The human instinct to make lessons out of living is built around one constant: our bodies cling to life, even when that life is being lived by others. The need to live tears muscle from bone as certainly as it rips a metaphoric heart in two. Sometimes I wonder if it’s our wounds that bind us because we trust the love that persists through the pain they cause.
We can feel the injuries of others if we let ourselves, in some ways as much as our own. This is a kind of hope I’ve grown more and more dependent on as life’s losses mount.
When I was young, all I wanted to be was fast.
My grandfathers built jets that shattered the speed of sound, so my childhood was filled with stories of flying that shaped my dreams of what fast could be. For the sixth-grade science fair, my dad and I built a replica ram jet out of a Dr. Pepper can, some water, and a tiny chunk of dry ice. Later, as he taught me how to change the oil in a car, Pops opened up about a high school speeding ticket he got for flying down one of the long, lonely desert streets where he grew up. The way he smiled when he said “never get caught racing” was the closest he ever came to giving me winking permission for something off limits. More often, he was telling me to slow down.
Where Dad and I shared speed most was on the track. In high school, he and I had almost identical physiques. Over six feet tall and just under 170 pounds, we were on the thin side, though he played offensive line on the football team while I chose basketball because I could jump. In the spring, we ran track, trading footsteps for flight 100 and 200 meters at a time.
Sprinting suspends time in ways I’ve never experienced elsewhere. Your body creates a fold in perception that wraps you inside itself until you cross the finish line and crash back into the turgid sensations of reality.
What no one tells you—or maybe what youth makes you incapable of hearing—is sometimes, when you choose to race, those collisions are final. You only know this after the fact. After the tearing. After the pain. After the realization that there will be no return and all that’s left is coming to terms, a slow process made even slower by the sudden death of the speed that began it.
This could be called our first experience with life after death, a first loss to begin preparing us for one that will rip the fabric of our self-perception. Years later, when Dad died, thoughts about death were swallowed by the certainty that I am dying in an instant; a moral and mortal wound. Object became subjective inevitability, an ending like the first domino tipped with earthquake force that shook loose my tectonic sense of living and set me adrift.
Somewhere in the early days of my grief, the back of my leg seized up in the middle of the night, a cramp so deep I rolled onto the floor, rubbing frantically at the knotted ball in the midpoint of my left hamstring. The body does, in fact, keep score. In my case, that tally came in pain radiating from the exact spot my father had given me my most specific physical inheritance.
The day my father died I held his hand while he struggled to draw breath, even as a mask forced oxygen into his lungs. I watched him gasp for air when there was more than enough available, watched him begin to suffocate when a nurse accidentally knocked the hose from the bottom of his mask. In the 15 seconds it took her to figure out what was happening, his oxygen levels dropped to 69 percent.
Squeezing his hand—so thin I felt his bones slide between my fingers—I told him I was there and he could relax. For a few moments he would. Then the process would repeat, leaving him panting like he’d just run a lap without getting out of the bed.
Late in the morning, the ER’s attending physician asked my mother for permission to intubate him. He needed consistent oxygen to fight the one-in-ten-million condition he had, something so rare none of the doctors in the hospital had ever treated personally. That treatment would be difficult, but he seemed to be responding well. It was just his breathing getting in the way.
Mom consented and we went down stairs while they did the procedure, returning to find him sleeping, his oxygen levels where they should be, finally allowing him to rest. His condition was still precarious, but he was stable and we were encouraged to head home so we could return in the morning rested and ready to make plans for next steps.
I left in the early afternoon, kissing him on the head before I went because open displays of affection were ok when he was sleeping. Mom waited for their pastor to stop in and pray for Dad before she left a couple hours later. There was supposed to be a next morning, another day’s race to be run. Supposed to be.
I have had exactly one human nemesis in life. Ron Allen.
Just typing his name makes me upset and I haven’t seen or heard anything about Ron since May of 1993. And yet, he will always hold that very particular place in my head and heart.
Nemesis.
In every way, Ron filled this role on the track. We ran the same races and invariably ended up in the same heats at various competitions, particularly in my best event, the 200-meter dash. Factor in that we were in the same league and I probably raced him more than anyone else.
