Announcing the Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women

Note: This site hosts my long-running running blog. Today I’m using it as a convenient platform to post about the endowed scholarship that my sister and I have created in honor of our mom, Janice Cattarin, who passed away in July of 2020. The first section of this post is a short briefer on the scholarship – what you need to know to donate and enhance the endowment. After that are some additional stories about mom that you may enjoy. And after that, navigate the blog if you’re so inclined. I haven’t written much in the last year, but there are plenty of stories archived for your enjoyment.

For the “Just Let Me Donate Now! Quick!” folks… 

Go to www.sunybroome.edu/gift. Under Designation of Gift, check “In Honor” or “In Memory” and enter “Janice Cattarin Scholarship”.  If your employer offers matching gifts, the Foundation qualifies!

 

Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women

Janice Cattarin believed strongly in the value of education and worked actively to further educational opportunities for women in the Southern Tier of New York, her home for nearly 60 years.

Widowed at age 28 in the mid-1960s with two young children, Jan was fortunate that her late husband’s employer IBM offered her a position shortly thereafter. That was possible in large part because she was also fortunate to have had the opportunity to earn a degree earlier in life. Her education likely made the difference between just getting by as a single mother and the quarter-century-long professional career she enjoyed at IBM, which spanned numerous functions until she retired in 1992. Her family benefited tremendously from the value of her having the education which enabled her success.

In 1967 Jan joined the Binghamton chapter of American Association of University Women, an organization founded in 1881 with the mission to advance equity for women and girls through advocacy, education and research. She was active in the organization for over fifty years until her death in 2020. She held nearly every office, attended every meeting possible, and volunteered at every event, and most importantly was active in the AAUW Scholarship Committee. She received the Binghamton area Women of Achievement Award in 1984 for her work in AAUW.

The Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women was established by her children to honor their mother, to give back to the community that was her and her family’s home, and to recognize the value of education for women, especially those who find themselves in a changing or difficult life situation where education offers the opportunity to raise themselves and their families to success.

SUNY Broome and the Janice Cattarin Scholarship

SUNY Broome, formerly known as Broome Community College, offers an ideal environment to maximize the impact of the Janice Cattarin Scholarship. It fulfills the educational needs for those striving to elevate their situation while holding costs low, but student resources are also often low, and there is always need.

It is intended that the Scholarship will operate in perpetuity, awarding several scholarships annually. Recipients will be chosen by a committee made up of SUNY Broome faculty, family, SUNY Broome academic affairs staff, and members of the Binghamton Chapter of AAUW.

Giving to the Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women

The Janice Cattarin Memorial Scholarship for Women is administered by the Broome Community College Foundation (a.k.a. SUNY Broome Foundation), a 501(c)3 foundation affiliated with SUNY Broome. Gifts are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Gifts can be made online or by check as detailed at www.sunybroome.edu/ways-to-give

Online gifts can be made at www.sunybroome.edu/gift

Under Designation of Gift, please be sure to check either “In Honor” or “In Memory” and enter “Janice Cattarin Scholarship”. The full scholarship name isn’t required; the staff will identify the gift and designate appropriately.

The Janice Cattarin Scholarship can also benefit from matching gifts from employers who offer this benefit. Please see details at www.sunybroome.edu/matching-gifts.

About the SUNY Broome Foundation

The Broome Community College Foundation strives to be among the most supportive community college foundations in the State University of New York System and in the country. The Foundation aims to assist needy students, recognize and honor high-achieving students, help faculty and staff provide the best instructional environment possible, and encourage innovation and achievement on campus, especially where government funds are either unavailable or insufficient.

Each year, about 87% of the SUNY Broome student population need additional funding to attend school. Without this help, attending college would be a little to null opportunity. Through the valiant efforts of the College alumni, businesses, community friends, foundations, associations, organizations, SUNY Broome faculty, staff, and students, the Foundation is able to award over $1,000,000 each year to deserving and financially disadvantaged students. The Foundation’s priority is to provide private financial funding to our students through merit scholarships and grants-in-aid.

Additional information on the SUNY Broome Foundation can be found at: broomeccfoundation.org

Broome Community College Foundation, Inc.
PO Box 1017
Binghamton, NY 13902-1017

For additional information about the Janice Cattarin Scholarship Memorial for Women please feel free to contact:

Catherine Abashian Williams, MPA, CFRE
Executive Director, Broome Community College Foundation, Inc.
williamscr at sunybroome.edu

or Gary Cattarin, son of Janice Cattarin at cattarin at comcast.net

Note: That's the facts bit. The rest is for your enjoyment.

