A veteran track and field observer looks for
meaning in the most challenging year of his life and finds it in an unexpected meeting with
an Olympic champion.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
A Ride for
Robert
by Mark Cullen
Dedicated
to Wes VanHooser
Part 1
An Evening with Mike
It's the first “Distance Night in
Eugene” - May 27, 2011 - the evening before the Prefontaine Classic. Now an
annual event, this is when the world's greatest distance runners assemble to
set the course of running for the year - and sometimes the foreseeable future.
Tonight, Mo Farah has his
breakthrough win in the 10,000m in one of the top 20 times ever run, and his
startling performance presages his London and Moscow double golds. His
blistering last lap gets this savvy crowd’s attention – who could ever match
that?
Uncommon is common at Hayward
Field, where stars mingle readily with the night, and night gives the stars all
the space they need.
I run into my friend, Mike Johnson,
head coach of the Western Oregon University team. I am privileged to join him
and his family for the entire evening.
Our talk turns to the best: your
five favorite performances ever?
As we stand in this hallowed hall
of American distance running, Mike and I share a possibly unexpected entry:
Robert Harting, we say, the 2009 World Championships.
 |
| Robert Harting |
Harting was a heavy favorite to win
the discus in front of his rabid hometown crowd in Berlin
Malachowski had one chance left,
but it was clear from the point of release that his dreams would not come true.
Like a wounded bird, his disc gave up and dropped well short of Harting's
golden Championship record.
Bedlam.
Harting is known for his exuberant
celebrations, and at the end of his competitions, the fewer garments he's
wearing, the better he has performed. He shreds his tops and performs joyful
victory laps.
In London, he celebrated his
Olympic gold medal by ripping off his singlet, wrapping himself in the German
flag, and storming over the hurdles set for the women's final.
Know that he is 6' 7" (2.01m),
287 lbs. (130kg).
The crowd chanted as he soared over
each row and - gifted athlete - he never came close to clipping a hurdle.
Decathlon, anyone?
"You know I love this
sport," I say to Mike. "I love appreciating it."
Yet I've always kept a respectful
distance between myself and these terrific athletes. An unexpected encounter
with even one during the course of a World Championship alters my experience
and memory of the event.
Trine Hattestad, Norway's javelin
world record holder and World and Olympic champion, will likely not remember
the 45 seconds we spent together in Seville in 1999.
I'll never forget it.
Kip Keino and LaShawn Merritt will
likely not remember the moment we converged on passport control in Helsinki in
2005. I introduced the gold medalist of the past to the gold medalist of the
future, but there was an understanding that my name was beside the point.
Earlier, a ripple had passed
through the airplane as word spread that Kip Keino was on board.
“If this plane goes down,” I said
to my neighbor, “it’s not us who will be in the headlines tomorrow.”
Cheerfully he chimed in, “Also on
board…”
* * *
"But if I ever have the chance
to meet Robert Harting and let him know what it was like to be in the stadium
that night..."
"Yes," Mike agrees,
"that would be a special moment."
Part 2
The Voice of God
October 1972. My family was
worried.
After 17 consecutive years of
school, I took a year off.
“Mark is dropping out of college!”
I knew that wasn’t true. I was torn
between history and journalism as majors and did not want to make a mistake.
I had attended Hampshire College in
Massachusetts in its very first year, and as it was too much like my high
school, it was time for a change. A year after my parents moved to Seattle, I enrolled
as a sophomore at the University of Oregon.
The legendary journalism professor,
John Hulteng, visiting from Stanford, taught my introductory journalism class.
He was eager for me to major in the subject, but I had been on a path for
history since I was three years old when my parents gave me the book, America and Its Presidents.
That same fall I enrolled in Bill
Bowerman’s beginning jogging class. A week after he was named head coach of the
’72 US Olympic Track and Field team, forty of us gathered near a tunnel of the
West Grandstand of Hayward Field and waited for who we assumed would be the 49th
graduate assistant coach.
Out walked Bowerman.
He turned, looked up at us, and
bellowed, “Hi, I’m your coach!”
On the track below us, Pat Tyson,
Gary Barger, Arne and Knut Kvalheim, Craig Brigham, Mac Wilkins, and Steve
Prefontaine were doing intense workouts.
We watched in awe.
