I think it's amazing that my father has kept detailed records of his running over the years. He has meticulously documented the races, places, times, and ranks of his finishes, as well as the workouts he ran daily. I drove to my parents' house one day to interview him again and he produced a series of binders, one for each decade going back to 1980. In these binders, he organized each month into a section, and within each divided section was a carefully written calendar of running and days of rest. I'll admit that I consider myself to be a bit on the obsessive-compulsive side of organization, but this calendar; the pristine penmanship, the highlighted names of races, the route of each workout, and the clear record of time for each run, I was shocked! He'd been keeping records all of my life and I'd never known about it, never even seen the binders. I felt like I was seeing my father through new eyes and connecting dots between our two personalities that I'd never noticed before.
We happened to be sitting on the back deck of my parent's house that day, the house I grew up in, where they have lived for over forty years. My father and his best friend, Bill Finkbeiner built the entire deck with their own four hands and it is a sort of sanctuary my parents regularly enjoy. From there, you can see the rolling hills of El Dorado, Placerville, Ione, and Jackson; on clear days, you can see the Sierra Nevada mountain range. What was at one time supposed to be a dam and a lake is instead a sprawling carpet of pine and oak. On the rolling hills, houses are few and far between, and most of them, you can only see at nighttime when their lights flicker and dance between dense trees. During the days at the beginning of winter, the fog can tumble and dance its way through the valley and tiptoe to the edges of that deck.
This particular day was clear and warm, and we sat together peacefully. I think a flood of memories passed through my father's mind while he flipped through the pages of those binders. He reviewed them with a kind of reverence and I presume, a bit of awe that he had run all those miles. I tried to stay quiet, not my strong suit, but after a short while I absolutely had to know why he had kept those binders for so many years.
"Initially," he said, "I had gotten fat, marital bliss can do that to you. I knew myself well enough to know that I wouldn't do anything about it unless I wrote down what I thought could be a sustainable goal. So, I decided to write down that I would run an average of five miles per day for a year." I was gawking at that because he made it seem so reasonable, but that sounds hard to me! Really hard! He further explained,
"We all make new year's resolutions, and who keeps them? So, after being asked, and once I told someone my goal, I had to work to achieve it. It didn't start out as a binder, just a spreadsheet. Keeping track of those daily efforts towards meeting that goal was the only way to do be able to know the average." After the year had finished and he did in fact achieve his goal, the next year, the goal became, improvement. There was only one way that he could think of to organize the progress and improvement and so, the record sheets and binders were born. He made it sound like a simple a diary of his hobby, but it was more than that...I is more than that.
As a child, I remember the consistency. My father would run practically every day, rain or shine. He had his favorite loops around our neighborhood, had his running meet-ups with friends and running groups, and there were also the dumping days. I'll explain. My parents drove together to and from work most days, for years and years. My mother would pick up my dad from his office (only a mile from her own), he would change into running clothes in the car and somewhere along the drive, my mother would dump him. He would run the rest of the way home. These dump runs were somewhere around 5 to 16 miles depending on what kind of race he was training for, and he was always training for something.
I was never a part of my father's training, but I later found out that Pop had been. On the deck that day, he told me this great story. There was this one run that my father would do on Rock Creek Road where there was a gradual uphill from the start. Pop would drop him off, get himself a beverage and chat with whoever until about an hour was up and then drive out to meet my dad. My father had painted a rock and would, each time, try to move the rock further and further out to show the increase in his speed and distance that he could accomplish in that one hour. My grandfather would head out just beyond the rock each time and yell the seconds left of the hour as my father was running toward him.
Just try and imagine a dusty old cowboy in jeans and boots, with a soda can in one hand, stop watch in the other, yelling a countdown at the top of his lungs to an approaching road runner. To a passerby, it must have looked like some kind of hazing ritual, I laugh just thinking about it! A little part of me wonders if the activity was just about moving that rock a little further each time, or could it have been that my dad liked running toward the wild and excited eyes of his father?
I told you before that we are a mixed family, a large family, and even with both of my parents working, we didn't seem to spend money like other families that I knew. We didn't go on big family vacations all together and we didn't drive fancy cars (except for my mom's Mercedes, but that's another story). Summertime excluded, we spent a lot of time together, either doing countless projects around the house like pouring endless squares of cement, or we were at one of my father's races. I asked my dad if having us around for training or at the races was a good thing.
