Back to the Drawing Board

6:02.7

"It is not necessary or desirable to have an intellectual attitude towards running. Of the great runners I have known, few could explain the satisfaction they derived from running. This did not detract from their greatness. Indeed it probably added to it. They have almost all been men in whom one could detect great power which had achieved its fullest expression through running." 

Roger Bannister, The Four-Minute Mile, 

The Lyons Press, 2004, p. 185.

* * * * *

I'm looking for 2.8 seconds.

Over the years I kept records of my running activities. They are not complete, unless I happen to turn more of them up sometime (I have a habit of keeping records of various activities, running being the most prominent, but I am not very organized and don't have a consistent method).

Looking over the records, certain patterns emerge. There were periods of running activity, each of which had a definite end ... except for, so far, the current one. 

1969 to 1974
The first period (emerging from adolescence into young adulthood) was from 1969 to 1974, ages 17 through 22. During this time, I transitioned from high school deep into college life. I ran at Henry Ford Community College on the track team for one year, and at Michigan State University with other runners I had met (not part of the MSU track team), including Scott Reid and Gerry Crane (the latter a very good runner). I took a track course as a physical education class (requirement?), taught by one of the MSU track/cross country coaches, Jim Bibbs, at the Jenison Field House. I remember running a 2:05 880 there rather easily. The coach didn't invite me to the track team, obviously ... for Ken Popejoy, a multiple 4-minute miler, along with a stellar team, was near the top of the national collegiate scene, division one. I can't remember for sure, but I might have seen Popejoy run the mile at MSU, possible one in which he broke 4 minutes. He was a very good miler: http://www.msuspartans.com/sports/c-track/spec-rel/041112aaa.html. I went to MSU during the Summer term of 1971, and then again for the 1973-1974 school year. At some point after 1974 I stopped running for quite some time. My focus was working and dating in my home area, downriver Detroit, one girl after another, while attending Wayne State University. 



1980 to 1986
Slightly before this period, I married Lee Fournier (January of 1979), a marriage that would fail, and part of me knew it would fail, just as part of me knew my second marriage to Sue Stevenson, feisty girl of Irish descent, would fail. It was during the period of my marriage to Lee that I decided to run, for accompanying this decision was an emerging awareness of its eventual failure. It was almost as if running was an escape from the depressing reality of it, or at least an activity I could count on to save me from complete despair ... a last and dependable resort to experience something to feel worthy and good about. Or both. So I commenced running again from age 28 until 34, because of the stress of my first marriage, a disaster from the beginning, the divorce, followed by uncertainty, depression, and then a second marriage with twins on the way before the actual ceremony. Running kept me sane all the while, a beautiful distraction and joy unto itself ... never sure which was more important ... but does it matter, for isn't the nature of things interdependent, intertwined? 

Before all this I lost six years of prime running age, from 1974 until this period, which is too bad because I will never know what I could have accomplished in my prime. But from 28 to 34 is still young as things go, especially from where I stand at 66. It was my golden age of running. I ran in Detroit, Kansas City, Denver, Seattle, and Boston, always running away from something, or to put it another way, towards something that is both good and pure. Running was my base, and still is, a pattern well-established. If I am running, I am running away from negativity and toward the antidote, a fix, a drug ... to forget, and forget again .. and then again. I get high on the success my particular body can achieve, the thrill of it all, and the control. It seems the highest expression of my talents because I have to put not only by mind and emotion into it, but also my body. There is a part of me that secretly wishes I would die running and be done with it all.

1989 and 1990

I had been in Midland since the Summer of 1988. Claire, my third child, was born in 1990. My wife, Sue, was an unhappy, lonely, stay-at-home mom, which I understand now ... but at the time I deeply resented being the source of income for our young family but otherwise ignored. Moreover, I was not happy with my job. Stressful times, time to run. During this period, I raced only five times. I was heavier, somewhere around 170 pounds, maybe more. Consequently, my performance level, although decent enough against competition, dropped from that to which I was accustomed, and although I thought it was merely age-related, which, of course, was true to an extent, I failed to understand that an extra 20 pounds or so was a burden too heavy to carry for optimum success.

1998 and 1999 

My boys were 11 and 12 years old, my daughter was 8 and 9. My dad was very sick, had Alzheimer's disease. My mom didn't handle it well. There was a lot of stress in my family. I raced twice.

2006 to 2009

I was legally separated from my wife and in a loving relationship with a wonderful woman, Sharon McCartney. But guilt plagued me continuously. I learned a lot about myself during this period, and am to the present day still processing what this was and is all about (April, 2018).

December 4, 2015 to Present - A Notice To Appear

I run because I’m sad and depressed. I run because it is something I can control, and that my body is suited for. I run because it gives me a sense of accomplishment, an element of happiness. I run because I’m running away from something and because I’m running towards something.

I started running in earnest again on December 4, 2016 after I got a Notice to Appear as attorney of record in a criminal case in Battle Creek … a clerical mistake that wasn’t meant for me but was “a notice to appear” all the same … if at the time I didn’t think of it that way. For I had thought of it as an annoying inconvenience, something to fix ... I was not the attorney of record and had nothing to do with defending anybody in Battle Creek.

It was one of those magical moments in life during which a message has been sent directly (indirectly, rather ... meaning that what is required is to shift focus from the obvious to the obscure) to a person for a particular reason at a particularly important time in that person's life in the material world … a message from the other side, the spiritual side, the side that comes to your aid when you are in need and feeling lost, which is most of the time in my case, sometimes more than others ... as in the present circumstance. I’ve had these lovely interferences before at certain junctures in the journey called My Life, a term used by those who mainly understand it to mean the only life there is.

But I happen to believe ... no, I know ... that Life is eternal, and that this experience on Earth is merely a phase of it, for lack of a better concept ... a phase in which most of us are in a state of amnesia as to who or what we really are ... but not all of us, and for some of us not all of the time, which describes me.

What I'm trying to say is that I wasn't getting a notice to appear in court. I was getting a notice to appear someplace else, which in a few hours time would begin to become apparent. I don't remember when this awareness actually emerged ... that something else was afoot, that I was being put on notice from a higher source about a matter different from court proceedings ... but emerge it would.

The circumstances that day were benignly funny. I was walking my dog, Louie, an English Setter of high-strung temperament -- a lovable fellow of improbable exuberance and good naturedness. I stopped at my other house to get the mail, about a half mile away -- a house I had to leave because of what happened there. In the mailbox was a standard legal document in a standard legal envelope from what is probably a standard courthouse in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was a notice for a defendant to appear in a preliminary examination regarding a felony charge, a drug case, a copy of which is also sent to the defendant's attorney. I was the defendant's attorney of record as stated in the document, but this was news to me. I was flamboozled, confused. An eventual phone call to the court settled the matter.

Louie and I continued our walk to White's Bar, a hangout of ours. I don't like having Louie on a leash, but he otherwise would run off and likely collide with a car on the busy State Street of Saginaw.

When things go crazy, I run. My historical record of spikes in running activity proves it. I run under duress, the stress of living in a world of crazy. I'm either running away from something or running toward something. The side effects -- good times, a competitive spirit, achievement -- are satisfying but are not the main thing.

I have raced 29 times since December 4, 2015.  The total number of races I have run since high school are somewhere around 115. That means that in two and a half years since the latest running spike commenced, December 4, 2015, about 25 percent of my total racing experience has been during the last 28 months! And of these races, I took 1st place in my age division 18 times (looks good on paper, but the competition is not as good as it was in the 1970s and 80s -- still, my times were as good or better than my times back then on an equivalency basis ... so I am proud of my achievements).