When Bowerman said he was our
coach, he meant it. He wrote and posted every one of our workouts. He came to
recognize us on campus, and even if he didn’t know our names, he always
acknowledged us.
One month into running with this
great coach, I needed a long run and entered the Eugene half-marathon. I was
delighted to finish well under two hours in my very first race, my years on
“the dark side” – that would be soccer – having served my distance base well.
Bowerman recognized me in the
Autzen Stadium parking lot and walked my way. I couldn’t believe he was going
to talk with me.
“Why’d ya stop?”
“Because I’ve been running for only
a month.”
This may have been, in his
cantankerous worldview, one of the ten or so reasonable answers he received in his
entire life. He softened, asked my time, and was genuinely pleased with the
result. I was back in his good graces.
Every week Bowerman posted a
revised roster of the forty of us – an updated ranking based on our workouts as
well as results from intrasquad races on the on-campus cross country course.
Four columns of ten. I started near
the top of the fourth and gradually moved through the third.
There was a weekly race, usually
against a community college. Before each one our team manager, a tall,
longhaired Texan named, fetchingly, Tex, read through the roster. The first
seven who indicated their availability were that week’s team.
Each week I sat in agony hoping
he’d get to my name, and in late October, Tex finally did. We ran in Bend
against the Central Oregon Hot Dogs. Two-time Olympic biathlete, Jay Bowerman, son
of William J., was a member of their team. We had our own name: Bowerman’s
Hamburgers. We were, after all, raw meat.
This showdown between July 4th
barbecue fodder gave rise to my favorite headline, from the Oregon Daily
Emerald: “Meats Meet Meats in Dual Meet.”
We ran on a dusty course on a hot
day. In a sport in which low score wins, we scored 33 points. I worked my way
into our top five and was a point scorer that day for a University of Oregon
cross country team.
“Hey, Tex!”
“Yes, Mark?”
“I scored a third of our team’s
points today!”
“Yes, Mark.”
I went to the first track meet of
the ’72 season and never missed another for the next five years. Well, except
for June that year when my mother put her foot down regarding the untimely
conflict between my sister’s wedding and the NCAA Championships in Eugene.
Section A, row 5, seat 5.
I remain baffled that there was
even a question. I gave the tickets to my roommate, Kyle Jansson, my friend to this day.
Three months later I found myself
in my native Massachusetts and went to a soccer field in Deerfield to watch a
childhood friend play. As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a Lincoln
Continental limousine, a rare sight in this part of rural Massachusetts.
During the game, a familiar face
became apparent to me. I let him be a father and left him alone. I was
introduced to his wife and explained my dilemma.
She said, “He loves to have this
kind of conversation with the next generation, and he’d love to have this
conversation with you. Go ask him.”
“In journalism school you will learn
a specific style of writing,” he said. "Take all the English, history, and political science you can get your hands on,
and you will learn to think about what you’re writing about, and the writing
will come.”
“Thank you, Mr. Cronkite.”
Often people say they’ve received
direction from the voice of god.
I, in fact, have.
Part
3
History in a Duffel Bag
My sense of history informed my
seven-and-a-half year running career, which ended in injury after I ran the
1979 Boston Marathon.
I have long suffered the slings and
arrows of being called - not always enthusiastically - a pack rat. I always
thought I was saving items for their historic value, a potential that, granted,
was usually more evident to me than anyone else.
For reasons I still don’t know, I
ended up with my older sister’s green Army duffel bag in my dorm room in
Eugene.
In it I placed every pair of
running shoes I wore from 1971-79, a total of 28.
A little company named Blue Ribbon
Sports was in the process of becoming Nike.
I put all six pairs of my Blue
Ribbon Sports running shoes in the duffel bag, and kept three of the boxes.
My podiatrist, Dr. Dennis Vixie,
was designing shoes for Nike.
“Here, try these.”
Waffle Trainer prototypes.
Did I mention those cool advertising
brochures Nike produced during their first year?
I have almost every one.
A dear friend finally convinced me
to put one pair in my safe deposit box.
The Bowerman waffle iron shoes.
One of three hundred pairs made by
him by hand.
A rarity among rarities, mine are
among the very few he made from a spike plate.
Authenticated by Nike royalty Geoff
Hollister, Nelson Farris and Dennis Vixie.
I even remember Geoff selling shoes
from the back of his vehicle at the ’72 Olympic Trials. He had parked in my dorm’s parking
lot.
