He ran in Hush Puppies, the casual dress shoes with heels. There were no shoes with swooshes, no running apparel stores or even running shorts back then. When my late father went for a run, he wore plaid Bermuda shorts, old T-shirts with holes in them and a floppy fisherman’s hat.
Running wasn’t popular in the late 1960s. Olympic athletes ran, not fitness buffs. My father ran because his doctor told him it would lower his blood pressure and he would live longer.
My father’s time as a runner was brief, but it tied us like a double knot on your shoelaces. Because he ran, I ran, and the sport became our common ground, the thing that we could talk about that was ours. Father to son, son to father.
I should think of him on Father’s Day, but I don’t. Instead, I think of him when I see middle-age runners.
A lot of the time he ran at night, so no one would see him. There was a long oval of homes in our Enchanted Lake neighborhood that my family called “The Block.” It was almost a half-mile around, so it took two laps, a sprint past a few more houses and you had run a mile.
That was my father’s favorite distance, and he would pad silently around the block in the dark.
Sometimes he ran on the golf course behind our house. Our home was on the 12th hole of Mid-Pacific Country Club, and my father would make a big looping circuit on the macadam paths that wove through the course’s fairways and hills. One night he announced his return by saying, “It looks a lot worse than it is.” He had stumbled at the top of a hill, rolled to the bottom and run home bleeding from his face, arms and knees.
When he ran around The Block, I would ride my bike alongside him. He always told me I was going too fast, and I could usually hear the labored breathing when he spoke.
I had it in my mind that he could run faster, and when he let me I would time him. I had a Caravelle watch, and in order to time his mile, I had to pull the set-pin when the second hand stopped at 12 and then adjust the hour and minute hands to an even position. When it was time to go, I just pressed the pin. A quick pull stopped the watch.
One night my father set out at a fast clip around the block, the Caravelle ticking away with every stride. He was really moving that night, faster than he had ever run. His breathing was more like a locomotive on a straightaway than that of a man struggling to push himself. He powered through the first lap without slowing down much.
With one turn remaining before the final row of houses to the finish, he told me he couldn’t do it. It was too hard. I said nothing and he kept running. When I pulled the pin to stop my watch, he had run his mile in a personal best of 6:35. It was faster by nearly two minutes than he had ever run and faster than he would ever run again.
I remember him walking off the effort, hands on the back of his hips, breathing in gasps. I told him it was amazing, and he smiled.
His effort, hidden by the night and seen only by his oldest son, wasn’t something that was shared at home. Neither my siblings nor my mother would care anyway. They’ve never heard the story.
This was ours alone.
Father to son, son to father.
Reach Mike Gordon at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.