More About Mom and the Scholarship

Let’s start with the frank part: Many who’ve run with me, worked with me, or just crossed my path have heard me lament about the trials and tribulations of caring for my aged mother (from afar, Cindy did most of the up-close leg work, bless her…). Truth: The last decade has been a rough ride. Mom did plenty of things I’ve complained vocally about as my form of ‘talk therapy’. Elderly people are frustrating in many ways. I probably will be too at some point, even if I’d like to think that I’ve learned some things not to do from mom.

But here’s the other frank part: Before all that, Mom was all the nuts. To use a bad sports metaphor, she wasn’t just thrown a curve ball, she took the proverbial beanball. I’ve mentioned repeatedly – in her obituary, in the scholarship brief above, and many other times – how she was widowed early with two young kids. You know that part. What else you should know is how she got up out of the dust and made it. And not just eked it out, but made it comfortably and with style.

She told me once that after dad’s death, she’d considered moving from our home in Upstate New York back to Ohio to be near her parents. But she didn’t. She kept on, and made her own life in New York. IBM was invaluable in making that happen, but they were only the third part of the equation. Her education was the first, her spirit the enabler, and IBM provided the vehicle.

Mom & Dad moved to the Endicott area when Dad the engineer took a job with IBM in 1961. In the five years before he passed, he made quite a mark; when I co-op’d there in 1980, people introduced me as Bob’s son. That was an eye-opener. Tom Watson’s IBM took care of their own in those days, and they hired mom the year after dad's death. Sure, they needed every able-bodied brain they could get, but mom’s education opened doors that led past a basic job to a professional career. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As a young kid, you don’t see the significance of a lot of things; they just are. When the Chevy wagon went away for the ’67 Firebird, it never occurred to me that mom was young and single and cool. It just meant that when we piled in the car with the neighborhood kids for a ride to McDonald’s, which in those days was take-out and we often ate in the car, it was a tight fit in a tiny backseat. But somehow we fit; we were little, and she was young and single and cool and on top of that, a professional woman.

She wasn’t the only one. IBM was ahead of its time. We spent plenty of time with her professional women friends. It seemed perfectly normal to me. But looking back I can see all the things I didn’t notice then. That small klatch was still an anomaly, even at IBM, and almost non-existent outside that orbit. It was still a man’s world. Mail still came to Mrs. Robert Cattarin a decade or more after dad’s death. She just didn’t let that stop her.

She dated a couple of people but never remarried. She finished the job, so to speak, of raising us, all on her own. Sure, she had help. For years she employed our caretaker, Mrs. Lucas to be there when we got home from school, since she couldn’t be (and yes, she was smart enough to file and pay the employer portion social security taxes, unlike a later Supreme Court candidate who didn't). Her parents would move in for a week each year and scrub every surface and fix every broken thing. And we had the best neighbors in the world. Bill next door was there for anything we needed. Not because of sympathy for that single mom next door, but just because that’s who he was (and still is, for that matter).

By the time I was in high school it had finally dawned on me that the reason I had to coordinate with mom for dinner plans almost daily over email (yes, in 1980, we were both IBMers, she for real, me as a high-school co-op) was because her calendar was, well, crazy. She was crazy involved.

You learn how not to grow moss from such a person.

So back to the scholarship. Why? The scholarship is endowed at the SUNY Broome Foundation and benefits SUNY Broome students. SUNY Broome is the new name for what we knew as Broome Community College (SUNY, for those of you non-New Yorkers, is the State University of New York system). Neither I nor my sister nor mom went to SUNY Broome (though my younger kid did get a fine education at another SUNY school). So why there?

The year after dad passed, mom joined an organization called the American Association of University Women, or AAUW. I don’t know how she learned about it or what spurred her initial sign-up, but it’s not hard to guess that educated professional women in the 60’s were not in the majority, and that the social and intellectual rewards from hanging out with people of her type were a big draw. Mom had attended Stephens College in Missouri, which at that time was a junior college, and then Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (not to be confused with THE Ohio State University), so she had a degree, which, as I’ve noted, probably made all the difference between just making it and making it nicely. I can’t say that IBM wouldn’t have hired her, but I can speculate that they wouldn’t have put her on professional track without her education.