Here’s the punchline: I never beat him in the 200. Not once. Worse, I was on the verge of breaking that streak in our last race. My last race ever, actually. Trying to beat him actually ended my track career and, in one moment, threw the limits of my athletic potential into clear relief as I fell face down on the track.
And Ron? He just kept running like he always did.
Somewhere in the late spring of my sixth-grade year, Dad asked me to work out with him. I was 12 and he was 43 and I had no idea where the ask came from. For a couple months, we did push-ups and sit-ups, me sitting on his feet and calling out the count while he worked on muscles that seemed pissed at being roused from their slumber. We lifted the couple of weights we owned, and I taught him some body weight plyometrics I’d been learning at my YMCA-team track practices.
Toward the end of that season, my eight-years older brother, Paul, and I were talking to Dad at the high school track across the street from our house. I’d mistakenly asked Paul to help me start training to play basketball in college. I think he took this as a request to try and permanently disable me with a workout I still can’t think about without light post-traumatic stress. Now that I think about it, Dad probably came over to make sure I was still alive.
What happened next, I’ve written about before. My brother said Dad could beat me in a footrace. I, being no punk, laughed at the idea with every inch of chest-out posturing a kid just beginning to beat his peers could manage. Predictably—to everyone but me—Pops blew my doors off. This is how I discovered he was a collegiate sprinter until a torn hamstring ended his career. Snapped in a race and that was it. This was also the end of my workout sessions with Dad. I’m not sure there was a connection between the two, he just stopped asking to do it. Now I can’t shake the fear my attitude before the race was the cause.
I never thought about it much at the time, though, because Dad refused to carry grudges against his children and was quick to coach me up on how to come out of the blocks or proper baton exchange techniques. Honestly, I completely forgot those workouts until, two days after he died, the realization hit me so hard I stopped and wrote it down. He started trying to get back in shape just about one year after his stepfather died, the same way his short stay in the hospital earlier that summer pushed me to start walking excessively.
But life moves too quickly to see these things in the moment. We chase forward motion until injury renders movement impossible; we run until loss forces us to sit with the elements of living we avoid through pain we can’t just walk off.
A note on Ron: his was one of the sweetest strides I’ve ever seen on the track. The dude was three-quarters leg and the symmetry of his form was impressive despite my desire to jam a stick between his knees like bike spokes and watch it upend him. The guy was a gazelle, pure and most natural when his legs propelled him forward through space and time. It was frustrating, to say the least, watching that stride pull away somewhere in the second half of our races.
Over the years I ran track and later coached it, I paid particular attention to the gaits of fast people. There are some compact runners, are all muscle and footspeed, like Leroy Burrell or Canadian steroid wonder Ben Johnson. Alternately, striders like Carl Lewis or Florence Griffith Joyner merge stride length with power that propels them forward each time their spikes graze the track surface. Some runners look like they shouldn’t be as fast as they are given the ways their form conflicts with the physics of traditional track logic. Michael Johnson and Usain Bolt fit this category.
My years running high school track in San Diego were a golden era for sprinters. Speed factories like Lincoln Prep and Morse, among others, pumped out Division 1 college sprinters left and right. At one point, three of the top five 4×100 teams in California—at the time the fastest state in the country—were within a 20-mile radius of one another.
I was just fast enough to get into races with guys who’d smoke me in all three of these running styles. Muscular power sprinters? Meet state 100-meter record holder Teddy Washington and future Heisman winner Rashaan Salaam, who—lucky for me—was also in my league. Striders? Try future all-American and NFL wide receiver Darnay Scott. Unexpected speed? My teammate John transformed a squat, bow-legged form into daily losses for me.
I was always chasing, slipping a little further behind even as my own times kept dropping.
There’s one other group of runners, rhythm sprinters like hurdler Edwin Moses, who won 122 straight races. Their speed is always surprising on the clock because their form is so effortless. So consistent. So, well, un-sprint like. You see it in their expressions. Most sprinters wear a mask of exertion. These runners seem lost in a meditative trance, every step straight and simple.
Ron fell into this group and it’s probably why I hated losing to him so much. During the race it didn’t look like he was trying. After the race it didn’t look like he cared. Meanwhile my every step was a struggle, every finish a failure when he was on the track.
