Between The Miles - A Daughter's Perspective

It's All In The Details

     I think it's amazing that my father has kept detailed records of his running over the years. He has meticulously documented the races, places, times, and ranks of his finishes, as well as the workouts he ran every day. I drove to my parents' house one day to interview him again and he produced a series of binders, one for each decade going back to 1980. In these binders, he organized each month into a section, and within each divided section was a carefully written calendar of running and days of rest. I'll admit that I consider myself to be a bit on the obsessive-compulsive side of organization, but this calendar; the pristine penmanship, the highlighted names of races, the route of each workout, and the clear record of time for each run, I was shocked! He'd been keeping records all of my life and I'd never known about it, never even seen the binders. I felt like I was seeing my father through new eyes and connecting dots between our two personalities that I'd never noticed before. 

     We happened to be sitting on the back deck of my parents' house that day, the house I grew up in, where they have lived for over forty years. My father and his best friend, Bill Finkbeiner built the entire deck with their own four hands and it is a sort of sanctuary my parents regularly enjoy. From there, you can see the rolling hills of El Dorado, Placerville, Ione, and Jackson, and on clear days you can see all the way to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. What was at one time supposed to be a dam and a lake is instead a sprawling carpet of pine and oak. On the rolling hills, houses are few and far between and most of them, you can only see at nighttime when their lights flicker and dance between dense trees. During the days at the beginning of winter, the fog can tumble and dance its way through the valley and tiptoe to the edges of that deck. 

     This particular day, it was clear and warming, and we sat together peacefully while I watched a flood of memories pass through my father's eyes as he flipped the pages of those binders. He reviewed them with reverence and I dare say, a bit of awe that he had run all those miles. I tried to stay quiet, not my strong suit, but after a short while I absolutely had to know why he had kept those binders!

     "Initially," he said, "I had gotten fat, marital bliss can do that to you. I knew myself well enough to know that I wouldn't do anything about it unless I wrote down what I thought could be a sustainable goal. So, I decided to write down that I would run an average of five miles per day for a year." I was gawking at that because he made it seem so reasonable, but that sounds hard to me! Really hard! He further explained,

     "We all make new year's resolutions, and who keeps them? So, after being asked, and once I told someone my goal, I had to work to achieve it. It didn't start out as a binder, just a spreadsheet. Keeping track of those daily efforts towards meeting that goal was the only way to do be able to know the average." After the year had finished and he did in fact achieve his goal, the next year, the goal became, improvement. There was only one way that he could think of to organize the progress and improvement and so, the record sheets and binders were born. He made it sound like a simple a diary of his hobby, but it was more than that...I is more than that.

     As a child, I remember the consistency. My father would run practically every day, rain or shine. He had his favorite loops around our neighborhood, had his running meet-ups with friends and running groups, and there were also the dumping days. I'll explain. My parents drove together to and from work most days, for years and years. My mother would pick up my dad from his office (only a mile from her own), he would change into running clothes in the car and somewhere along the drive, my mother would dump him. He would run the rest of the way home. These dump runs were somewhere around 5 to 16 miles depending on what kind of race he was training for, and he was always training for something.

     I was never a part of my father's training, but I later found out that Pop had been. On the deck that day, he told me this great story. There was this one run that my father would do on Rock Creek Road where there was a gradual uphill from the start. Pop would drop him off, get himself a beverage and chat with whoever until about an hour was up and then drive out to meet my dad. My father had painted a rock and would, each time, try to move the rock further and further out to show the increase in his speed and distance that he could accomplish in that one hour. My grandfather would head out just beyond the rock each time and yell the seconds left of the hour as my father was running toward him. Just imagine a crusty old cowboy in jeans and boots, with a soda in one hand, watch in the other, yelling a countdown at the top of his lungs to an approaching road runner! To a passerby, it must have looked like some kind of hazing ritual or something. I laugh just thinking about it! I wondered what motivated my father more; was it truly just moving that rock a little further each time, or could it have been running toward the wild and excited eyes of his father?