AAUW has been all about advocating for women’s education since their founding in the nineteenth century. Today, when women make up more than half of all college students, that might seem like an anachronism. But when broken down by field, there is still a long way to go. I’m an avid reader of Scientific American, and they’ve run countless columns about how far we are from gender equity in science and research, for example. And even now, there’s no question that traditional women’s roles persist. Not that that’s wrong, but it adds a challenge to a woman trying to come back from life’s curve balls – or beanballs – and lift themselves to success.

Mom worked tirelessly on almost everything that AAUW did. And one of those things that AAUW did was to create a scholarship fund endowed at SUNY Broome, targeting ‘non-traditional’ women students. Not teens just getting started, but women who have taken a curve ball or a beanball and are trying to lift themselves and their families to success. That was mom’s story. My story is what it is because she succeeded.

When mom passed and we wanted to designate a charity for gifts, because we didn’t want flowers and in the age of COVID had nothing to do with them anyway, so sis and I opted for the AAUW scholarship fund as a worthy target. Then when the dust settled, we decided to earmark funds she’d given us years earlier to the same cause. In light of our substantial gift, the AAUW chapter considered renaming their scholarship in mom’s name, but in the end we opted to set up a separate endowed scholarship in her name with the same goals and selection criterion as the original fund. This means more grants to more students. And hopefully more success stories and successful and happy families. And it also serves as a gift to the community which she called home for nearly sixty years, and which gave sis and I our starts.

The scholarship is administered by the SUNY Broome Foundation who’s significant size means the endowment enjoys perpetual professional investment management. The Binghamton AAUW Scholarship Committee will judge applicants, though sis and I can also chime in if we wish, and the Foundation will ensure that if AAUW and sis and I are long gone, they’ll continue to administer the scholarship and award grants. So this really is a perpetual gift.

When was the last time you were able to be a part of a legacy?

Please consider donating to the scholarship fund.

And thanks for reading this.

By the way, you can read mom’s obituary here.

On Six

Was it just two weeks ago that I broke my blogging silence? Answer: slightly more, but pretty much, yeah. And did I call that one, “Take Six”, whereas I’m calling this one “On Six”? Answer: yeah, but that is purely a convenient coincidence. And when you read this story, should you assume that the last episode was an intentional setup for this one? Answer: Not on your life. Really. It wasn’t.

Sure, I hadn’t published in ten months (nearly eleven, but who’s counting?). And sure, I said it was anyone’s guess as to whether I’d run the Virtual Boston Marathon, with the smart money resting on No. And yes, I did run it a few days later. But it wasn’t a setup. I didn’t know. Trust me on this.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that my previous post saw the light of day on the last day of August. Truth is, it came out under dark of night somewhat after midnight on the first day of September. Having failed to poke my head above water since last October, I felt a weird drive to publish earlier than the month before hitting a solid year of silence. And I came so close to getting it done, missing by about twenty minutes, that I backdated it into August. Call it cheating, and shame me. I know this sounds weird. It just mattered at the time. And this confession matters now, why?

Because that was Tuesday, the first of September, and so far as I knew, there was no way in purgatory (or lower) that I’d run Virtual Boston. Sure, there was a part of me that wanted to do it, but the event window was opening in mere days and I had run a grand total of nine laps around the track – two and a quarter miles – since swapping the running shoes for the bike shoes back in mid-May. And that was absolutely the truth. At that moment.

The very next day, my clubmate Dan turned things up-side-down. 

At noon on Wednesday – yes, the very day after posting that it’d be nearly unthinkable that I’d run a “VBM” – Dan pinged me: “Do you think you could run a half marathon? Would you join us for the first half of our Virtual Boston on Saturday morning? We’ll go slow! I promise!”

Game on.

Now, the idea of showing up and running any distance with a group that would have to figure out what to do when I crumpled into a ball by the side of the road after a few miles was simply ludicrous. But as I’ve said often before, the runner mentality doesn’t rule out ludicrous.

The idea that I’d join them only to run as a pacer or companion for the first half alone wasn’t so much ludicrous as it was a defiance of logic. What’s with this halfway stuff? Why suffer just for that? And me pace them? Seriously, don’t you have that a little backwards? Hey, if I’m in, I’m in.

But I was by no means in. At least, not yet. Not having run only nine laps three weeks earlier.