The day of my father’s memorial service, I found out the private high school I attended—the one whose buildings Dad and I painted so we could afford tuition—was in the process of selling the five-acre plot of land Dad’s former church and my childhood home sat on. They’d purchased it to use the preschool building. Now, it was merely funds for improvements on the main campus.
My memories replaced by condominiums. I still don’t know how to deal with that.
When I was a kid, like seven or eight, I ran the open fields between our house and the church. Around that time, I scared myself by running as fast as I could. I stopped and looked around to make sure I hadn’t started a tornado because it felt like I had. I wasn’t that fast, but the speed we create when we’re little makes the world slower in ways we’re not prepared to handle.
I was nine when L.A. hosted the Olympics in 1984. That whole year, I’d go to one end of the field and crouch at the starting line with the Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson in my head. When the phantom gun went off, I’d run as fast as I could for whatever I assumed was 100 meters. I never won a race on that field because, even in my imagination, I couldn’t outrun reality. But I never lost one either, which is the beauty of daydreams. Their finish lines are simply invitations to run again.
It’s fitting that Ron was in the race when competitive running died for me.
It wasn’t my worst loss. That honor belongs to Rashaan, who obliterated me in the 200 a year prior, running the last 20 meters backward simply because he could. He could have cooled down with a Coke before I crossed the line. But losing to him was no embarrassment. Rashaan was lightning with a Terminator stride.
Losing to Ron at league finals my senior year was soul crushing. In less than 22 seconds, my last chance to beat my nemesis was snatched physically in ways I still feel today. And everything was coming together. A season earlier, I had plateaued. But then I slid under my fastest time at our last meet and started shaving a few of hundredths each time I clocked my workouts.
When I popped just under 22 seconds at my last workout before that final meet, I checked for Ron’s time in the notebook where I recorded the best times of my competitors. My sprint partner, Daryl, and I scoured each week’s newspaper box scores and then dissected what we could from how those guys ran.
I was within five hundredths of Ron. I could get him. I felt it.
On race day, all signs seemed to confirm that feeling. My 4×100 team won our third straight league title and I finished second to Daryl in the 100, my time right where I needed it to be. In early 90s terms, I was amped.
The wait for the 200 stretched like a rubber band between my fingers as I lounged in the shade, denying the existence of my dry heave nerves. When first call came, I hopped up, grabbed my spikes, and jogged across the infield. Motion felt uncomplicated.
Six days before his last race ended, I sat with Dad in his hospital room. Just a canula in his nose for oxygen, he was in pretty good spirits. If anything, his inability to eat enough worried me most. He was melting in front of us but couldn’t force himself to do anything about it. I can still remember the surprise I felt when it only took one hand to help him up off the couch a week before he went to the hospital. We still thought it was pneumonia, so everyone who came into his room gave him a pep talk about getting enough in his system to fight off the supposed infection.
What I remember most is he was still laughing. Not as much as normal, but enough to make it feel like just another of his trips to the hospital with something serious he’d somehow shake off so he could go home to the next project in his wood shop or the next Padres game on TV. Dad had a knack for surviving, for outsprinting whatever issue he was dealing with. Until he didn’t.
When I came back on Friday, the situation was much more serious. He’d been diagnosed with a condition called c-ANCA that was wrecking his kidneys. His lungs were simply struggling to keep up. He’d been stuck so many times for so many tests that nurses were having trouble finding veins to use for the next blood draw. And he still wasn’t eating. But the diagnosis meant a treatment was available and the doctors seemed to think it could help.
Just over 72 hours later, he passed. I left that last day believing I would see him the next, hope a stubborn weed in me. It is small comfort now that his doctors thought we would too.
The truth, though, is the cliff is so abrupt and so steep. We imagine we’ll see it coming—for ourselves and those we love—but that’s not what we get. Just one step, one final injury, one precipitous fall. No matter how many signs we had, the drop is sudden. Just a week after going to the hospital, Dad was gone. Still calm and stable, the nurse who called said his heart simply gave out.
Part of me thinks he’d been running too hard for too long. His heart, which had struggled to keep the beat for years, finally reached its limit. It’s no trite cliché to say Dad was known for the size of that heart. It only makes sense that, in the end, it collapsed under its own weight.
