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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday July 16, 2001 Volume III Number 29 |
FOCUS - Marathon
Just the word calls up feelings of exhaustion. Marathon. There’s a specific definition of the term – the twenty six mile race that is the Grand Finale of the Summer Olympic Games every four years. The Marathon.
But then there is the more general definition. We use it in every day speech as an adjective basically to say – it’s impossible. It went on forever. It was a marathon. A marathon meeting. A marathon exam. A marathon sermon. A marathon project. A marathon work-day. A marathon planning session.
We all know what it means. Grueling. Relentless. Interminable. Unremitting. Exhausting. Punishing. Merciless.
All those things apply when one instructs his or her body to run twenty-six miles. There’s no mistaking it, it’s a monumental achievement. And when the Greeks stunned the world, including themselves, by defeating the Persians in 490 BC one unnamed soldier spawned a legend by running the distance from the battlefield in a place called Marathon all the way to the City of Athens to bring the news of victory. Even then, the forty kilometers, or approximately twenty-five miles, was considered a colossal feat. It became the standard for a competition in the original Olympic Games of the Greeks for the next six hundred years.
Tradition tells us that the Greeks competed in Olympia for over a thousand years. From the very beginning of recorded history, Grecians held organized athletic competitions every four years. The winner’s lists, the recorded names of Olympic champions, go back nearly eight hundred years BC. The games continued until the Romans conquered the Greeks in 200 BC. For over a thousand years prior to that great defeat, the winners of Olympic competitions gained special privileges in Greek society as political leaders, land barons and honored citizens. Parents raised their sons (only men were allowed to compete and attend the games) in hopes of Olympic glory as a means of insuring a lifetime of economic security.
A twenty-four year old Frenchman, Pierre, baron de Coubertin, a young scholar and educator, was commissioned by the French government to form an international, universal sports association just before the turn of the twentieth century. He first conceived of the notion of reviving the ancient Olympic Games as a way to bring together all the nations in a grand celebration of athletic competition. He believed that sportsmanship was a training ground for international co-operation and peaceful co-existence. He traveled throughout England and France and the United States. His youthful exuberance convinced some, but brought derision and skepticism from others.
When he made his first proposal in Paris to the French government in November of 1892, he challenged the delegates with these words -
“Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands. That is the true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced into Europe the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally. It inspires me to touch upon another step I now propose and in it I shall ask that the help you have given me hitherto you will extend again, so that together we may attempt to realize, upon a basis suitable to the conditions of our modern life, the splendid and beneficent task of reviving the Olympic Games.”
The assembly voted to approve his proposal. In the United States, he won over the President of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and a prominent Greek businessman Dimítrios Vikélas, and together in 1894 they formed an international committee of seventy-nine delegates from nine countries, and enthusiasm mounted. In recognition of the initial investment of the French, the committee scheduled the first competition to be held six years later in Paris. But when someone suggested that the games be held in Athens four years sooner, the committee embraced the grand significance of the thought, and there was unanimous support.
In 1896, the First Olympiad of the Modern Era took the world by storm from its historic epicenter, Athens.
Let the games begin.
* * * * * * *
When our middle daughter announced as a high school freshman that she wanted to run cross-country, well, we reacted in stunned disbelief.
This was the girl who needed the most prodding to join us on the family hikes and bike-rides. And then when she did join us, en route, I would frequently say, “OK Candy, let’s keep it going…” and Carolyn would corner me and offer a little suggestion: “Ken, let her explore, it’s good for her.” I was the typical male of the species in those days, a man on a mission. It was my foreordained role, I thought, to keep the family moving towards the finish line. Candy liked stopping along the way to enjoy the sights, watch a butterfly or pick some wild flowers. For some reason, her mother approved of such distractions, while I, The Dad, goaded and barked working the caravan, urging one and all to roll ahead in some semblance of forward motion.
If I could somehow go back to those Sunday afternoon bike hikes with that little brown-eyed girl I think I would spend more time chasing those butterflies and sniffing those wild flowers and less time cracking the verbal whip.
Maybe, if God so chooses to bless, I’ll have another chance… with the grandkids (?).
Those of us who share the same gene pool have taken pride in our thick strong thighs, good for lifting and pushing, and climbing hills. Things like that. Those thunder thighs of mine always gave me a handy excuse to finish toward the back of the pack. Lag behind in the wind sprints. No one has ever linked our family DNA with speed or distance for that matter. But Candy showed us that genetics do not necessarily limit performance. In fact, with training and determination and coaching, even the least likely can rise to the top.
I’ll never forget the day I went to Candy’s first cross country meet. She was barely fifteen, warming up and stretching like she meant business. It was a three-point-one-mile race, and at mile one, I stood with the other parents waiting for the front-runners to appear from around the bend. The first two were expected to lead the pack, but when Candy came round in third, I jumped up and down like a cheerleader, threw my head back and laughed uproariously, then shouted some kind of enthusiastic encouragement that certainly must have caused the other parents to wag their heads in disgust, but frankly, I was too pre-occupied to notice.
I broke into a run myself. I wanted to be there at mile two to confirm what my heart told me I had seen with my own two eyes but my head told me must have been an impossible hallucination. And sure enough, there at mile two, she held her position, and was pulling up on numbers one and two.
It took me about three days to settle down. The idea that my own flesh and blood could possibly be considered a speedster and a distance runner was more than I could process.
So I’ve watched my daughter run. And then her older sister got interested, too. Years later, approaching her wedding day, our older married daughter challenged her younger sister Candy to train for the greatest challenge of her running career.
One month before her marriage… was the San Francisco Marathon.
Twenty-six miles.
* * * * * *
In the last twenty-five years or so in our American social evolution we’ve seen a quantum leap in human physical achievement. We have iron man competitions, and Guiness Book of World Record feats that stagger the imagination. Just look at some old footage of professional basketball or football from the sixties, and the major leagues look like the minors in comparison to today’s high-level competition.
The bodies are bigger and stronger and quicker. Kinesiologists and personal trainers and fitness technologies and high tech nutrition have produced super human performers. Children start early, and by the second or third grade coached by hopeful parents, are taking the road to stardom.
All that considered, the Marathon remains as an ultimate test of human endurance.
No one knows exactly how far that unnamed soldier ran from Marathon to Athens to report the Grecian victory over the Persians. But it was about twenty five miles.
To this day, record times on the Olympics are not recorded in the annals of Olympic history for the Marathon, because the conditions vary from city to city. And in the first Olympic games competition, the Marathon race was set at about twenty-five miles. It wasn’t until the British Committee ran the games in London in 1908 that the standard was set. The Marathon run went from its start at the Windsor Castle all the way to the Royal Box in the London Olympic Stadium – a precise distance of forty-two thousand one hundred ninety-five meters, or twenty-six miles three hundred eighty five yards. The Committee recognized that standard at the 1924 Games. To this day, every Marathon is set exactly that distance.
The first Boston Marathon was run shortly after the first Olympic Games. Every year, since its inaugural run in 1897, the Boston Marathon has attracted athletes from all over the world, many of them Olympic hopefuls.
The San Francisco Chronicle Marathon of 2001 stands in that Grand Tradition.
* * * * * * *
The alarm went off at 4:30AM Sunday morning. We had three runners in sleeping bags in our host’s beach house in Half Moon Bay.
They’d been training for nearly six months. We loaded up the truck, and as day broke, there was excitement in the air.
Candy would run the full twenty-six. Her brother’s girlfriend, Sonya would run the first thirteen alongside Candy. Then, half way through the race, Kristyn would take the tag from Sonya, and finish the final thirteen miles.
At the starting line, several thousand runners gathered in the early morning mist. San Francisco skies were gray, typical of this time of year with plenty of low clouds and coastal fog. Mercifully for the runners, the air was cool, and a light breeze meant that the runners would not overheat.
Candy said, “Dad, I know what you’re thinking. I don’t want any pep talks, or Dad talks. I’ve gotta get my head ready for running.”
I’ve got preaching in my blood. I went to seminary. I write LeaderFOCUS every week. Pep talks… that’s what I do. Sermons. They just flow. All I need is a listener. I’d been thinkin’ this one through for a long time, I had some great lines together in my head… you know, the kind that give you goose bumps, bring a tear to your eye… how could she NOT want to hear one or two of my moving and clever phrases at this fine and memorable moment in parenting?
Carolyn gave me one of those looks… “Don’t worry about it. She still loves you. She just knows what you are going to say. You don’t need to say it. Let her be.”
So I watched quietly from the sidelines, along with a couple thousand other observers in about the same physical condition as myself, watching the runners with that look in the eye of what once was or what might have been, content to sip a hot Starbucks while standing on the curb as someone else pummeled him or herself on the pavement of the streets of San Francisco.
I pointed my camera.
The gun went off.
And as she and Sonya ran by, they smiled, and waved.
The crowd cheered.
* * * * * *
We were there for mile six. Alcatraz off on the Bay in the distance. She and Sonya both looked strong. And at mile thirteen, Candy passed, determined, focused. A short time afterward, Sonya crossed her own finish line, something she’d never done in her life… thirteen miles straight without stopping.
Kristyn took the tag, and started off on her thirteen-mile journey through the streets of San Francisco. They passed through Golden Gate Park, and under the Bridge and over to Fisherman’s Wharf and up the hills, back to the park. And then along the strand at mile twenty-one we waited, and along came Candy and her sister Kris and Kris’ husband, Ben.
Candy was hurting. Never before had she ventured this far as a runner. Runners tell you about “hitting the wall.” Candy’s wall was hit. But with fire in her eyes, she just kept on running, one step at a time.
At the finish line, one by one, runners
crossed over. Weary.
Bent over. One
collapsed. And as Candy came
across, she seemed surprisingly strong, and enormously relieved.
This feeling of pride rolled over me like that day as a high school
sophomore she finished third in the Varsity race.
She did it.
Twenty-six miles. And still standing.
I held her tight. She was sweaty and shivering from exhaustion. And then she asked…
“Been drinkin’ Starbucks, Dad?”
* * * * * *
It’s Monday morning, and you are a leader running your own personal marathon.
You may remember those who didn’t think you could do it. You’ve already proven them wrong. You know you could have worked harder to prepare yourself… but in spite of the gaps in your preparation, you’re still doin’ pretty well.
But it’s a long road. You keep thinking about how nice it would be to cross the finish line. But at every turn, it seems the road stretches out even further than you had imagined, so you find your pace, and one foot follows the other. You keep it going.
I hope you’ve got some support… some people who believe in you. Encourage you onward. Remind you that you’ve got what it takes.
But even with that support, a marathon is really a lonely run. Unless you are one of the few hard-core athletes who’ve got a shot at finishing first, you are really one of the crowd. There are some in front, and some behind. But you’re not lost. You know where you are going. You are running against yourself… and the clock.
Life really is a marathon.
We’re in it together.
Keep your pace.
Every step counts.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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