Why I Am Watching Football Tonight

I am watching football tonight.

I am not watching football tonight because I agree with Colin Kaepernick (I don’t) or because I agree with Donald Trump (I don’t).

I am not watching football tonight because I agree with the players who wish to kneel in support of Kaepernick’s lead (I don’t) or because I sympathize with the NFL owners who wish to do whatever is their best option to maximize their profits (I don’t).

I am not watching football tonight because of my resigned, weary feelings towards a multi-billion-dollar maker of overpriced shoes, with decades of commercial success thanks to marketing savvy and decades of notoriety for exploiting workers in sweatshops, which now in its marketing brilliance has decided to exploit our own mindless political divisions for its own profit.

I am watching football tonight because I enjoy watching NFL football. I enjoy the athleticism, the speed, the strategy, the unpredictability. I enjoy watching the greatest QB and coach of all time lead my favorite team for as long as they still can. I think it’s a great game.

That’s why I am watching football tonight. Because I like it.

If you want to be subversive, if you want to be an individual, if you want to be (sad to say) different, here’s the best thing you can do: Watch football tonight if you like football. Don’t watch football tonight if you don’t like football.

No politics. No virtue-signaling. No retreating into the safe space of what’s supposed to be your little political tribe.

The boldest political statement you can make is the statement that our every decision does not need to be, and in fact cannot be, a political statement if we are going to stay healthy (or perhaps regain our health) as a culture.  If you find that your daily relations, your purchasing decisions, your decisions of what sports to watch, your friendships are being driven or even significantly shaped by whether you align yourself with the left or right, you are being played for a fool by the powerful. You are being manipulated. And you need to rediscover the joy and skill of thinking for yourself.

If you like football, watch football. If you don’t like football, don’t watch football.

Just do… what you please.

That is all.

 

10

We human beings are big fans of narratives. The Seattle Seahawks lost the Super Bowl to the New England Patriots because they passed on the goal line instead of giving the ball to Marshawn Lynch. Barack Obama won re-election in 2012 because Mitt Romney couldn’t relate to the average American voter and disparaged 47% of the electorate. JFK defeated Richard Nixon in 1960 because he looked better on TV. “New Coke” failed in 1985, not because it was a poor product, but because of people’s psychological attachment to the original Coke.

All of the above narratives are simultaneously partially true, partially false, and entirely impossible to prove. Narratives serve a constructive purpose, in that they take the small pieces of knowledge we share and have readily available to us, and enable us to create plausible stories to explain the events that wound up occurring. Without narratives, we would in many cases be unable to form conclusions and would spin our mental wheels, unable to move forward and make new decisions based on our knowledge of the past. All of that said, narratives can be dangerous if we put too much stock in them and mistake a narrative for reality. While narratives typically contain elements of truth, their flaw is that by using them we are using the small fragments of reality we do know in order to tell an entire, complex story, ignoring entirely the vast majority of factors that we do not know in the process, and assuming with hubris that the minority of information we already know must explain the outcome in hindsight.

Today, I became one of the happiest statistics you can become. Today, I joined the growing ranks of 10-year cancer survivors. On Tuesday, June 10, 2008, an oncology nurse administered the last of eight chemotherapy treatments that drove my Hodgkin’s Disease into remission. Fourteen weeks prior, the same nurse administered my first treatment, beginning by telling me “we’re going for the win.” This past winter, I saw the same nurse yet again for a blood draw after receiving the news from my oncologist that he only needs to see me once a year now instead of every six months.

Surviving cancer is an incredible victory and a defining experience in one’s life. However, the less you know about a person, the greater the tendency to define the entirety of that person and everything that happens to that person through the lens of the few highlights you do know. This is, again, the danger of narrative. While certain aspects of my character today have undoubtedly been influenced by my battle with cancer 10 years ago, it is a giant and unwise leap to assume very many aspects or events in my post-cancer life would have unfolded much differently had that battle never occurred. Would my career have looked different? Would I drive a different car? Would my outward personality vary much in a non-malignant parallel universe from what it is in the real 2018?

The answers to all three of those questions are, I haven’t the foggiest idea and neither do you. However, if we don’t stray into the realm of narrative and stick to the facts, it’s still possible to say beyond a reasonable doubt that none of the following things could or would have happened had chemotherapy not existed and I had not been able to survive cancer a decade ago:

I would not be alive, and probably wouldn’t have lived to see my 35th birthday.

My two daughters, now 8 years old and 5 years old, would never have existed.