I pulled in to park.
Next to history.
Part 4
A Guy Named Wes
I'm not quite sure when it was that
2012 began to fall apart for me.
It certainly wasn't the Olympic
Trials in Eugene where I witnessed Ashton Eaton's decathlon world record, the
third time I’ve seen a new standard set. Nor was it the last day of the
Olympics when I realized that my entry in a highly respected international
Olympics prediction contest was to win silver.
Had I only thought of it, this
might well have led to some shirt-ripping of my own, though at 60, there seemed
to be dramatically fewer times when people might actually have wanted me to do
it.
Things began to unravel the second Sunday
in July when I sat on an old deck chair and it collapsed. The only thing
between the wooden deck and my tailbone was a thin piece of canvas.
The deck won.
I was lucky that I had cracked my
tailbone and not broken it, as a break requires a surgical repair. But that was
hard to appreciate when standing was far easier than sitting for many months to
come.
Four days later I was standing
outside when I heard a crash inside my house.
A large painting had not been
rehung properly, and one of the few remaining emblems of my Dutch family’s life
that evaporated in World War II had come crashing down. It didn’t just fall; it
fell over the arm of the couch and ripped in four directions.
Two down and I was nervous about
the third.
*
* *
Fatigue is insidious.
It doesn’t take hold of you in a
day; rather, it slowly and imperceptibly takes a little of yourself, bit by
tiny bit, until you forget what it was like to be rested. For four years I suffered
from fatigue so disabling I was napping several hours almost daily.
Increasingly, I was frightened, most especially by the dismal
history on my mother’s side of the family. She and her two brothers all died at
75 of heart disease.
“How’s that for genetic
programming?” we used to joke.
It felt less and less like a joke.
Our bodies are always speaking to
us, if only we will listen. I gave up red meat, followed quickly by the wine I
so loved to match with foods.
I was listening, but uncertain as
to what.
My annual physical exam came to
have a predictable ending.
“Shouldn’t I be taking a statin,
given my high cholesterol and family history?”
My sleep doctor and internist, trusted providers to this day, understandably put fatigue into the sleep apnea bin and focused on treating the known condition.
My sleep doctor and internist, trusted providers to this day, understandably put fatigue into the sleep apnea bin and focused on treating the known condition.
When I was 52, a heart scan registered 0/400, meaning I had no arterial plaque whatsoever. Memorably, my doctor turned to a resident and said, "He's my first zero."
Eight years later: 8/400, still
exceptionally low for a 60 year old. But to me, eight points meant I was headed
in the wrong direction. Now there was plaque where none had been
before.
“OK,” said my internist, relenting
at last, “I’ll write you a prescription for a statin, but before you fill it,
you have to see the director of cardiac rehabilitation at Swedish Hospital.”
Dr. Sarah Speck, who is nothing if
not brilliant, has a cardiac wellness business which then was getting off the
ground. She approved me to continue walking within a limited range of effort –
far less than the heartbeat of well over 140 I register when attacking a poor hill
near my house in Seattle. Her business includes a small gym with cutting edge diagnostic
equipment. Each staffer has a degree in exercise physiology.
Wes VanHooser, a star soccer
player who had just graduated from Seattle University, did my intake interview.
For an hour, Wes listened to me pour out my fears.
“Why don’t we do a stress test?” he
asked.
This calmly delivered suggestion
was not really his to make, but he was the first to perceive I was at the stage
that it was necessary.
Days later, I looked over Wes’s
shoulder as two lines on the printout, one blue and one red, diverged.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s just you being tough,” he
replied, not quite the answer I was expecting. He explained I was pushing
myself into oxygen debt, further proof of my propensity for thrashing myself.
Not long after, as the intensity of
the test ramped up near its end, Wes turned pale.
“How are you feeling?”
“Well, I have some discomfort near
the top of my collarbone, but that’s just my breathing.”
That was not my breathing.
Two weeks later, the full meal deal
stress echocardiogram showed both that I had the physical fitness of a
39-year-old and that something was very wrong with my heart.
The only way to find out what was
to go in and look.
I did not quite perceive the seriousness
of the situation until I met with Dr. Speck’s nurse, Terry, to schedule the
procedure.
“Our next available time slot is in
13 days,” she said.
“Let’s see,” I replied. “Monday the
12th. I have a meeting.”