It only makes sense, now, those last moments feel like a sprint.
I’d love to say that I saw it coming; that something felt off in my leg when I stretched; that there was a twinge during my warm-up strides.
Instead, I felt amazing despite my part-time job keeping me from practice two days a week the last month of the season; despite my chronic insomnia leaving me just eight hours sleep in the three days before the meet; despite the four years of losing this exact race to that exact guy.
What I am sure of is this: my final race was beautiful until it wasn’t anymore, a moment that came ten seconds too early.
The summer before my senior year produced one of the most powerful “failures” in track and field history. At the Barcelona games, British sprinter Derek Redmond was peaking at just the right moment in his pursuit of a 400-meter dash medal. He’d run the fastest preliminary time, cruised in the quarterfinals, and was expected to coast through the semis, setting up a run for the podium. And then, 150 meters in, Redmond’s hamstring snapped. Face contorted in pain, he hobbled to a stop and took a knee, years of work evaporated.
After a moment, he hobbled to his feet and tried to keep going, basically hopping around the track on pure instinct. The pain etched across his entire body was not yet familiar to me but so clear I felt it. As he rounded the last turn, his father, Jim, pushed past security and out onto the track, coming alongside him to sling his son’s arm over his shoulders. In that moment, Derek’s dream collapsed and he sobbed, burying his face in his father’s shoulder. But they kept walking.
For the last 80 meters, Jim helped carry his son as cheers for their now shared efforts grew louder and louder. When they crossed the finish line, the crowd erupted in appreciation, rattling the stadium. Commentators praised the moment as singular moment symbolizing of the Olympic spirit.
But in the record book? Derek Redmond’s race result is listed as a DNF—Did Not Finish—because he “received assistance.” Two years later, his surgeon concluded he could no longer race at an elite level.
The mix of pain and love that must exist in his memories of those moments, I can only imagine. But I can imagine them much more clearly now that my father is gone.
When the starter called us to the blocks, I was calm and clear-headed. Dropping into my crouch, I felt the cool hint of a breeze so subtle, I thought “Well, at least our times won’t be wind-aided.” I was more comfortable than I ever remember feeling in the eight years I ran sprints.
On the gun I fired out, drawing myself up into my stride a full three steps quicker than usual. At 6’3,” coming out of my coil always felt like scrambling out of the backseat of a clown car wearing clown shoes and stepping over two other clowns to do it. But not then. The voice in my head screamed, “There’s your extra five hundredths!”
By 40 meters, I hit full speed and leaned hard left into the curve, familiar physics driving me forward. The sound of each footfall whistled past while everything else was silence. One of the gifts of track is its isolation. Once a race began, I was alone for the time it took to reach the finish, no expectations beyond running fast and hoping for a good outcome.
As we came out of the curve, Ron was still the stagger’s distance behind me. He usually made up that distance before we reached the straight. Shorter version: rather than my usual game of catch up, we were even and I had gas left in the tank.
That’s when I felt a slight ping in the back of my thigh, halfway between my ass and knee like I’d touched a live wire. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t normal. As soon as I pushed onto the other foot, though, it stopped and I accelerated, pressuring Ron to press too hard too early. I couldn’t know my own pressing would leave me just two more strides. Ever.
On my next step, the muscle snapped and a searing pain I imagine accompanies getting shot sent flames coursing up and down my leg. This was the second most excruciating moment. In denial, I took another stride and my leg collapsed, dropping me face-first onto the track. The pack sprinted away, Ron at its head, and I listened to the finish through throbs that felt audible. When the race ended, my brother—now my assistant coach—jogged over and knelt down beside me.
“You ok?”
I knew the question was about more than my leg and that he already knew the answer.
What is left when we step off the track permanently, our last race run? There is a passage in Thornton Wilder’s novella, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, I return to when this question assails me.
We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
My father was a pastor in the truest meaning of the word. He lived his life one act of tangible service to the next. He was not simply, as some now try to define the position, a public speaker with a built-in audience. His messages were typically delivered in actions more than words.
However, one of the best sermons I heard my father preach comes back to me as I think about our shared injury. It focused on an element of the crucifixion I now can’t separate from the swirling ways life connected us in pain and joy.
