Dear Family,
I have a confession.
I took a long lunch break one day last week (ok, I guess I have two confessions) in order to hop across the river from Rosslyn to the National Building Museum and pick up my race bib for last weekend’s Marine Corps Marathon.
When I returned to the office with my swag bag, I was spotted by a colleague. I’ll refer to him here as “Tom” (since that’s his name).
Tom: You racing this weekend?
Me: I am!
Tom: Marine Corps, right? (looking confused) Is the race on Saturday?
Me: Um… no.
Tom: I thought you didn’t run on Sundays.
Me: I don’t … I mean, I didn’t … well, I mostly don’t. Don’t tell my mom.
The comprehensive story of how I came to justify running the Marine Corps Marathon on the Lord’s Day is a long and tedious one, not worth committing to paper.
And so here it is:
Among what I’d call my core group of running friends (the half-dozen or so people I run with most often) is a woman I’ll call “Rachel” (not her real name, but she answers to it because her Hebrew name is too hard for most of us to pronounce).
Rachel is an observant Orthodox Jew who upholds her faith’s standard of modesty even while running in the most unforgiving conditions. On the most oppressively sweltering summer mornings, while most of the rest of us are wearing just barely enough clothes to avoid getting arrested, Rachel runs with her hair covered, sleeves that extend below her elbows and a calf-length skirt.
She’s a few years younger than I am but has been a grandparent for considerably longer. (Orthodox Jews tend to become grandparents young for largely the same reasons that many of our people do.) When people ask whether I am a fast runner, I sometimes reply that I run about as fast as a Jewish grandmother in a long skirt. And it’s true…except for the ones who run faster than me.
I love my core group of running friends. (I love them, y’know, in a running club sort of way — “bonds forged through mutual suffering” is how one of my favorite people to run with once aptly described it to me.) But I particularly enjoy running with Rachel because 1) she’s a chatterbox — I don’t have to do any work to keep the conversation going — I can stop talking entirely if I want and just listen to her like a podcast while the miles sail by; 2) she’s always upbeat, even when things aren’t going great; 3) we are both adherents to religious traditions that ask a fair amount of us.
And inasmuch as my faith is largely rooted in hers, it’s sometimes fun to compare notes. This is complicated on occasion by the fact that she studies the Bible in Hebrew and I, well, don’t. (She tells me I should and that learning Hebrew “isn’t that difficult.” She may be right, but she also has no idea how fundamentally lazy I am.) When I asked her a question about something I’d recently read in Ecclesiastes, she had no idea what book I was referring to. “Ecclesiastes,” it turns out, is the Greek name for the book. (Why do we use the Greek word in English Bible translations? I have no idea.) In the Hebrew Bible, according to the internet, Ecclesiastes is called “Kohelet.” I’ll try to remember that the next time I have a question for her about it, but I’ll first have to learn and remember how to say it.
Hey, that’s a really nice story, Tim! What does any of it have to do with the Marine Corps Marathon? Hang on — I’m getting there.
One Tuesday morning on the track late last year, Rachel and I were lamenting that we were unlikely to ever run a race together because they pretty much always fall either on Saturday (her Shabbos) or Sunday (my Sabbath).
Faithful Latter-day Saint families have varied interpretations of what it means to keep the Sabbath Day holy. I was raised in a household that did not work or play on Sunday. When a rained-out Saturday soccer game was rescheduled for Sunday, we did not play. When a friend’s birthday party was held on a Sunday, we did not go. We did not go to the movies or to the mall on Sunday. We did not eat out. When Halloween fell on Sunday, Dad wrote a letter to all the neighbors asking if would be all right if his kids came trick-or-treating on Saturday night instead. (And we did.)
We also did not watch TV on Sunday (unless Dad wasn’t home and the Eagles were playing…or it was a really important playoff game, or…).
Some of these practices relaxed as all of us got older. (I now watch football on Sunday with Mom and Dad fairly often.) I also grew to understand my parents’ approach to the Sabbath less as a set of hard-and-fast rules and more as general principles. We would never go out to eat on Sunday when we were home, but we would on vacation — presumably out of quasi-necessity. (But make no mistake, my parents would always find the local ward, and you better believe we went to all three hours. We weren’t one of those jack-Mormon families that ducked out after sacrament meeting just because we were on vacation.)
But the practice of avoiding sports (and recreation generally) on Sunday held more or less firm, and Crystal and I passed it down to our own children. It was easy in some ways because Sunday sports usually conflict with church. We would certainly never — never — consider missing something as important as Sunday worship for something so trivial as a sporting event. Consequently, we never really needed to directly confront the question of whether sports were Sabbath-appropriate on its own terms.