Terry froze me with a look. If my
heart wasn’t going to nail me, Terry’s death stare certainly would.
“Actually, I can miss that
meeting…”
The next thirteen days were the
most frightening of my life. I had worked so hard in the stress echo test that
something felt different – ominously different. Dr. Speck gave me permission to
keep walking, but I chose not to.
As I entered Swedish Hospital, I thought
as I approached the registration desk, “Well, if I go down now, at least I’ll
be going down in the right place.”
In an angioplasty, a tube is
inserted into your femoral artery and threaded into your heart. A contrast dye
is injected and doctors evaluate the degree of blockage, if any.
The angioplasty showed a blockage
so serious it required a stent. Remarkably, there was no plaque anywhere else,
and the heart scan almost had been right, with just one small exception.
The scan shows only hard plaque, not
soft. The soft had attached to that small amount of hard and, unseen by the scan,
had built up a blockage of 85% in the artery aptly named the ‘widow maker.’
I am by now used to the sound
people make when they see the before and after images of my heart: they suck in
their breath. Low whistling comes next. The space through which blood was
getting to my heart was almost immeasurable.
No wonder I was exhausted.
Dr. Speck later explained that I
worked so hard in the stress test that I might well have dislodged some plaque
and made my condition even worse.
Over time, Dr. Speck revealed herself to be perplexed. “This just doesn’t
make sense,” she said. “How could someone with your level of fitness have an
85% blockage?”
She checked the boxes for genetic testing.
The mystery of generations of dismal health on the Dutch side of my family
came unraveled.
I carry two genes in rare combination. One causes me to produce cholesterol
at a rate 55% higher than normal; 10% of the population carries this gene. The
other is known as the ‘stickiness’ gene. This charmer causes all that plaque to
adhere much faster than normal.
A possibly deadly combination.
My survival beat astronomical odds.
There are few feelings in my life better than offering this explanation to
my family. Now we all can find out if we carry one or both genes, and if so,
with diet, exercise, medicine, and sleep, much can be done to ameliorate the
effects of this genetic dynamic duo.
* * *
It’s a well-known phenomenon that
after positive life altering experiences, people feel gratitude and
appreciation to a degree they have never before experienced. Many are skeptical of this bit of mysticism, but I’ve found it endures.
I’ve always thought of myself as an
appreciative person, as one who tries to find the good, but I’ve never
experienced appreciation and gratitude so profoundly. I was surprised that
through all of this, I had cried only once. This was unusual for me, as I’ll
tear up over moments of beauty even more readily than moments of distress.
The only time I had come to tears
was in the hospital when it was suspected I was having internal bleeding from
my femoral artery. My soft-spoken nurse, Naveen, became a general. He ordered
me to bed. Alarms sounded, lights flashed, an emergency team rushed in. False
alarm, but those few tears were tears of abject fear.
I kept waiting for the dam to
burst.
Part 5
Man with a Mohawk
I enrolled in a three-month,
three-day-a-week cardiac rehabilitation program at Swedish. Even saying the
name of the program was difficult for me at first, but as I passed through the
halls of this venerable hospital, I came to appreciate my good fortune.
One afternoon, as I stood in line
at the hospital’s Starbucks, a young women wheeled in her beau. He
was a strapping man, perhaps 27, and to see someone so strong and healthy in a
wheelchair looked incongruous. His distinctive look was defined by a tall
Mohawk.
One side of his scalp was
punctuated by a large, Z-shaped scar. I can only imagine the conversation. “How
can we operate on his brain and preserve his magnificent Mohawk at the same
time?”
Grace comes in many forms.
I looked at his partner and then at
him. He and I looked each other in the eye and nodded.
I think of him
every
day.
On a dank January evening, I drove home
from the cardiac class along 12th Avenue on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.
A young father was trying to beat the 6:00pm pickup deadline at his child’s
daycare across the street. I stopped mid-block in rush hour traffic, and a
driver from the other lane took my cue. The young father looked at me as though
he had just been given a reprieve.
A bashful smile, a gentle wave -
then he dashed across.
Perhaps it’s easier to give
reprieves - no matter how small - when you’ve been given one yourself.
Two weeks after my life-altering
procedure, it was Thanksgiving.
No kidding.
Giving thanks was never like this.
Part 6
Seeking Sieg
I took Uncle Walter’s advice and majored in history. The writing bug,
however, never left.
