Free Marathon Man by Bill Rodgers

including my brother-in-law. They would tell me: “Your dad was a great teacher. He changed my life.” I didn’t know of this kind of thing. My dad was not a bragging kind of guy. He had strong opinions, for sure, but he shied away from talking about himself. I suppose a lot of fathers were like that back then.
    While I got my rambunctious energy from my mom’s side, I had a quiet persistence, which came from my father’s side of the family. Our paternal history traces back to a seventeenth-century bagpiper from Crieff named Patrick Rogie. The ancestor who came over to the New World from Scotland was a Protestant minister and a medical doctor. He went out and settled in the woods of Virginia. He educated all his sons. They became good writers and readers. Many of my father’s colonial ancestors attended college in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think there was any braggart stuff going on back then—you did the job and that’s all. Charlie and I descended from these tough, hard-working, and quiet Scottish people.
    I remember my dad taking Charlie and me down to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University to show us just how far along we’d evolved as humans. But seeing the diorama of cavemen bursting into a high-speed footrace to chase down their prey, I knew my need to move was nothing new. We were meant to move. We were meant to run. We had been for thousands of years.
    My father was also fascinated with flying—Charles Lindbergh, World War II airplanes, the aviation industry. He grew up building remote-control planes and sometimes he would take us out with him to fly his plane. In some ways, his thinking was very nuts and bolts, but he also had a larger worldview. He passed that on to Charlie and me—a certain sense that anything is possible, that you could do anything.
    Open, friendly, easygoing, optimistic, spacey—I would say that I shared all these attributes with my father. Charlie would always say, “Dad’s off in quasar land again.” I guess that I, too, was prone to getting lost in the clouds. Once, I remember playing some game out in the front yard with Charlie, Jason, and a few other neighborhood kids, and I said, “Well, I’m going to go in and use the bathroom.”
    They were all waiting outside for me to return so they could resume the game. A good amount of time passed by. “Where the hell’s Bill?” everybody asked. Finally, Charlie went in the house and walked upstairs, and there he found me lying on the bed, reading a book. I’d completely forgotten about the game.
    My dad and mom were not too happy with all the trouble I conjured up for myself as a kid. I was lucky to have good, loving parents. They showed a lot of patience with me—and they sure needed it. Then one day Charlie, Jason, and I joined the track team. We were no longer Lost Boys running wild in the woods. We returned to school new men. We were runners. And once I found running, everything changed. Imagine pouring water on the ground. Goes all over the place, right? Pour that water into a channel and suddenly you have a stream and then a river and then a raging, powerful body of water that can’t be stopped. Running was my channel and I poured myself into it full force.
    While I was a productive member of the Wesleyan cross-country and track team, I didn’t train nearly as hard as I did in high school. I wasn’t like Amby, living by the “devote everything to your running” creed. I’d go out partying with my buddies on weekend nights and get back at around four in the morning. As I carefully crept into the dorm room, I’d know that Amby had been asleep since 9:30.
    While I saw two days without classes as an excuse to party, Amby saw it as an opportunity to get in longer runs. The notion of sleeping in Sunday morning was as absurd to Amby as, well, me waking up early on God’s day of rest to go on a little