In the story, Christ cries out “It is finished” and then dies. Simultaneously, the veil separating the rest of the temple from its holiest space is torn from top to bottom as if by an invisible hand. As Dad put it, utter grief and unspeakable joy became visible in the same instant. Death had come and life grew fully aware of its arc. Put another way, dying was still inevitable but death was not.
My father’s death tore something inside of me. And if injury is a lens through which we resee life, both pain and love look different in ways I cannot unsee. Because of this, I somehow feel more connected to Derek Redmond than I did when the same injury that wrecked his Olympic dreams cratered my best race. The feeling flooded me when, just over a year later, I read that his father had also passed away.
I wonder if, at some point later in his life, he helped Jim out of a chair or into a car and felt a little piece of what his father had felt for him. I wonder if life afforded him moments when he felt able, in some way, to give back to his father what he’d been given on that track. I wonder if he never felt like he could, even if he tried for the rest of his life.
That’s kind of how I felt about trying to repay my dad some of what he had given me. Sometimes we share an injury with someone we love and it binds us together. Sometimes the injury comes from that person and it reminds us why we wanted to be bound to them in the first place. Sometimes we just have to make peace with the parts of living we will never fathom.
I don’t claim to understand losing my father. I just know what it felt like when he was alive and I needed him to be there and I found him walking beside me. I sometimes wonder if holding his hand that last day felt anything to him like Derek’s father running out onto the track, slinging his son’s arm over his shoulder, and helping him walk that last hundred meters.
When I pray about it, I hope it did. I hope he knew he wasn’t alone.
At meet’s end, I leaned against the railing at the end of the track, even the slightest movements feeling like my hamstring was ripping all over again. The last race had just ended without me. Daryl came over and put his arm around me. I can’t remember anything he said, wrapped up in self-pity as I was. The timing of my injury could not have been worse. As if in confirmation, the boys team score totals were announced over the PA system.
“And in second place…Santa Fe Christian…”
I’ll never forget the blend of my team’s groans and the cheers erupting just around the curve where Army Navy’s team celebrated another win.
Ron’s team.
We lost by two points. If I’d merely finished the 200 in my typical second place, we’d have won by six. If I’d been on the 4×400 team, we’d have moved up a couple spots and the worst we’d have done is tied them. In the most team of team sports, I had single-handedly cost us our first-ever league championship. I couldn’t even celebrate qualifying for a third-straight regional meet with the relay team because my leg wouldn’t heal fast enough to run the next week.
Limping to my car, an epiphany all athletes eventually experience hit me. Competitive sports were over for me. The next day, I took entrance exams at the university I would attend in the fall, trading basketball and running for science and singing. Ironically, the loss of sports was merely preparing me for the larger losses of both of those pursuits to come. At the time, though, all I could do was grieve the end of something I generally took for granted: the feeling of digging my spikes into the ground and slowing the world down by speeding myself up.
My last memory of competition, then, is Ron running away from me one final time, an ache deeper than the one in my leg. Sometimes I wonder what he did with his speed, if he ran in college. I hope so. His stride should have carried him that far. More though, I wonder what he did when his ability gave way to the reality of the diminishing returns of age.
I wonder the same thing about my father, now that he’s stepped off the track for good. In life, he made the transition from athlete to after more smoothly than me. When he tore his hamstring, he accepted that his time to run had ended, married Mom, and was drafted at the height of Vietnam. I think this helped him redirect his competitive energies into his efforts to help others.
I know he missed it later. He told me as much. Once, in high school, I was on the verge of quitting basketball, my incessant need for external validation strangling the joy of simply playing the game. After some bitter pill encouragement from my brother, I stuck it out, but I was still miserable early in the season. Dad noticed. Not one for big speeches, he pulled me aside one night.
“You know, Mike, sometimes you have to choose to love what you’re doing. Sometimes even the things you love are hard to like. But you won’t always be able to do them, so decide to love them while you can.”
Dad wasn’t there the day I tore my hamstring. We never talked about the irony of sharing the same career-ending injury in any substantive way. Life moves forward so we did too, just a little slower for the lingering pain, something he no longer feels with me. But if I pay attention, I can still feel him in it.