By extension, anything my two daughters will go on to accomplish in this world, and any descendants they may ultimately produce, would never have existed. You can extrapolate this through generations and see the butterfly effect that saving one life can produce.

If I had never experienced cancer, I would never have been motivated to run a dozen marathons nor to raise many thousands of dollars to benefit cancer charities and help turn other patients into survivors. And that brings me to the fun announcement portion of this blog post:

I did not create the above graphic. The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society did, in naming me their Honored Hero for the 2018 Chicago Marathon being held this October. The photo on the right is me with my wife Krissie on our wedding day, June 21, 2008 – yes, 11 days after that aforementioned final chemo treatment. The photo on the left was taken less than 16 months later in downtown Chicago as I crossed the finish line of my first marathon, fulfilling a promise I made the day after I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease. I will be running this fall not just as an Honored Hero but also to raise funds for the LLS. If you’d like, you can donate to the charity and help turn more patients into survivors at this link.

Because of all the problems described above with narratives and the fact that I really don’t think I am any sort of egomaniacal person, I can’t quite get fully comfortable with the “hero” tag they are bestowing on me. Heroes wear tights. Heroes fly. Heroes are, if not faultless, close. I am none of those things. What I am is somebody who took his medicine, got better, and got healthy enough afterwards to run marathons for charity and raise a family and be a husband and a dad. And if that makes me some sort of a hero to some, well, so be it, but I really think that just goes to show that anybody can be a hero.

We are, all of us, more than our narratives and have innumerable facets beyond and beneath our labels. While I do not know and cannot know the precise extent to which my own facets and traits have been shaped by my cancer experience, I do know that survivorship has made my life richer than it would have been otherwise. If you currently find yourself battling cancer, know that while you are unfortunate in one very big and obvious way, you are also very fortunate in more subtle ways that will reveal themselves over time. I am very fortunate indeed to have been given a full healthy decade post-cancer. I look forward to many more. And it is my hope that I, and others like me, can do our own small part to make the same possible for others with effects that ripple through the generations.

So Long, Sports Night

A few months ago, I was the last one awake in the house one late evening and had nothing else pressing to do, so I decided to browse Hulu. I stumbled upon reruns of Sports Night, and immediately with excitement chose an episode from midway through its two-season run. Once upon a time – that time happening to coincide with my junior and senior years of college – Sports Night was considered as smart and as cutting edge as network TV could get. Aaron Sorkin’s early-career creation featured witty, quick-paced dialogue and several actors who would go on to long, successful careers – plus a Robert Guillaume nearing the end of his to lend gravitas to the cast. As an aspiring sportscaster, the sports director of my college radio station, and an intern at WABC-TV in New York at the time, I loved Sports Night. So it was with great excitement I tuned to it on Hulu, only to be stunned. I discovered that what seemed so cutting edge in 1999, had aged shockingly poorly. The dialogue which once seemed so witty and fresh now felt forced. I could only stomach half an episode before shutting it off. How had a show gone from great to unwatchable in less than two decades when mediocrities such as “Home Improvement” remain eminently enjoyable if caught in reruns? I thought about it for a few minutes, and then, what had initially shocked me suddenly made perfect sense.

“Sports Night” is no longer watchable in 2018, because it depicts a fleeting American media landscape which has become an anachronism. To anyone under the age of roughly 28, I suspect the world it depicts is borderline unrecognizable. This realization immediately made perfect sense to me, because that very changing of the sports and media landscape is the same thing that led me to depart that world and seek a career change.

If you are a follower of this blog, you know it’s been dormant for the better part of a year. I feel like I owe you an explanation, and so, I am writing this entry for you.

In the past year, I had the chance to do a lot of reading. I read some very good books. One concept that struck me in the books that I read was that of change, and this concept is one that took me half a lifetime to grasp. A lot of people probably never grasp it. Specifically, there’s a tendency among human beings to decide either “change is bad” or “change is good,” and to identify yourself in one of the two camps, either a traditionalist or a radical. Intrinsically, this fallacy never quite made sense to me. Myself, I never quite fit in either camp. In many ways I am conservative and a traditionalist, yet I am also forward-looking and unafraid of change when it is warranted. In the modern-day American political climate, the very notions of conservatism and radicalism have been turned on their ears as in many areas (I am thinking largely fiscally here, but also culturally) those known as “progressives” are most protective of policies of the past and entrenched power, while the “conservatives” are the actual radicals.

