails, feigning boredom. She whipped me and she knew it. I knew it. I was a heel for trying to flaunt my health and youth. She was fighting cancer and I was talking smack with her?? I am still shamed to this day. Not for losing, but for not taking that same walk with her and holding her hand instead of racing her. You just don't get these moments back. They just stay on, forever as a reminder of why you should never take yourself too seriously when you think you've got it all together.

So it is with humility that I rounded this track holding the hands of my two boys who never knew this great woman who was like a mother to me when my own could not. I saw in the faces of the people that had been there all night that they all had their stories of love and loss because of cancer. Who doesn't know someone who's had cancer? And in the faces of these people I've accused of being Desperate Housewives, of being vapid and materialistic, I saw the same choked expression, like if you talked to them, they might cry. We're just not as different as we'd like to believe. Only the veneer is different. Our tears are the same.

Last month I was told by a doctor I "probably didn't have cancer." I pointed out with great concern that 'probably' is not 'definitely'. He agreed, and arranged tests to provide definitive resolution. I tried to be ok. I was not ok. I was very worried. Scared. My luck in being a statistical outlier is renown. I didn't want to break through the odds of 'probably not'. A week after the tests, I found out for sure that I didn't.

I don't mention this for support sympathy. If I wanted it, I would have posted the news a month ago and begged for comfort. I mention this now because I was on the same track as cancer survivors who got that same conversation with their doctor except a week later their news was much worse. And both the survivors and I were on the track while even more people got the same conversation: "It could be cancer", and it was, and they are now gone. I have nothing to complain about. I am blessed beyond my own understanding, despite my every effort to assume I am the reason for my great luck.

It's at times like this I am knocked down a notch. I was today. The Relay For Life was nearly finished. The event closed 24 hours after starting with cancer survivors making one last lap. It was funny looking through that group of strangers, wondering if I'd see someone I knew. I didn't. Just people whose trip I've been on. The grandmother walking with her grandkids… the teenage girl in the purple wig surrounded by friends and family wearing t-shirts with her picture on it. I've been in those groups. I wished them luck. They started out on their lap and my wife asked me to track down my daughter and her friends to help with some tear-down functions.

Mindlessly I start walking along the track, like I had done the entire day. No one was on it because it seemed the event was over, or at least focused on the cancer survivors at the other end of the track. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe I walked faster than I thought… or people just saw this guy, alone, walking on the track behind this group of other people who were cancer survivors. For whatever reason, people were clapping and cheering me on as I walked by. There are no words for the shame I felt, after realizing what was happening. They thought I was one of them. When I started walking, no one was on the track at all… not even along the sides. Into the third turn, there were people lining each side suddenly and they we clapping and saying "way to go!". I saw my daughter between the third and fourth turn and we cut through the infield to get back to my wife.

The guy afraid he had cancer and didn't, got praise for strength he didn't have to find. It's really hard to explain to the people who are clapping why they shouldn't. Waving them off makes you seem demure and magnanimous. Humble. They're not looking for mistaken identities. Sometimes, when life comes like this I wonder if I will ever learn from it. Looking back, I hope I did. I know this much: I didn't race my daughter back to the tent. We took our time, held hands and walked.

Editor's Note: I wrote this at the beginning of a long series of medical tests to find out what was wrong. It took a while and while cancer was not the first item they considered, all the others fell off the list until it was cancer or GERD. How could it be something so simple? It was. In the end, there was surgery to repair a stomach valve and the rest has been history. No cancer. Unlike all those people who walked that circle, it was not a burden I had to carry. The weight of its shadow was enough.