Reflections

Those are the days you look back on 20 years later and wish you could go back to. Memorable people and faces that will stay with you in your memories and that will come back to you in your dreams years later.
When I was 21 and had dreams of becoming a serious runner I started running at Pt. Defiance with a group of older runners. Every Sunday morning a group of 15-20 of the top runners in the Tacoma area would gather in the parking lot in Pt Defiance park to rip through 3 loops of the hilly 5 mile trail circuit.
The who’s who of the local running world would show up every Sunday. Sometimes an out of town celebrity would join us. Once it was Pat Tyson. Once it was a 13:?? minute 5K runner from Stanford. Even the legendary Steve Prefontaine ran there back in the days. But the core of the group was the local runners who I looked up to. There was John S. The Boeing employee who was the father figure that we all looked up to. He was tough and cool like most of us certainly weren’t. There was the local hero Leon. He was the runner we all wanted to be. Long black hair with a never tiring stride, winner of everything winnable in the area, a runner with so much potential. Mike the playboy, who entertained us with his tails of conquest at a time when I understood about 50% of what he was saying. Ernie the Coca Cola dealer, Gerry the teacher, Larry the Viet Nam vet all of whom I looked up to. They were the people that taught me what it was to be a man, to be an adult and that getting older wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The pace would always start slow but gradually it would pick up until I was struggling just to hang with the group. Each week I would get dropped but slowly the length of time I could stay with them was longer. After many months of getting left behind each week, I was finally able to stay with them. I still remember the feeling of sprinting through the trails, running as hard as I could and feeling the power in my body. It is a feeling I still hope for, a feeling of power that made it all worth it
I look back on those days 25 years ago as one of the best periods of my life. I was poor, had a indefinite future but I had the comraderie and connection to friends, something that never happened with the same intensity or quality.