Anyway, my realization on change is this: Change is by definition neither bad nor good. Change is a constant. Change is reality. An endearing character flaw in human nature is the tendency to, when we first find something, assume that the way we found it was its natural, intended state. This illusion leads us to resist change as somehow upsetting the natural order of things. However, this gets it exactly backwards. Change itself is the natural order of things. When you were born, your parents were probably very different people from who they had been a decade prior. As a young child, you didn’t realize this. We get lulled into thinking the parents we know as preschoolers will remain more or less the same forever. Of course, the reality is that our parents are constantly changing just as we are ourselves. If you move into a neighborhood, the state in which you initially find that neighborhood is not static but in the midst of a continuous process of change. Someone who’s lived there for a decade is bemoaning the loss of what it once was, while someone who moves in a decade after you will see that new state as the illusory ideal. This does not mean we should embrace all change or resist it, but rather we should expect it to occur as the natural order of the universe and evaluate each change on its own merits, with as little sentimentality as possible.

The world of sports media and sports statistics and, yes, “Sports Night,” which I entered as a newly-minted college graduate at the turn of the millennium was one I had come to believe was an intended state when, in reality, it was merely a fleeting state amidst constant change. By roughly 2005, the sports media and analytics landscapes had already become significantly different from what they were in 2000. By 2015, they were essentially unrecognizable. I don’t care to provide a lot of additional detail here because I have plenty of friends and former colleagues who still work in sports and whom I respect, and I don’t want any of those people to think I am bashing the industry. Though I do have my stark philosophical differences with the current states of both sports analytics and the sports media, that’s not my intent. If you want to discuss it with me one of these days, I’d be happy to meet you for coffee at any Starbucks where you can even use the restroom now without ordering a coffee.

My intent is merely to explain that, by early last year, I no longer enjoyed working in the sports world and no longer saw a future for myself in it. I came to realize that the cynical, stressed, unhappy person I was at work and in the first couple of hours after work each day was a person I increasingly didn’t like very much, and I liked myself much better in almost all other settings. This wasn’t healthy, and I knew that in order to look out for my own future and my ability to support my family long term, I had to make the leap and quit. It was the only viable option and, inspired by game theory much like my coaching hero Bill Belichick, I saw that the true risk would come not by making the move too early, but by waiting until it suddenly became too late.
The career transition took longer than I hoped it would, and during that time I didn’t feel much like blogging. I have always seen my career as a central aspect of my identity, and stripped of that identity, I didn’t much want to share my voice. I wanted to get everything in order first. As I write now, everything is back in order and I am ready to share my voice again. I have been working for the past month in a new role for a terrific software company where I am happy, challenged, and believe I could stay and thrive for a long time.

So, you’re going to see more blogging from me again. I am running the Chicago Marathon this fall (more exciting stuff on that to come very soon), and this little spot on the web will be back to its regularly-scheduled programming. Though I am glad to be back, I really never left you all. I just retreated into my bunker for a while. And while I may have said goodbye to the world of “Sports Night,” I will never say goodbye to my beloved world of sports and sports fandom.

Why I Love Running

I love running because it is the world’s simplest sport to take up, yet can never be mastered.

I love running because people of all ages, from the single digits to the nineties, can do it.

I love running because it is the world’s only sport where pure weekend amateurs share the stage with the sport’s greatest legends, on the same course in the same event at the same time.

I love running because it is possible, at least theoretically, that an unknown amateur could win a world-class race.

I love running because, wherever you travel, as long as you pack a pair of sneakers and a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, you can get a great workout and gain views of the city you are visiting that few tourists ever will.

I love running because it calms you and makes you feel better when you are unhappy, and feels like a natural way to celebrate when you are happy. Essentially, it does the same things that people turn to alcohol for, except it is healthy and makes your mind sharper instead of dulling it.

I love running because, no matter what trail you are on in what state or country, you are instantly bonded with all other runners on the trail in the simple gesture of the runner’s wave.

I love running for a similar reason to why I love all sports: because sports are one place in our world where the playing field and the outcome are almost always fair. Running takes this fairness to a unique level of simplicity, as the only way you judge success or failure is by your own race against the clock.

I love running because a race can have tens of thousands of participants with tens of thousands of unique stories, and it is possible for most of those runners to consider themselves winners at the end of the race, and rightly so.

I love running because the primary goal of most of those tens of thousands of runners is not to defeat the other runners, but rather to push themselves to be the best they possibly can.

I love running because many of the friends I like and respect the most are runners, and because 90% of the runners I have ever met are people I truly like and respect.