I wrote one-third of the 1976 Olympic Trials Souvenir Program and never had
more fun than covering events for its daily supplement. Who knew that Bruce
Jenner stories would have such traction almost four decades later?
Through the late 70s, I wrote race reports and athlete profiles for the
World Publications tabloid, On the Run.
My big break was supposed to have been a cover story on Gerry Lindgren, but the
paper folded a week before my deadline. I still have 85 pages of transcripts of
interviews with the Sparrow as well as his coach, Tracy Walters.
The Stinky Foot, Lindgren’s legendary Tacoma running store, was where I
conducted three interviews with him. When I returned to clarify several details,
he had famously disappeared.
Work took over as my history teaching career took a surprising turn into
athletics administration and a policy making role in Washington State high
school athletics.
It was Don Kardong who said after the ’76 Olympics that he wanted to find a
job that would allow him to continue to train at a high level, and so he got a
job teaching.
He wondered why his mileage fell to 20 miles a week.
So it was with my writing.
* *
*
The day before the ’76 men’s Olympic Trials marathon, I sat in a meeting room in race headquarters in Eugene. I was not introduced
to the men on either side of me until this impromptu gathering was over.
A fairly animated discussion took
place: with Frank Shorter and Billy Rodgers heavy favorites for the first two
spots on the Olympic team, who would take the third? It took a long time to get
a word in, but finally I said, “Don Kardong,” and they all turned and looked at
me.
Why Kardong?
“Because he has the best balance of
distance strength and track speed in the field. If he’s close to third at 20
miles, watch out.”
That got interested nods and
murmurs of, “OK, we’ll watch for him, too.”
Kardong was fourth at 20 miles and
took coveted third by 56 seconds over his Stanford teammate, Tony Sandoval.
To my left was Joe Henderson,
editor of Runner’s World magazine, and to my right, the voluble coach of the
Greater Boston Track Club, Billy Squires.
Henderson graciously told this
story in his Runner’s World report on
the race, concluding with, “Kardong wasn’t even on my list, which shows how
much I know.”
The 1988 Seoul Olympics took place
in late September and early October. I had entered the Track and Field News
Olympic prediction contests several times before, but this time I was coaching
cross country and decided I’d show my runners there was more to the sports
world than Michael Jordan.
What was intended as a thumbnail
sketch of each event turned into a preview of all 47, with an explanation of
each of my medal picks. Twenty-four pages later, I was finished. This became a
quadrennial exercise and in 2012, I posted it online. My website, Trackerati, was born.
* * *
Summer of 2013. Early July. Nine months
after my greatest trial. I was beginning to find my stride again.
As I parked in the neighborhood near
Swangard Stadium in Burnaby, British Columbia, for the Harry Jerome Classic, I
pulled in behind Canadian Olympian and national javelin champion, Curtis Moss,
and at the end of the meet he invited me to join him and his coach for dinner.
We were joined by other coaches and
athletes, and it turned into one of those memorable track and field evenings
when people who have never met bond through our common language. I told his
coach about my fledgling website, and he emailed me a few days later to say
that a press pass was waiting for me for that Saturday’s Victoria International
Classic.
So it was that the great Canadian
coach, Don Steen, Dad of ’88 Olympic decathlon bronze medalist, Dave, got me my
first press pass since the ‘76 Olympic Trials – a brief interlude of 37 years.
I thought to send a link to my
article about the Canadian meets to Track
and Field News, and much to my delight, they posted it in the left hand
column, “Today’s Headlines,” for the world – well, my world – to see.
It was exhilarating. For the first
time, I began to find joy again, and going to the two Canadian meets revived
me.
Hours after the Victoria meet my
elderly Dad suffered a massive, disabling stroke.
Even though he was in Maine and I
in Seattle, I kept long-distance vigil through the summer and did not venture
far from home.
I took up race walking, of a sort,
and twice traveled to Portland to work with a coach. She marveled at my lack of
flexibility: my true physical inability to master the style after many years of
running in a straight line.
Undaunted, I entered a 5k and was
delighted to make my goal of breaking 12:00 per mile pace my first time out.
This earned me 8th out of 8 in my age group, tough company when it’s
the Bowerman Athletic Club 5k on the Nike campus in Beaverton.