So I check my calendar and yup, I’ve got no meetings for the next hour. I lace up the shoes and go out the door and, well, let’s just see what happens.

Serendipity happens.

We all know that we run together not only because it’s socially enjoyable, but because in doing so we drive each other forward almost subconsciously. You stop thinking about everything that hurts and you focus on good conversation. But doing anything together of late has been fraught with risk; we all know that even seemingly healthy people can be asymptomatic carriers in the Age of COVID. So I certainly haven’t been calling people up to run or bike or hike with (though I’ve toyed with the idea a few times). But as I noted, serendipity happens.

Less than an hour from Dan’s ping, when I step out the door, a (different) friend I haven’t seen or chatted with in a while runs past my driveway. Like this was all planned. I call out, he holds up for me to waddle up to catch him, and we end up cruising a few miles, blissful chatter making me ignore the fact that my body hasn’t run since, when? Which, to be fair, it really didn’t seem to be minding. Rolling home a whopping four and a quarter miles later and feeling fine, I figured Saturday could happen. But I wasn’t going to commit. Not yet. Let’s at least pop in a few more miles on Thursday, and maybe even a loosen-up jaunt on Friday.

Here’s where I say, “Wait a minute, how old am I, and how long have I been doing this? And don’t I know what’s coming by this point?” Denial is powerful. I really thought I’d run a little more before Saturday. I should have known better. My body has been consistent since, oh, let’s say, forever. There’s a three-day recovery from these first-time-for-anything efforts. From the bodily insult on Day Zero, we move to Day One, where the muscles aren’t happy. Then we hit Day Two, also known as Max Burn Day, which is just that. Day Three brings the fire down to Day One level, and the next day we’re in the clear. This, for me, has always been. The weeks-prior track laps had been so slow, with breaks in-between, that they didn’t trigger the sequence. False confidence. But galivanting off with a friend at a real pace (not fast, but at least a pace in the neighborhood of what Dan had planned for Saturday), well, yeah, that pretty much did it. The clock was activated.

Now you’re doing the math and you’ve quickly realized that time may be flexible in the relativistic space, but not here in normal life, and there wasn’t enough of it. From that run on Wednesday, hmm, then Day One, muscles certainly hurt, I’d better rest. Then Day Two, Max Burn Day, landed on Friday and it was indeed quite the burn; running on them now would probably extend it so I’d better not. And yes, that puts Day Three on… Saturday. Mid-day, really. So no, we’re not out of the woods by early morning Saturday. Not even close.

Having thus not gotten out the door again, that meant Saturday rolled around not only with legs still afire, but with a mere six and a half miles on my running odometer since May. Sweet.

And that brings us to the wordplay section of our story. Those of you who have ever done a track workout with me know that one of my old wisecracks is to tell the group that we’ll start (whatever interval we’re doing) on six. Then I’ll start counting, “One! Two! Six!” and bolt. My fellow runners get a humorous break during the workout, and they catch on after the first few times.

So it is. We go on six. And so it was on Saturday.

Now, Dan’s VBM course started at his home in Hudson, a few miles north of my home, and headed due south to the Boston Marathon starting line in Hopkinton, which happens to be exactly a half marathon (you really can’t make this up, the distance just works out; it’s eerie). This meant we’d be running through my town, bypassing my home by just a mile or so. Not knowing how this whole VBM would go, I told Dearest Spouse that I might be home within the hour.

The rest is almost a foregone conclusion. Quads, hamstrings, and at least one calf were angry by the very first block from our socially distanced start (which admittedly was virtually impossible to maintain for twenty six miles, though we tried – at least at times) at the chalk start/finish line Dan had laid down in front of his home. Everything north my waist was hunky-dory; the cycling had done it’s work for cardio health, and my brain was deluded enough to ignore the rest, a good thing since the southern half hurt early and just got worse as the day wore on. But chit-chat, ribbing, bad jokes, and even, late in the day, truly horrendous singing kept us going, the three of us who planned to go the distance, and a fourth (later joined by a fifth) along for camaraderie, plus the roadside assistance from Dan’s wife and other friends. I hand Dan a lot of credit for setting all this up – even getting the club’s show clock for the finish line – and for policing our pace to a fault. Riding a wave of adrenaline of stupidity, I cruised past the bail-out-for-home point and just ran. Slowly. Casually. Somewhat painfully. Yet enjoyably. This really was fun

In Hopkinton, we tossed in a loop around the traffic island in front of the common just to ensure we didn’t end up a hair short, which wouldn’t have mattered, since the Virtual Boston Marathon Official App failed miserably: it couldn’t measure distance (twelve-point-oh at the half marathon… cool!), so the results had to be submitted manually anyway. As the saying goes, you had One Job… But we knew the distance and we knew what we did. (The app also failed again later trying to submit results. OK, you had Two Jobs… but hey, it was very good at supplying meaningless rah-rah. Whatever.)

Somehow the Hopkinton cop who cheerfully stopped traffic and seemingly took six pictures of us on the starting line managed to never hit the shutter, so we settled for some disorganized selfies instead. And then we headed north, where, as you might expect, slow and painful became slow and painful at twenty-something miles, a different thing altogether. We’d swapped our southbound pacer companion in Hopkinton for another, so while Marathoner Things One and Two lumbered steadily on, pacer companion Charles dutifully stuck with me when I hit the inevitable walk break zone and dropped back a bit. But by that point it would have taken Jock Semple pulling me off the course to keep me from finishing this foolish folly, and even that might not have worked (it didn’t work for him many years ago, right?)

To add a bit of ironic circular closure to the feat, around mile twenty-three we passed the home of that very same friend who’d distracted me on Wednesday’s run and helped me convince myself that this was a potentially possible stupid thing to do. And there he was, out working on the lawn, getting a front row seat to my soon-to-be successful submission to stupidity, marveling at what he was mostly, but not entirely, not responsible for. A few miles later, it was in the books.

If you don’t count those nine laps around the track back in early August, this was pretty much zero to marathon in three days flat. Not to say I wasn’t in good shape from the cycling and hiking, but, well, they’re clearly different muscles. It was by far the slowest marathon I’ve ever run, even counting those uber-casual Groton Marathons. But that entirely casual approach made it fun, right up to the end.

And technically, I didn’t need to do it. The Boston Athletic Association had announced that not running this would not interrupt any Boston Marathon streak, though in generosity they simultaneously stated that doing it would count toward extending a streak. So call this a freebie, number fourteen, and since they’ve basically grandfathered qualifying times into the next edition, fifteen could be in the cards, if the event even happens and I’m able to move when it does. After that, the likelihood that I’ll requalify for future years is doubtful. Heck, in the few brief runs I’ve taken since that day, I can’t fathom how I managed twenty six at all.

But hey, you never know. I didn’t expect to run any marathon on six, either.

Phoenix Riding (Or, Take Six!)

To the outside world it seems... He writes occasionally, we read occasionally, what’s the big deal? Heck, we didn’t notice he stopped writing a while back. He didn’t send flowers either.  Who cares? 

To the author it seems... Holy Bejeezus, I’ve been trying to write this column now for six months, no, make that nine! I’ve never gotten to a conclusion, and the world keeps changing. I wonder how long before Google locks you out of your own blog?

This is a running blog, but there’s scant little running going on here. Whatever. My small and anything-but-loyal band of readers know that besides dishing out amusing stories to compete for a tiny sliver of their time, my goal in this now dozen-year-long series of chronicles has been to provide some positivism, some uplift (and this year being Excrement Expo 2020, we really need positivism). Sure, there have been chapters where I’ve railed on various organizations or situations, but at the end of the day, I’m a moderately old guy who tries to keep at it, and in telling the tale of doing so, encourage others, moderately, very, or even not old, to do the same. When my unnaturally excessive activity light winks out, that will be a sad day. 

So world, let me say this: I’m not dead yet. I may have some flesh wounds, but I’m in decent shape at the moment, though that isn’t due to running. Or perhaps it is; not physically, but mentally. The running brain, perhaps the lizard part of it, but whatever, it just won’t let you hang up the active life and the desire to stay fit. So when one avenue is shut down, you find a different road. This new one (which really isn’t new at all) uses two wheels. 

For years I’ve weathered scorn from non-runners who insisted I’d ruin my [pick your favorite joints – knees, hips, feet, whatever]. And today I write with a diagnosed meniscus tear and unquestionably sore knees. So were they right? Maybe. Maybe not. But even if they were, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s been a hella’ ride, and it isn’t over, as Bluto (Belushi) once said, till we decide it is. 

Yes, I have sore knees, but consider that before I started running, I couldn’t hike downhill without knee braces. Now, Adirondack Death Marches are a regular occurrence (including thirty-seven miles, five summits, and ten-thousand-foot-plus vertical feet over two days a few weeks back…which was a bit much, I’ll admit…so really, can I blame running for my woes?) I could point out other benefits, but the reality is, If I hadn’t been running for the last fifteen years, I’d bet good money that plenty of other things would hurt a lot more. Motion is lotion, as my most recent physical therapist likes to say (she’s right, of course). 

I’ve completed fifty-seven solar orbits, and when I look at my male ancestors when they were my age (at least the ones that weren’t already dead by then, which is most of them), they look, to be frank, what I think of as old. My beloved Uncle Joe, pictured at about a year younger than I am now, looked like someone approaching sixty, which isn’t a bad thing for someone who was, in fact, approaching sixty (and he made it to ninety-nine, smiling all the way, so he clearly did a lot of things right). But I look in the mirror and I don’t see the word sixty (I know, I’m not supposed to say that, you are, [gosh, thanks!] but I’m waxing philosophical here, so just go with it), nor do I see the appearance of true age in most of my active circle. Maybe it’s just my rockin’ fashion sense compared to Joe’s era (I hear you laugh uproariously) or failings of the photography of his day, but I’d like to think that our mutually-supported active life has staved off decline to the rocking chair by a bit, and I think Dearest Spouse and my clubmates would agree. A few wounds aren’t too bad a price. 

All that being said, the reason I’m in decent shape at the moment is largely thanks to inspiration from Dearest Offspring the Younger, who back in May, while she hunkered down with us for a three-month COVID-induced house arrest (and cooked up for us an incredibly creative menu and breads and desserts and…), suggested we go for a bike ride. Out came the trusty Trek 520, purchased for the princely sum of three hundred eighty-three bucks almost exactly thirty-four years earlier (with thanks to Wing-San for the advice on that life purchase). The same trusty Trek that carried me through Appalachian Mountain Club Vermont Green Mountain Death Rides in the eighties (said sled being held up by a cycling companion, name forgotten, in the pic, circa 1989), and more importantly, carried me on AMC Worcester Thursday night rides where on one fateful evening in 1991 I met a charming lady who would become Dearest Spouse. Yes, said trusty Trek emerged, and its tires, which I couldn’t even pin to a specific decade, actually held air. And now, nineteen-hundred miles later, I’m no longer feeling like a tub.

Cycling isn’t a new thing, it’s just been in hibernation for about a quarter century. And it arrived just in time. When that fateful return to the bike came around, I’d been trying to turn the running thing back on after a six-month healing break, during which, well, we’ll get to all the fun and games that went down during that time of silence in a bit. But truth be told, it wasn’t going so well. My pace was, by my standards, molasses-like, which really didn’t matter, but worse, my body was, by anyone’s standards, rebelling. Then those two wheels rolled in to bring me back from the world of the fitness dead. Not like Phoenix rising, but like Phoenix riding. Yep, there it is, that clever title tie-in. You were waiting for it, weren’t you?

Mind you, that six-month break produced a half-dozen tries to put out some sort of an update on how things just weren’t healing. But each time I came around to, “But things just aren’t healing, I’m not running, and my loving readers, they just don’t care,” and I’d put it aside for a few weeks. Then come back to it. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Perhaps by this sixth try I’ll get it out the door. Heck, by now the article even has two titles! So, Take Six! 

 So, in rapid-fire succession, 

Take Zero (because you heard this already): The half-marathon I shouldn’t have finished, and the Cheese Storm Incident (also known as CSI: Marlborough). And… he’s down.

Take One: Death by PT! Which really meant lots of exercises that we hoped would make things stronger without breaking anything else. And sitting on the beloved (not) spin bike at the gym (which you could do, pre-COVID). And getting a bit pudgy. (Yeah, I know, not by societal standards, but still…) The plan was to do this until said knee plateaued for at least three months, at which point we might think about the nuclear option (wait, who’s “we”, I hear you ask? In this case it’s Dr. Triathlon and I, who made a secret plot to run the NYC marathon together… how’d that work out, eh?). And I wrote about it. But you really didn’t care. So I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Two: Where I prove to have the patience of a puppy. We opt to pull in our dates and jump to the nuclear option ahead of time. But Dr. Triathlon manages to break some of his own bones skiing (I ask him, “When an orthopedist breaks something, who do YOU go to?” He replies, “Me!”), so things get delayed, and next thing you know it’s time for my half-business, half-pleasure trip to Arizona where Dearest Spouse and I plan to hike the deserts after my conference. An unexpected traffic encounter (which happened to be in Phoenix; thus her recovery adds a sort of double entendre to Phoenix half of the title, you think?) puts an end to her hiking plans, but we wander the countryside anyway and I get one day of hiking at a really wild place called Chiricahua (the picture here doesn’t do it justice, you’ve gotta’ go there!), which I’d never heard of before, but which seems to pop up everywhere since. And I wrote about it, or started to, because it while the desert was cool (or hot), the whole trip experience wasn’t very uplifting (you might say it was impactful), so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Three: The nuclear option, PRP, or Plasma Rich Platelets (as opposed to the thermonuclear option, traditional meniscus surgery, which we’d decided is a bad idea for anyone who plans to remain very active). In this chapter, we extract some of my ether of life, centrifuge the daylights out of it in a really cool machine, and come up with a syringe of highly concentrated platelets – the component of your blood that induces healing. Dr. Tri refers to this stuff as “Miracle Gro”, as opposed to the sack of red blood cells left over, which will get you DQ’d for blood doping. Then we inject it into my knee and see what happens. Which, the first time, is not much. And the second time, feeling like a human pincushion, is sadly still not much. Well, you’ve gotta’ go up to bat, right? It was worth trying. And I wrote about it, but besides pictures of the cool blood machine, there wasn’t a lot compelling, so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Four: It’s now pushing March and looking doubtful I’ll be able to keep my Boston Marathon streak alive. So I hatch a diabolical plan: Cook up a virus in my Level Four Biohazard Lab deep in the basement, unleash it on the world (of course, I had thought of this and started months earlier, because I’m diabolical), and make sure the nation is led by the most incompetent collection of liars, cheats, and morons we’ve ever seen. And it worked. Boston is postponed. Five extra months to heal. My streak might live on… And I wrote about it, but the O.J. Simpson “What If I Did It?” joke was truly tasteless even by my standards, so I put it aside, unpublished.

Take Five: Said virus forces Dearest Offspring the Younger, now an experienced chef, to abandon her upstate New York outpost and take refuge in Fort Home, resulting in the aforementioned orgy of baking and cooking and pastry the likes of which the world has rarely seen. I don’t believe we ate the same dinner twice. It was, what you might call, an expansionary time. Around the time when Boston was to have been run, I tried to get back out there. I logged about eighty-five miles over a month, not enough to counteract the culinary delights, and of course, the gym was closed. Things were getting desperate. And I wrote about it, but it was just another Oh Woe Is Me tale, so I put it aside, unpublished.

And then: “Hey Dad, let’s go for a bike ride.” 

Take Six: Phoenix rides. 

[Truth in advertising: Really that was Take Seven. The original Take Six didn’t make it out the door, either. I wrote about the cycling emerging, but wasn’t sure the it would stick, so I put it aside, unpublished. But Seven was pretty much Six, so I stopped counting.]

Once I glued my thirty-year-old cycling shoes back together with silicone caulk (since shopping the Age of COVID is a challenge) and refreshed my bicycle maintenance skills, the bike quickly became a habit, much like running. The first month was exciting, the second settled into a routine, but a good one, and by the third I’d ridden to towns I’d never driven through, not to mention all three neighboring states. It’s been a ride, literally; and one that my knees have been happy about. And no, I don’t know what I’ll do come November. 

Somewhere in the haze of quarantined days, Boston turned from postponed to cancelled to virtual, and that event comes up in a few days. I’ve run a grand total of two miles around the track in the last three months. But between the cycling and plenty of hikes ranging from those Death Marches to reasonable mountains to some amusing local stuff (triple points!), the summer has seen plenty of fitness restored. Whether it will let me jog a ludicrously slow virtual marathon is anyone’s guess. Whether I’ll even try is also anyone’s guess. Wagers, anyone? 

Truth is, this could well be the end of big running miles. Or maybe not, who knows? I have been and always will be a big proponent of running as a source of physical and mental fitness, but I never deluded myself into thinking it would last forever. If this turns out to be a transition, I might not spend much time running, but the running mentality won’t let me sit on my posterior, either. It’s just fitness OCD redefined to another medium.