I love running because marathons bring out the best in the residents of a city. It’s often said that if you feel despondent about the condition of the human race, you should go out and watch a marathon. This is true, and you should. There may be many things which divide us, but I defy you to watch a marathon and come away thinking the human race is not salvageable.

I love running because a cheeseburger a few hours after a well-run race will taste like the greatest cheeseburger you have ever eaten, even if it’s not.

I love running because the sleep you get after running a hard race will be some of the soundest sleep you’ve had in recent memory.

I love running because I love the rewarding soreness that turns descending a flight of stairs into a Herculean task in the first 24 hours after a marathon.

I love running because this is our bleepin’ city.

I love running because, while many people say they could never do it, most of them actually could if they really wanted to.

I love running because as long as there is a next race, there is a next goal to achieve and a reason to keep pushing.

I love running because, nine years ago, the goal of having a marathon on the horizon helped motivate me to defeat cancer and, after hitting the reset button on my body, working myself into better shape than I had ever previously been.

I love running because it has inspired millions upon millions of dollars to be donated to worthy charitable causes, including the fight against cancer.

I love running because the anticipation of the starting line and all its possibilities is like few other feelings.

I love running because the triumphant relief of the finish line is also like few other feelings.

I love running because Dick and Rick Hoyt.

I love running because Juma Ikangaa.

I love running because one time I got Bib #26 in a marathon, and drew a little “.2” next to it with a Sharpie on my bib because you can’t forget the last .2. This really happened.

I love running because I hope, one day, to luck into Bib #24601 and claim it entitles me to steal a loaf of bread from a convenience store along the course.

I love running because it pushes me to be better.

I love running because there can always be another race to try and be better officially.

I love running because I can run, and as long as I can run I will.

Next weekend, I will run the Chicago Marathon. It will be my fifth Chicago Marathon and my 13th marathon overall, all of them post-cancer treatment. I cannot say exactly how the day will shake out, save for one thing: I will love it.

Happy running.

 

 

 

Pure Persistence: Boston Marathon Race Recap

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

-Calvin Coolidge, 30^th President of the United States

I am writing this blog post aboard Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited from Worcester, Mass. back to my adopted home of Chicago. In doing so, I feel a little bit like Peter King, the longtime Monday Morning Quarterback columnist for Sports Illustrated who frequently writes his copy aboard Sunday night Acela trains and seems to take pleasure in telling his readership all about it. This is probably the closest I will ever come to actually being Peter King. Once upon a time, I thought I could be Peter King, or Peter Gammons, or another similarly prominent sportswriter. Prior to that, I thought I could be a national sportscaster like Bob Costas or Al Michaels. And, years prior to that, I thought that one day I could be like Jim Rice and play left field for the Red Sox.

I was wrong on all three counts. In a parallel universe, in a different lifetime, with different circumstances and/or breaks, perhaps I could have become a Gammons or a Costas. Somewhere in there I do still believe I possessed the talent to do either, but maybe I never did. It’s hard to say, and much like the old Tootsie Pop conundrum, the world may never know. My dreams of playing for the Red Sox were strictly that: dreams. I most definitely never possessed the talent to be a professional athlete.

TALENT WILL NOT.

Yet, there is at least one corner of athletics where those among us without the God-given talent to achieve at the highest levels can, for brief (or not so brief, if you have a slow pace) moments, lace ’em up and occupy the same playing surface of legends. That corner is distance running. The Boston Marathon is its Super Bowl. For the second straight year, I was fortunate enough to score a bib for a cancer charity, lace up my own Sauconys and take my place at the same starting line in Hopkinton as the world’s elites.

This one wasn’t really supposed to happen. Last year, I ran for Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Though I would have loved to sign up again for 2017, I didn’t believe my fundraising well was deep enough to reach the required charity minimum for Boston two years in a row, so I planned on sitting this one out. Then, at the start of February, I received a surprise call from Drenda Vijuk. Drenda, whom I met through running races with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training program in Chicago, was scheduled to run Boston this year with Team In Training, but had to drop out due to other commitments. Knowing me as a friend and cancer survivor with Boston roots, Drenda asked if I would be willing to come off the bench and take her spot on the team. I accepted, and the race was on. Ten weeks to whip myself into marathon shape, come home, and run Boston again.