He actually surprised me when he answered, "Having the family around was a negative. If you are truly a competitive runner, you need to pamper yourself and manage yourself, focus." I won't lie to you that I went from joy, thinking about Pop, to feeling a little pissed off! Do you have any idea how many weekends we spent out on some dirt road, just staring at our shoes, waiting for him to run around a corner? He continued, "If the family is there, you're not just taking care of yourself. Having the family there didn't make me run faster, but it was our family time and nice to know that the family was supportive. But it could often be more of a distraction from performance." Interesting. Just when I was about to get defensive with him, he said, "Look, in the sum of your life, it's more important to have had the family time than to have been an elite athlete."
Well, okay then, but I still felt a bit defensive about the whole thing. Supporting my dad at those races, all those years, had been a bit of a sacrifice. My sister and I would have loved, especially during our teen years, to just be doing what our friends were doing. The races were work for us. It was a system of hurry-up and then wait the many hours it took before Dad would cross our path. I must have done a thousand word-searches sitting on the tailgate of the car, at an aid station in God only knew where in the world we were! Come Monday morning, when other kids were sharing stories of their glamorous weekends of shopping or their team sporting events, I can vividly remember the contorted faces of my friends as I would describe how I helped my mom pop a blood blister on my dad's foot so he could continue running the fifty-mile race he'd entered. Seriously! No one ever knew what I was talking about. And I'd be lying if I said that I didn't resent it a little, that we didn't to the typical family things that my friends and their families did. When we did get to visit Los Angeles, where almost all my mother's family lives, it was often just my mom, sister and I because my dad didn't join us.
So, even though I value it now, our family time back then felt more like a sentence for a crime I didn't commit. I can say that I thought my father was Super Man when he would cross the finish line of those races. Everyone would laugh and tease him that his hair was still in place, like Clark Kent. He would have a smile (most of the time) on his face, and my mother would always be screaming, "Go Wayne! Yeah, my Baby!" So the end, the finish, usually made it worth those long, often boring days. There were plenty of races that he didn't finish, either because of injury or stomach problems that he couldn't get under control. Those days, and usually the week after, would leave a gloomy cloud over the whole family. But more often, my father would amaze us with his sheer determination to finish.
He doesn't say so, but even his friends have commented to me of how fast they think he was, especially in his 40's. Dana Gard, another best friend of my dad's, told me that my father would hunt runners down and work them over until he wore them out and then, would pass them. There was an artistry to it, like a skilled game of chess; always trying to anticipate your opponent and make moves to set yourself up for the check-mate at the end.
Going back to the binders and the deck of the house, there was all the proof of just how much time and dedication he had put into that original New Year's resolution that he made so many years ago. I was staring at thirty-plus years of his running records and as I looked through the names of races and places, I realized I had so many memories like he did, though mine were painted with a different brush and from a different perspective. We had all lent our hands, our abilities and our time to helping him achieve his goals and run all those miles.
The truth is, my father doesn't really see himself as an elite runner. He would say that he is just a guy who always loved to run and who enjoyed racing people; not the clock, the people. The record keeping that I mentioned before was used to prepare as well as he could to keep up with his friends and even to keep up with people he didn't like very much. He told me that if there was ever a feature of a runner in the newspaper, it became a goal of his to find that runner during a race and to beat him!
He told me, "I would set myself up to be the predator late in a race, not the prey." That statement is one that I reflected on for a long while. You see, the races where he set personal records of time were exciting, but most of the best stories he has are about the, "who." Who was there, who beat him, who he beat, who had a good day, who had a bad day. The community of runners was and is a sacred thing, and the relationships have always been for him, the why.
Allow me to give an overview of running accomplishments of my dad, who my brother-in-law lovingly nicknamed, "the Waynester". Roughly speaking, my father has run close to fifty marathons and approximately one-hundred-seventy-five ultra-marathons. At the time of my earliest research, my father ranked fifty-fifth overall in a recently published roster of, "Americans who have completed races of at least fifty miles in length over a span of thirty years or more." This was according to lists published by independent statistician, Nick Marshall and stats posted on sites such as; Ultrarunning Magazine, Ultra Sign Up, the German site of DUV, and Real Endurance. You can go to these sites, type in a name, and find most if not all of someone's racing stats.
My father's fastest recorded mile time was 4:12, sometime after high school in either 1965 or 1966, in Balboa Stadium in San Diego. Speed never really left him because at forty-two years old, he recorded a 31:36 10k, which is 5:16 average mile speed! Of the shorter distances, the 10-mile was his favorite because at that distance, he felt that he was much more competitive. So, distances between 10-mile and 50-mile races were his competitive happy place. Past the 50-mile distance, he feels less competitive, though at that distance, there is usually the beauty of the trail and the company of runners that make being competitive less important. He documented that his first marathon was the "Magical Musical Marathon," put on by Sally Edwards (Fleet Feet, Sacramento) in 1980. My mother remembered my dad was nervous that day.
She said, "We had driven to downtown Sacramento. Wayne's focus was just to finish because it was the longest distance he had ever tried. When he finished, he was so happy!" My mother figured at that moment, that he was probably hooked on racing. On September 19, 1980, My father decided to enter his very first ultra-marathon in a big way by running seventy-three and a half miles around Lake Tahoe. His record book shows that he finished in twelve hours and forty-eight minutes! Even though he had started enjoying the longer races, he kept running marathons as well. In November of 1981, my dad ran his personal best in the Stockton marathon with a time of 2:40:14. In April of 1982, he finished his first "American River 50-Miler," with a time of 7:48:29, finishing 37th overall and 16th in his age group (according to stats on: realendurance.com). Now, because an "Ultra" is considered to be any distance over a marathon, in 1983 at the American River 50, even though my dad had to stop at mile-32 because of severe knee and leg pain, he still technically ran an ultra-marathon that day. Going through his meticulously kept records, where he marked every mile he ran, even if he didn't finish the race, it was easy to count the distances.
Being impressed by all of the above would be enough, but a few years ago he felt a calling to travel to Europe and walk "The Camino de Santiago," which took him from St. Jean-Pied-du-Port, France, to Santiago, Spain. It is roughly 780 km (nearly 500 miles) from start to finish. Later on in the book, that journey will be its very own chapter, I promise!
"I never made a living running," my father said, "but that was never the point. Though everyone always asks you about your times, the times don't matter. You can't beat the clock, all it does is record the passing of time, but you remember the people who beat you, and the people you beat and can celebrate even when someone else has beat you. You should celebrate the achievement either way."
If you remember from before, in the introduction, when I mentioned the rainy night my dad found himself alone at the pizza place on a Tuesday? In the same location of the Buffalo Chips workout, across the parking lot, a group of ten or twelve guys would also meet on Tuesday nights. Those guys were referred to as the "hot dogs," or the "speedy showoffs." The Buffalo Chips (who usually gathered at the pizza place) were more of a social group of people who ranged in ability and speed and it was far more casual. That particular Tuesday night when no one from the Buffalo Chips showed up, the speedy showoffs invited him to run with them. They drug him along two loops of the Sac State campus as a warm up and then moved to do speed work on the track.
"I was balls-to-the-walls just to hang in during the warm up as the other guys were casually carrying on conversation!" My dad recalled, "I felt like my eyeballs were dragging on the ground during the warm up!"
So, at the end of the warm up, the whole group went over to the track for a drink of water and to begin running repeat 200's. The speed drill is, you run half a lap hard and then run the other half easy, and then repeat. After about four of those, a mile, they finally paused for a drink of water. It was then that one of the guys came to the drinking fountain and suggested that my father go on ahead to The Graduate and wait for them there, get a pitcher of beer for the group. He supposed they didn't want to run him into the ground because they wanted him to come back. My dad hates to admit it, but he was so embarrassed to not be able to keep up, that he went back to his car and drove home. He had suffered, legs cramping and twitching, but the next Tuesday, the speedy showoffs went to find him amongst the Buffalo Chips and told him, "You belong with us," and that was that, he was a part of the Capital City Flyer's.
Within a year, Capital City Flyer's had attracted runners from the Beals Air Force Base region and it was no longer accurate to keep the Capital City name, so the name was changed to the Pacific Flyer's. My dad got better and better over time but claims he was not one of the better runners of the group. It was a talented group of men and women who, some of them, had Olympic aspirations and held records of their own in varying distances. Often, my dad was on the B-team of competitive groups. That's important because someone from the B-team would fill in on the A-team in case of injury or illness.
Marathons took him up and down California, to Las Vegas, and in 1985 with a good friend, Jerry, he went to run the marathon in Honolulu, Hawaii. My father completed that marathon in 2:54:00. In December of 1987, my father was part of the Pacific Flyers running the team championship at the California International Marathon, where his team took first place with the accumulation of the best individual finishes over any other team. Dad's finishing time that year was 2:51:50.
Sprinkled in and amongst the marathons, were 50k and 50-mile races as well and at 40 years old, my father finished American River 50 in 7:42:13. What's crazy for me to think about is, at age 40, he was just getting started in what would be his most competitive years! In his ultra-running career, he has finished such prestigious races like, "Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run," and he finished it twice. His best performance there was in 1994 when he finished in a tie for 9th place overall, with a time of 19:49:18. The bonus that year was that he crossed the finish line hand-in-hand with his training partner and one of his best friends, Bill Finkbeiner. He was 47 years old then and won 2nd place in his age group that year. We all knew he didn't mean it after his first Western States when he said, "I'll run this race again when Hell freezes over!"