At the beginning of August I felt
that biennial tug and arrived in Moscow for the last seven days of my seventh World
Championships. I pledged to write every day, and kept in touch with Sieg
Lindstrom, Track and Field News’ Managing Editor, with whom I’d struck up a correspondence after the Canadian
meets.
T+FN
is certainly the most prominent track and field resource in the United States
and, with Great Britain’s Athletics
Weekly, one of two key sites in the world. Far more than the track and
field world tunes in during World and Olympic championships, and the T+FN center column, “The Day’s Best
Reading,” has achieved holy grail status among track writers.
It’s hard for me to understate the
importance of this publication in my life. I’ve read it since my days at
Oregon, and several times I’ve joined their tours to World and Olympic
Championships. Through these I have made more friends than I can count, most
especially the track and field family I affectionately call “my posse,” whom I
first met in Sevilla in 1999, the very same night I met Trine Hattestad, in the
very same place.
The Moscow tour stayed in several
hotels and, knowing my posse, I registered at one of them in the hope of
finding them there. I wrote Sieg to let him know I’d made it and asked where he was staying. We were all at the same hotel.
I put the word out that I’d like to
meet Sieg and the result became almost comical.
Every morning at breakfast: have
you found Sieg yet? No.
One of the tour staffers, Lloyd,
became my seeking-Sieg general, and every day he said some version of ‘but he
was just here!’ I hadn’t seen a photo of Sieg, but I’m convinced that at some
point he and I were mere feet from each other.
One evening I did a sunset trek to
Red Square and retraced the route I took with 23 students on a bitterly cold
January night in 1986.
I sat ringside in an outdoor
restaurant and watched the human parade.
I was startled by what sounded like
boots with metallic toes marching on the rocks of Red Square. Images of a
bygone era came to mind. I jumped, expecting the military, and instead saw a
young woman go by in six-inch heels, a form of intimidation altogether
different than the kind favored by previous dictators.
Or not.
Christmas carols have always held
deep resonance for me, and suddenly over the restaurant’s sound system came the
haunting melody of one of my favorites, “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.” I was
touched by the image of the resilient rose blooming, against all odds, in the
midst of winter.
It’s one thing to know this may be
the last time I’ll have a night like this, I thought. It’s quite another to
know I might never have had it at all.
*
* *
On Friday of the World Championships, I decide to head to Luzhniki Stadium
for the morning sessions to see what they have to offer. I used to attend these
religiously, but came to feel at the end of each Worlds I had only skimmed the
host city.
This morning it’s the shape of the sunlight that captures my attention. On
one of my color-coded index cards, I jot down “Teardrop of Sunlight,” and four
hours later post an article by that name.
At midnight I return to my hotel
from post-meet festivities with my posse and fire up my ten-year-old laptop.
Remarkable how seamlessly it works here in the land of comcast.nyet.
There’s a message from my longtime
dear friend and teaching colleague, Sue Patella, and Supa asks if I’ve seen the
front page of the Track and Field News
website.
I hurry to the site and scroll up
and down the left side. The absence of my article surprises me just a little,
it apparently having dropped off already. I’d noted before that material comes
in so quickly during major meets that a posting might not stay there long, but
even this seems quick to me.
But I do understand; after all,
it’s Friday of the World Championships.
My eye drifts to top of the center column.
I burst into tears.
Part 7
A Ride for Robert
Ever since the addition of Friday’s
Distance Night in Eugene, I’ve done myself the favor of flying.
I’ve got this one down.
The 5:30pm nonstop from Seattle.
Arrive at 6:35, pick up the rental car, make a beeline to Hayward Field in time
for the men’s 10,000m at 7:50.
It’s 2013 and I’m in the waiting
area at Sea-Tac Airport.
I’m on the phone with my nephew,
George, who has just graduated from college. He and a buddy are at Crater Lake
as part of a national parks tour that is so similar to the one I did when I
graduated that I wonder what else is genetic.
A shadow passes.
“George,” I whisper, almost a hiss.
“George,” I say even more
insistently.
“Uncle Mark?”
“Robert Harting just walked by.”
“Who’s Robert Harting?”
“The Olympic and three-time World
champion in the discus. He must be on my plane to Eugene.”
George cracks up. He knows how
important this is to me.
“I’m going to introduce myself to
him and hope that I embarrass myself as little as possible.”
“Well, Uncle Mark, good luck with
that.”
And so I tell Robert Harting what
it was like to be in the stadium that night.