The Calvin Coolidge quote at the top of this piece was a favorite of Drenda’s husband Joe, who personified it throughout his life, not least by surviving multiple bouts with cancer. Joe is no longer with us, but I decided that I wanted to dedicate my 2017 Boston Marathon to Joe’s memory, and so I ran with his name and the first sentence of the Coolidge quote on my shirt.

Two days after I received the call from Drenda, my beloved New England Patriots played in the Super Bowl, and if you are remotely into sports you know how that turned out. Trailing 28-3 to Atlanta, Tom Brady and the Pats stormed back to mount the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history, winning 34-28 on James White’s touchdown in overtime.

Knowing I needed to increase my mileage quickly in order to run the marathon, I began pounding out near-daily 5ks on the treadmills in my office building’s gym over my lunch hour. The Monday following the Super Bowl, while on the treadmill, I had a post-Super Bowl panel discussion on ESPN. Some reporter – I can’t remember who – at one point made an off-handed comment in the midst of discussing the Patriots QB’s longevity that “Tom Brady doesn’t drink beer.”

When I heard that comment, I thought, “hey, why don’t I stop drinking beer until the marathon?” Now, I don’t drink very much to begin with under normal circumstances – maybe a beer with dinner a couple of times a week – but I saw no downside to cutting out alcohol entirely for a while, and it isn’t a big enough part of my life so that this was at all difficult. In the process, I also cut out just about all sweets and excess sugars and substantially increased my water intake.

Partially thanks to closely watching my diet, partially thanks to diligent training, and partially thanks to the wisdom gained through running 11 previous marathons, I felt an almost eerie sense of calm leading up to Monday’s race. I slept great the night before the race. I approached the starting line with almost zero butterflies. I was entirely injury-free. There was no reason to expect anything other than a strong race.

The Boston Team In Training coaches repeatedly stressed the importance of going out slowly, and I had already learned the hard way from my experience in 2016 how correct they were. If you search on this blog for my recap from last year’s race, you’ll find more details, but the early miles of the Boston course basically start off like a roller coaster. I took the downhills hard, and they sapped most of the juice out of my legs early.

I was determined to avoid a repeat performance in 2017, and especially when the weather turned out hotter than forecast (it was in the 70’s throughout) I made the conscious decision to start out extra slow. Checking my stopwatch, after I saw that I’d cleared the first three miles at a 10-ish minute pace, even though I was feeling strong I intentionally dialed it back.

Sports fanatic that I am, I am incapable of participating in an event like this without having various sports analogies and figures roll through my head at different junctures. As I enter Natick around Mile 8, I can’t help but think of local legend Doug Flutie and his “Miracle in Miami” pass to Gerard Phelan. Shortly thereafter I heard the voice of Joe Castiglione on a radio on the sidewalk, and asked the man with the radio the score of the Patriots’ Day Red Sox game.

“4-2!”

“4-2, Red Sox?”

“Yep.”

Above all during this portion of the race, I thought of Patriots coach Bill Belichick. A brilliant tactician and game theorist, Belichick employs principles which I have, over the years, tried to incorporate into my own life (and no, this is not an exaggeration). Belichick’s strategies often seem counter-intuitive, but they are always made with a long-term vision in mind. He also is unsentimental, and will adjust on the fly to his current circumstances, as opposed to adhering to what he originally believed the circumstances of a game or a season would be. Perhaps most importantly, Belichick always devises a game plan which neutralizes the opposition’s greatest asset. In other words, if the opponent features a stud running back, Belichick will develop a defensive scheme to contain that running back. If the opponent prevails, it will be on the strength of a secondary option.

I began to see my own game plan for this race as a pseudo-Belichickian strategy. Run too slow, almost painfully slow, on the early hills so that they would not destroy my leg muscles. After the race’s midway point, the course becomes mostly flat or downhill save for three big hills in Newton. By the time I hit Newton in 2016, I had no energy left in my legs. Not this time. I would hit the race’s midway point, gain adrenaline from the Wellesley College “scream tunnel,” and turn on the jets for the back half of the course. I was banking leg energy and would close with negative splits. Call it a “Bank it and Crank It” game plan.

Approaching Wellesley, I was almost giddy. Many runners were passing me as I progressed slowly, but I moved along with a big smile on my face. At a couple of moments I even giggled under my breath to myself. My legs felt so fresh, almost as if I had barely run 5k instead of a half-marathon. Anyone tracking me on the marathon app would assume I was struggling, but I would soon take off and surprise them all. “Bank It and Crank It” was going to work. I had the energy to take off at any moment; all I had to do was pick my spot.

