Getting Back to Your Roots

Happy Easter!

With a little more than two weeks elapsed since my last post I’ve accumulated a somewhat sizable list of items I want to write about, so I’ll try to keep this as focused as possible.

But I must be honest.  It has been a tough few weeks.  I have to keep reminding myself, as I wrote a few weeks ago, to take my own advice.  Self improvement is a continuous process.  In fact, it really never ends.  And this is not a bad thing.  Remember when you were younger and you thought there would be a day when you had “arrived?”  Aging seems to me to gradually clarify the actual location of this destination: I do, in fact, believe the day of “arrival” still exists; but not in this life on Earth.

Lately I’ve been focusing on going back to my roots.  Admittedly, I’ve lost touch with them more than I would have liked.  This has happened both recently and over the past few years.

Since adolescence, I’ve done quite a bit and been involved in many things but there have been two defining themes in my life: running and music.  Sadly, I’ve been largely prevented by injury from doing one of these activities over the past year, and the other one I’ve simply neglected.

I’m trying to change that.  On March 26 I went to the Stanford Invitational, one of the biggest invitational meets of the spring college track and field season.  Dan Petty, one of my former athletes, surprised me by coming into town for the weekend to see the meet and visit San Francisco for the first time.

Spending the entire evening at the Stanford track was soul food for me.  There were a few Princeton runners there, and Dan’s former college teammate was competing as one of the top runners in the men’s 10,000 meters.  But other than cheering for those individuals I had no real reason to be there.  Being at a track meet simply felt like home for me.

I took lots of photos (album here: gotta love the pole vault series).  I spent quite a bit of time watching races with Steve Taylor, Dan’s former coach at the University of Richmond, and an overall great guy.  I chatted with Dan, and caught up on how things are going for him.  He’s now loving his job as the social media guru at the Denver Post, a career path that he’s told me is the end result of a conversation over dinner we had at an Applebee’s in Flemington, N.J. the year after he graduated from high school, where I encouraged him, based on my own personal experience, that writing for his college newspaper might be a great thing to do.

It’s funny how things like that happen.  In June of 1998, shortly after I graduated from high school myself, Ned Brazelton, my cross country coach, gave me a copy of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie as a graduation gift.  I read the entire 192-page book in one beautiful, sunny summer afternoon, sitting next to Lake Huron at my then-girlfriend’s family’s cottage in Bay Port, Mich.  As most who have read it will attest, Morrie is a moving tale of a dying professor’s last life lessons for his former student.  It brought me to tears.

But perhaps the most significant reason I love this particular book is what “Braz” wrote inside:

June 20, 1998

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

Phil, use all your potential to make your life worthwhile for yourself and others.  Learn the lessons of life well.

Ned Brazelton

At 18 years old, I read this and appreciated the sentiment.  But I had no frame of reference for really grasping its meaning.  Reading it at 30, it almost knocked me on off my feet.  I’m old enough now to see how Braz inspired me: to teach, to coach, to want to help others, to have a lifelong love of running.  And I’m old enough now to see that I may have had a similar effect on someone else.  Life comes full circle.

Am I learning the lessons of life well?  Well, some come easier than others, but I’m learning them.  The one I’m learning now is that roots matter.  They ground you.  Sometimes your roots come in the form of places.  Sometimes they are people – family and friends.  Sometimes they are activities, like running, that have always held a special meaning for you.  Often, these overlap.  But they always help you to remember who you are when you lose your way.

So even though I can’t run, I’m taking every opportunity to be around runners.  I’m committed to my physical therapy more than ever.  Every day at the gym, for my 20 minutes on the stationary bike, I’ve been reading all of the back issues of Runner’s World that have gathered dust in my apartment over the past few months.  I’m making plans.  I’m dreaming again.

And it all feels wonderful.

As for the music?  Well, that topic will take up an entire post or more, so I’ll have to save it for later.  But needless to say, I’ve been picking up my guitar a lot more frequently lately…

Tagged as: Music, Running, Stanford Invitational