Boston Waits

March 16, 2020

Greetings from a new start,

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Charles Darwin

This week has been crowded with change; few have been spared from the waves of disruption around the world.  Even as I watch the morning get lighter, I am aware that today will bring more challenges.  Some are inconveniences, some are tragedies.

I hesitated to write about my tiny slice in this, since in the spectrum of events cascading around us, it may seem frivolous in comparison.  But this this morning I realized that the disruption is not the story, the response is.

For a couple weeks now I have been adamantly, piously, insisting that the Boston Marathon would not be cancelled.  My position had been forged by experience, that the marathon, and all of us who are connected to it, were a force greater than virus or violence or politics.  (Some history)  It wasn’t until last week that I felt a thin crack in my own conviction.  On Friday the crack widened to allow reality to pour in.  I watched with the rest of my running community as the BAA announced the marathon would be postponed. 

I didn’t fully acknowledge how disappointed I was until late Friday when I realized how gloomy, and irascible, I had been feeling.  I was explaining to someone that Boston had been postponed and it came out angrier than I expected.  I knew the arc I was on was going to lead to self-pity and resentment and that feeling of helplessness, of being a victim of circumstance.

I’m human, my response was human, albeit a five-year-old human.  I gallomped around on Friday, muttering in my head about travel cancellations and scattered training plans, and bad coffee and whatever else got in my way. 

The next morning I went for a run, cleared my head, and allowed the right response, the healthier adaptation, to appear.  I made my way into the woods, stood on a bluff looking over the river, and let the light pour into me.  I leaned on the bark of a tree and felt strength, felt resilience, felt myself changing.  What I felt, you will recognize, was hope.  

The spirit of the Boston Marathon is the same that unites humanity against any force that would make us smaller than what we were made for.  It is what gives us the desire and the strength to stand up again and again, to deal with pain, to push back against challenges.  It is what provides the unshakable drive that allows us to adapt. 

In 2001, the runner/writer John Bingham traveled with a group to Antarctica to run ‘The Last Marathon’.  After months of training, nearly a week of travel, the runners arrived off the coast of King George Island.  And there they were stranded because of gale force storms, pelting the world with ice and snow. After a few days of trying to get ashore, the race was cancelled.  As John said: “That might be the end of the story, if this had been a group of normal people. But, these were runners.”

And so, on the frozen deck of the ship, these strange, determined souls, ran hundreds and hundreds of laps in the snow and punishing winds.  The ship tossed and pitched, and they held on to the railings and then kept running.  They ran their marathon.  They adapted.

For those of you who don’t run, you may wonder what to do with this story.  I’m hoping you already see some possibility.  What we have to learn from John, and from our neighbors who are already forming their Plan B in this turbulent time, is that simplest of philosophies; it is not what happens to us that determines our quality of life, it is what we do with it.

The Boston Athletic Association has decided to postpone the marathon until September 14.  I will be there, and it will be amazing.  I now have six more months to be ready.  But what to do with this body now?  What about this momentum I have already built, the miles already logged, the training cycle which is just now peaking?   

I’m going to run the Boston Marathon on April 20, as planned.  Well, not quite as planned.  I am going to run it here at home, a Virtual Boston.   I’ll use the miles I’ve invested, fulfill the desire I have forged these last months.  I will make the best of the day with the best I have in me.  

For those of you who run, I am extending you an invitation to run Boston with me on April 20.  Wherever you are, we can run as a community.  If you live nearby and want to run all, or part, of my Virtual Boston, you are welcome to join me.  If you want to know more, email me at mondaymoanin@gmail.com and I’ll share the plans as they come together.

If you don’t run, you can cheer us on.  You are part of the energy we need to accomplish this. 

This outlandish idea is not what matters; the running will be awesome, but it is only a sample to give you to use in your circumstance.  If it hasn’t already, this latest crisis will interrupt your world in some way.  What happens after that, what you do to respond and adapt, is what will matter.  It is the theme of your life.  Things will come along to rain chaos on us; we need to be prepared with a philosophy that will outlast it, and so no matter the disruption, we are living a rich and satisfying life.  Our best life.

Hope this finds you embracing change,

David

Copyright © 2020 David Smith