Post Defeat, Part III

Yesterday I visited Astoria to meet with one of the fine teachers Yo Ghana! works with and to have lunch with some old friends.

On the way home I took a quick detour in St. Helens to visit their high school track, a place where I have some vivid memories.  The cinder track has been replaced by an all-weather one, and I wasn't altogether clear that the new one was in the same spot.  But walking across the parking lot and athletic fields awakened some flickers of recognition from the spring of 1974 and 1975, times in which shaving a few seconds off a personal best or beating a rival seemed like the beginning and end of life.

It's hard to recapture that feeling these days.  I run occasionally but have gained a lot of weight in recent years.  Even a few years ago, when I was lighter and training pretty hard, I couldn't even manage to run six miles at 7:00 a mile, a pace once reserved for long recovery runs.  I could barely run a half mile or so at my former marathon (26.2 miles) pace.

More telling are the weight of responsibilities.  Mike and I had talked about how to more fully engage his students and their partners in Ghana.  My old classmates had moved on from athletics to being focused on work and family and how to be good friends with people like Bill, who passed away last year.  Back in Portland I met with a close friend who is battling a daunting illness with tremendous grace and shared time with him with other friends.

For several years, running trumped everything, and I was sure that happiness would come with achievement.  And certainly there were moments of euphoria, like that afternoon in St. Helens when I broke 10:00 in the 2-mile for the first time and got second place in an invitational.  But the memory of that triumphant day seemed small yesterday, an interlude dwarfed by even ordinary meetings and developments, for extraordinary people reside in those places.

Are athletics a bridge that carries us across the troubled water of adolescence, or a distraction from what we should care more deeply about?