But then as the end of last year approached, the prospect of our church time rotating from 9:00 back to 11:00 got my rationalization-prone mind to thinking about things I might reasonably do with my newfound extra time in the morning.
Several thoughts occurred to me, more or less at the same time: 1) I don’t live in Utah, where most everything worth doing seems to happen on Saturday. Here in the real world, most races (and all the best ones) are on Sunday; 2) It would be possible for me to do most of these races and still make it to 11 o’clock church; 3) What is so objectionable about running on Sunday anyway? Certainly going for a leisurely walk around the neighborhood is an appropriate Sunday activity. And if walking is ok, then why not run? And if I‘m running anyway, then why not run with other people?
That guy in Chariots of Fire (you remember — the runner who missed his race in the Olympics(!) because it was moved to Sunday) must be so disappointed.
If I were telling this to my Sunday School students (and I won’t) this is the part of the story where I would recognize that I was gradually yielding to Satan’s clutches…
It also occurred to me that if one of us (Rachel or I) was going to bend on the Sabbath, it was always going to be me. (Rachel does not so much as turn her oven on or adjust her thermostat on Saturdays.) And so, applying my parents’ “general principles” approach to Sabbath observance, combined with my own elaborate and convoluted system of rationalizations and circular reasoning, I resolved to continue to abstain from training on the Lord’s Day, but that I would participate in certain Sunday-morning races, provided I could still make it to church on time.
Three people currently walk the earth who I live in fear of disappointing: Crystal and my parents. To avoid disappointing Crystal, I first asked her how she felt about my plan. She said she was fine with it.
To avoid disappointing my parents, I simply did not mention it to them.
My first-ever Sunday race was the Road Runners Club of America 10-mile Club Challenge on February 22 — an annual event pitting all the road running clubs in D.C. and Maryland against each other on a brutally hilly course in neighboring Howard County. The race started at 8:00 a.m., and I had a decent run (for me, especially given the hard terrain) with a sizable negative split, crossing the finish line at 9:23 a.m. I jogged to my car, drove straight to the church, and marched through the front door wearing my racing gear and carrying my church clothes. I changed in the bathroom and even made the pre-service 10:20 a.m. choir rehearsal.
And just like that, the Band-Aid was off. I ran four or five other Sunday-morning races earlier this year. I did the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler (perhaps our area’s most iconic and popular race) in the spring (I even ran another negative split and a PR). I ran a couple of half-marathons I’d always wanted to do. And I always made it back, not just in time for church, but by 10:40 so I could play the organ prelude.
I never felt any guilt about any of it. And, honestly, I still don’t. During my temple recommend interview last month, when the stake presidency counselor asked me whether I strived to keep the Sabbath Day holy, I told him yes, and I told him what I’d been doing all year. I told him I’d run the Parks Half Marathon that very morning. He expressly told me he felt I was worthy to go to the temple and (digitally) signed my recommend.
But notwithstanding all this Sunday running, I still hadn’t run a race with my friend Rachel (for various reasons). To rectify this, we decided we would run the Marine Corps Marathon together.
This presented a challenge to my “run before church” model, as I am nowhere near fast enough to run a full marathon that starts and ends in Virginia and still get to church by 11:00. (Maybe if we had 1:00 p.m. church, but I wouldn’t wish that hell on anybody.)
And so, for the first time in my life, I missed church for a sporting event. Our ward had to push the Primary program back a couple of weeks on my account (because I’m the pianist). I do feel a little guilt about that, but I’ve been able to rationalize most of it away…
Because the Marine Corps Marathon is freakin’ awesome!
The race atmosphere was nothing short of epic. It was my 15th marathon (my first in 3 years) but nothing like anything I’d experienced in any of the previous 14. For one thing, the race is huge — probably 10 times more finishers than any marathon I’d done before. It claims to be the third biggest marathon in the U.S. (smaller than New York and Chicago, and sometimes smaller than Boston, depending on the year) but the biggest marathon in the world with no prize money. The crowds lining the street were seemingly endless, deep, and loud.
The course starts near the Pentagon, goes through Rosslyn (the local term for “Downtown Arlington”), crosses Key Bridge into Georgetown and runs past every important D.C. landmark you can probably think of before crossing the 14th Street Bridge back into Virginia, taking a lap of Crystal City and running past the Pentagon one final time before one final steep climb up to the Iwo Jima memorial. Encouraging you up the last hill are a couple hundred newly minted Marine second lieutenants in training at The Basic School in nearby (sort of) Quantico.