When you pick up a rental car at
Mahlon Sweet Airport in Eugene – it must do something good for the soul to
always come home to a place called Mahlon Sweet – there’s only one way out. The
exit funnels you past the airport’s main entrance.
There looms Robert, busily
consulting his phone, looking up and down and seeming perplexed.
On my way out I had noted the
absence of a Nike limousine, and having learned, in fact, that you do live only
once, I pull over, roll down the window, and say, “Robert, may I offer you a
ride to your hotel?”
He peers in and it takes a moment
to register.
“Yes. Thank you.”
I take, surprisingly, only one
wrong turn on a route I know well, and we are driving along the banks of the
Mackenzie River.
This man is not the man of the
shirt-ripping public persona the world knows. Here he is in person: quiet and
thoughtful, insightful and introspective.
Truly a gentle man.
I ask him of his interests beyond
the track, the travel, the business – he is, indeed, a corporation.
“Well,” he says, “I enjoy working
on my Masters - doing the research, reading, writing - I very much enjoy the
writing.”
“Well,” I ask, “what is your
topic?”
“The shoe.”
The single greatest accomplishment
of my life is that I did not drive into the Mackenzie River.
Startled, I explain my collection,
and he becomes animated. We agree that he’ll get in touch by email and I’ll
send him my inventory and notes. Later, I think of two books he might like as
well. He doesn’t have a card, but I give him mine.
Friends are skeptical. “Do you
really think you’ll hear from him?”
“Yes,” I answer with calm
assurance.
It’s remarkable how well you can
come to know someone in a short period of time. He is a man of honor and I’m
quite sure I’ll hear back.
Later that evening, Keninisa
Bekele, the greatest male distance runner of the last decade, jogs his victory
lap at Hayward Field. I extend paper and pen and the following week present his
autograph to a twelve year old student of mine whose family is from Ethiopia.
Standing next to me as I encounter
Mr. Bekele is the photographer, Marty Stitsel, a Seattle-area running
compatriot from the ‘70s, who invites me to join him for dinner. I’m sitting
two down from Doris Brown Heritage, five-time world cross country champion and
women’s distance running pioneer.
As I walk back to my hotel, I
wonder if I should just leave now, as a weekend which begins with Robert,
Keninisa, and Doris is clearly not going to get any better. I stay for the
Prefontaine Classic the next day anyway, the universe having twisted my arm.
Three weeks later, my inbox:
“Hi, Mark, this is Robert…”
Epilogue
Much of my life has returned to
normal now, except that at work, people assess what’s on my plate every time I
eat. Challenging physical fitness activities have replaced lengthy naps. I’m sleeping
far better and even had the opportunity to celebrate an overuse injury.
Life is the same but normal is not.
Often I wonder how fast the plaque
built up the first time and when my fight to slow it, and its inevitable
return, will intersect. In my new world, tick-tick-tick is not always the sound
of my heartbeat.
Nonetheless, I more than take joy
in being here, at my remarkable luck at having walked in to have this addressed,
and long I will wonder how I can possibly adequately thank Wes VanHooser.
My joy and excitement about the
possible are back. After all, I’m here to experience them and awake and alert
enough to appreciate them. I started writing again and just wish I could let
Professor Hulteng know. I missed him by one year.
Meeting Robert at the end of an
arduous year meant that magic still could happen - though, of course, the real
magic happened on an operating table at Swedish Hospital.
But to get there, sometimes a
different kind of magic is required: a guy named Wes breaks protocol and saves
your life.
* *
*
Today
is 364 days since I met Robert.
As
there is no men’s discus at the Prefontaine Classic this year,
I’ll
have to find another way of getting those books to him.
But
tomorrow I’ll fly to Eugene
You
just never know who’s going to be on that plane.
* * *
Link to "Teardrop of Sunlight"
http://www.trackerati.com/2013/08/teardrop-of-sunlight.html
Link to "Tribute to My Posse"
http://www.trackerati.com/2013/10/tribute-to-my-posse.html
copyright 2015 by Mark Cullen. All rights reserved.
* * *
Link to "Teardrop of Sunlight"
http://www.trackerati.com/2013/08/teardrop-of-sunlight.html
Link to "Tribute to My Posse"
http://www.trackerati.com/2013/10/tribute-to-my-posse.html
copyright 2015 by Mark Cullen. All rights reserved.
