"Most people run a race to see who is fastest. I run a race to see who has the most guts." -Steve Prefontaine
When I was a little kid, cystic fibrosis scared the hell out
of me. Imagine reading in an encyclopedia that you weren’t supposed to see your
25th birthday. Now imagine finding this out when you’re not even
a teenager. It was beyond scary.
My Uncle Bobby, who bravely married into our family around
that time, played the role of my coach and cystic fibrosis’s biggest adversary.
He trained me to run 1k and 5k road races. The training regimen improved my
health. Instead of not being able to complete laps in PE every single day, I
was now finishing amongst the top tier of runners in my grade. That year, I won most
improved athlete in the fourth grade. That award sounds like winning "Most Likely to Succeed" in a high school yearbook but I promise you that award still stands out
as a moment of clarity for me. It showed me that with tireless effort,
overachievement was possible. I also began to realize that defying the odds felt
damn good.
Uncle Bobby at one of his last Peachtree's
Still I made every excuse I could think of not to run the
most famous 10k in the United States. I just couldn’t get my head around running
6.2 miles. That was running 25 quarter-mile laps around the Peachtree High
School track where Bobby and I spent hours training.
Bobby didn’t take to my pity especially being that he’d run
the race for years. He had a drawer full of the legendary Peachtree T-shirts.
He soon began teasing me that I would never be able to earn the legendary shirt
because I didn’t have the strength mentally to run the race. He would try to
add fuel to the fire by calling me every year after the race to ask me how he
looked on TV while earning another shirt. As my running days subsided and I
stopped wanting to train with my uncle, his post-race calls faded and eventually
stopped. It wasn’t until I finished college that I realized that my lungs didn’t
stop me from running the Peachtree Road Race.
My head did.
All I wanted was one of these.
On July 4, 1997, with my uncle by my side, I ran and
completed my first Peachtree Road Race...and I was soon hooked.
Tomorrow morning marks 19 years from that day and will be the 20th consecutive time that I run those hilly 6.2 miles on America’s Independence Day. Sadly, because Bobby's last Peachtree was in 2012, I’ll be doing it without my ruthless coach beside me. Uncle Bobby is alive and well but his body told him it was time to stop running…his nephew did not.
Therefore he should be expecting a post-race call tomorrow from his former running mate, who will be adding a 20th Peachtree Road Race T-shirt to his own drawer.
Hey, a little teasing never hurt anyone…heck, it probably saved my life.
Thanks Uncle Bobby! Let me know how I look on TV!
I run this race without him now but he's still busting my chops in spirit.