After you cross the finish line, one of the second lieutenants drapes a finisher medal around your neck.
And then he salutes you!
Did you get saluted by a Marine officer at the finish line of your last marathon? No? Well, it’s pretty cool.
You can’t tell in the gif, but I saluted him back (as I’m fairly certain salutes are supposed to be returned). I’m sure I did it wrong.
And as for my actual performance? Well, I would say it was commensurate with my preparation. The hard truth is that I am just not very good at preparing for or running marathons. The only reason I have run so many of them is because I keep telling myself that the next one will be when I finally put it all together.
I typically have at least a half-dozen excuses lined up for any given marathon. This time I could have blamed my newly diagnosed arthritic hip (which did not bother me at all during the race but derailed my training for about a month) and getting hit by a truck (see last month’s letter) which sidelined me for another few weeks. I never got the mileage in that I need to avoid my characteristic second-half fade.
I suppose if there were a division for “grandfathers who got hit by a truck in the past three months,” then I might very well have made the podium. Absent that, it was just another average, middle-of-the-pack performance.
Of my 15 marathons, I’d say I’ve run about a third of them reasonably well (roughly even splits — no significant slowdown in the second half). In another third of them, I’ve completely melted down and had to walk large chunks of the final 6-8 miles, which is horribly demoralizing. In the other third, I’ve faded in the second half but managed to avoid walking, which is a little disappointing, but I’ll still take it. This performance fell into that last category.
In the end, it was both my 8th fastest and my 8th slowest marathon. I’d like to think I’m faster than this, but once we get up to 26 miles, I guess this is just who I am.
The saddest part of it this story is that Rachel picked up a stress fracture and wasn’t able to run it with me.
I guess we’ll have to do it together next year. I plan to skip the other Sunday races because we’ll be back to 9:00 a.m. church, but Marine Corps? That race might actually be worth my soul.
In other October news, Crystal and I had a fun night with Mom, Coco, Grant and Jen at Ford’s Theater where we saw a production of “Come From Away,” the fabulous one-act musical about the tiny Newfoundland town that suddenly had to absorb several thousand stranded passengers aboard flights that were diverted there on 9/11.
I was familiar with the show but had not seen it before. I would see it again. So good! I was surprised by its ability to emotionally transport me back in time. Being forced to re-live the day brought me to tears at points (not that that’s hard to do).
(Speaking of which, last month, I texted my children a link to the September 2001 edition of the Famlet, which begins by announcing Crystal’s pregnancy with our third child — who would turn out to be Sophie — before abruptly pivoting to the terrifying events of the 11th (from a D.C. perspective). It’s a little embarrassing to read now, not least because I was apparently still double-spacing after periods back then — the horror. But it is what it is — a little time capsule. Hard to believe it’s been 25 years.)
Crystal and I hadn’t been to Ford’s in years — a tiny little jewel box of a theater. I can’t imagine it seats much more than a thousand people. Our seats were in the balcony, maybe 15 feet from the box where Lincoln was shot 161 years ago. Nothing so dramatic happened on our night there, but we enjoyed the show.
It was great seeing our cousins the Mabeys during their D.C. trip two weeks ago. They happened to be at Mom & Dad’s house for the BYU game against Notre Dame, which was fun to watch with them. (Though sadly, that glorious win feels like a long time ago now.)
This picture of the crowd storming the field was taken by Grant and Jen from their seats in the north end zone bleachers. (I don’t generally use other people’s pictures of events that I did not attend in these letters, but somehow this seemed cooler than taking a picture of the event on Mom & Dad’s TV.) It was also reminiscent of the last time BYU defeated a top-2 team in Provo — September 1990, when we beat then-No. 1 Miami, and 18-year-old BYU freshman Timmy Willis stormed the field from the south end zone bleachers.
We returned to Grandma’s the next day for Sunday dinner with the Mabeys, and by the end I was mostly calling Laura and Megan by the right names. (I only mixed up Matthew and Luke once, but that was mostly a mis-speak. Matthew and Luke are easy to tell apart. Laura and Megan on the other hand…)
For Halloween we got a visit from Sophie and Felicity!
They flew in earlier this afternoon (during my temple shift) and were joined at our house by Grace and Matt. We headed up to Mom and Dad’s house for traditional Halloween chili (a tradition that goes back to when our children’s trick-or-treating days) and introduced them to their first great-grandchild.
Happy Halloween!
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly