Boston

When people hear I grew up in Massachusetts they usually ask whether I spent a lot of time in Boston. The answer I’m quick to give is no. I lived in a small town on the New Hampshire border about an hour north, and any trip into the city was usually spent at a Red Sox game or on a class trip.

With that said, Boston holds a certain significance in my life. For one, I have early memories of a poster in our house from the 1983 Boston Marathon. I don’t know why we had it. My parents weren’t runners, yet they chose to frame and hang a poster depicting the B.A.A. crest, the route from Hopkinton to the heart of Beantown, and overlapping silhouettes of people running along a horizontal plane. It stands out in my mind. 

At 15, I went to Boston for more than baseball and Revolutionary War history; I spent five weeks in a summer program at the Berklee School of Music to study jazz piano in 2001. At the same time, my father, Clark, was also there—as a patient at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma had returned for a third time, but instead of trying chemotherapy again, he decided to undergo a relatively new procedure: his entire lymphatic system would be wiped out and then grown anew from stem cells that had been harvested from his body. I recall visiting him wearing sanitized scrubs and gloves in a negative pressure isolation room since he was so vulnerable to illness and infection while his immune system was being redeveloped. The procedure was considered a success—my father’s cancer went into remission for about five years. During that time, he and my mother moved to New Hampshire, where they ran a bed and breakfast near Lake Winnipesaukee. Lymphoma finally got the better of him in spring 2006, a month before I graduated college in New York City. So, while the short answer is no, the long answer is that Boston was the place where I first realized that my father was not going to be around for the majority of my life. It was also the place where I saw him fight and overcome an impossibly persistent disease, even if it eventually caught up to him in the end.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the choices we make in the present can drastically alter our futures. If you start with the idea of what you want to do and work backwards, you can visualize the steps along the way. Ask yourself: What do you have to do in the here and now to prepare you for the next step, and how does that get you ready for the next one? 

Training for a marathon is very much like this. You set what seems like an outrageous goal at the beginning of a training block and then take all of these little steps along the way to make it actually happen. Time is like a blanket: pinch together where you are now with where your end goal is and the fabric in between is the process. If you trust it, you’ve already accomplished the end goal by following the steps. 

This mentality is something I picked up from my father. When I think about some of the different experiences he had and lives he lived, they seem risky—he raced sailboats, built a house around a rock, opened and ran a children’s bookstore, and ran a bed and breakfast (those last three with my mother). However, there was never a moment he didn’t have a plan (or so it seemed to me as a child). He instilled in me the idea that there wasn’t really anything I couldn’t accomplish if I did my research. In fact, the risky choice could be the safe choice, if I just take the appropriate steps along the way.

There are a few situations, though—being fully cured of incurable cancer is one of them—that aren’t on the blanket of time. I can only imagine what someone as measured and exacting as my father might have been thinking when he learned of his diagnosis. It was out of his control and there was no plan that would solve it. While he didn’t share these feelings with me directly, I saw him make decisions to live life fully while he could and do his best to prepare the rest of us for what he knew was eventually coming.

The poster, along with the experience I had that summer in Boston, inspired me to set the goal of running the Boston Marathon in memory of my dad. In 2015, nine years after he had passed away, I made my own plan: I would complete the New York Road Runners 9+1 program, gaining me entry to the New York City Marathon, I would run the marathon in the Boston-qualifying time of three hours, and run the Boston Marathon the next year. Needless to say, the plan didn’t quite unfold the way I had imagined; I didn’t successfully run a qualifying marathon until my fifth try at the distance, seven years after I had initially set my goal.

This past Monday, April 17, I ran the Boston Marathon for the first time. I was finally able to experience those two points in time that I had pinched together, the fabric between them more elastic than I had imagined. There were so many steps along the way that I hadn’t expected—rewarding, life-changing steps. As I lined up at the start in Hopkinton, I wondered if this was something my dad had ever imagined I would do; I wondered if he put that poster up where I would see it every day to intentionally nudge me onto this path. As I ran by his alma mater, Babson College, I wondered who he thought I was going to be, and who he would have been as he aged. I wondered what our relationship as adults would have been like. As I turned right on Hereford, and then left on Boylston, I realized how all of it was going exactly according to Clark's plan.