Shortly after Wellesley College, my friend and fellow Hodgkin’s Disease survivor Calli – whom I wrote about in my pre-race blog post – caught up with me. I asked how she was feeling and she responded that she felt no pain, injury free. Such great news after she had battled injury in the final weeks of training. She asked me the same and I responded that though I was going slow at the moment it was “all strategery.” I explained that I was going to lay in the weeds for a small bit longer and then take off. She took off ahead and said I’d probably catch up to her soon.

“Soon” would be a three hours later after the finish, the next time Calli would see me. On a hot day, celebrating her 10-year cure-versary, she ran stronger than I think anyone anticipated, including herself. She should be extremely proud.

I bided my time for another half-mile or so, proceeded up a small incline around Wellesley Hills, and decided, “this is it.” It was go time. I smiled and giggled to myself once more, and cranked up the pace to somewhere in the 9:30-10:00 range, which for me is a comfortable 10k or half marathon.

It felt superb. Where other runners had been mostly passing me for the past handful of miles, now I began cruising past all of them. I was 14 miles into my race, yet with virtually fresh legs. The final 12 miles of a marathon would never be easy, but the fastest close of my life seemed not merely attainable, but almost a certainty, until…

GENIUS WILL NOT; UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB

…it all fell apart at once.

At Mile 15, the heat began to get to me. I felt it swirling up from my neck and around my head. And, seconds later, the unmistakable feeling of nausea entered the pit of my stomach. I had two choices: Slow down, or throw up. I chose to slow my pace. The legs had what I needed, but my insides did not.

A mile or so later, one of my other Team In Training teammates, Talya, caught up to me and said hello. I told her about my queasiness, and she told me she was suffering from the exact same thing. A lot of people were; it was the heat. Leave it to someone who works within the medical profession to be prepared. Talya was carrying antacid tablets with her and offered me one. I took it and thank her and chewed it, and could barely muster the saliva to choke it down. I was losing fluids from the heat and my mouth was simply too dry.

I resolved to get water from the next aid station, and did, but even swallowing the water was no easy task due to my burgeoning nausea. The Tums tablet did seem to have a nominally positive effect, but it wasn’t enough. As I entered the Newton Hills, with each incline and decline I felt my insides tossed and had to walk. At one point, I felt poorly enough that I had to take a seat on the curb for a minute. About to start heaving, when I reached the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Chestnut Street midway through Newton, I had no choice but to stumble over to a medical aid tent, sit in a chair, and sip water while waiting for my stomach to settle.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

This aid tent was just about one-half mile from where my brother Ben was stationed with a camera, steps from our onetime childhood home. I texted him to let him know the situation, but to hang tight, I was going to try and continue. About 10 minutes later, I sent a second text: “Feeling a bit better… I think I am going to give it a go.”

I took off from the aid tent, slowly increasing my walk to a run. I did this a couple of times in fits and starts as my ailing stomach would tolerate. I was running when I saw Ben, stopped by him for a few seconds and explained the situation. My stomach was causing significant issues on this day, but I would not stop. I was going to finish this.

The stomach issues never really subsided. They didn’t get worse again, but neither did they improve. I could run slowly on the straightaways, but every time I hit even a small hill my insides would shake up. In my head, I began thinking of Joe Vijuk, and saying phrases to myself in my head:

Joe Vijuk escaped war-torn, Communist Eastern Europe as a child with his family on a boat.

Joe Vijuk endured to play professional football, was a teammate of Joe Theismann, and reached the CFL’s Grey Cup.

Joe Vijuk went into business, succeeded, and donated lots of his money to charitable causes, including much in the fight against cancer.

Joe Vijuk fought cancer multiple times.

Joe Vijuk lost the use of his legs.

Joe Vijuk suffered through far more severe physical pain than I, in my own half-year bout with cancer, ever knew.

Joe Vijuk might well be watching me today.

Joe Vijuk was not a runner, but if he had been, and he was having the same race I am today, he would certainly finish. And he would do so with a big smile on his face.

I dedicated my race to Joe. I will finish it for him. 

Joe Vijuk lost the use of his legs. I have plenty of stored power left in mine. 

I will never, never quit a race I am running for a cancer charity. I will finish this marathon.

I will finish this marathon with a smile on my face.

And so, as Calvin Coolidge suggested, I pressed on. It was not pretty, it was not comfortable, but it was joyous. As our Chicago Team In Training head coach Marie always counsels, “take what the day gives you.”

This day gave me an upset stomach and a shattered race strategy. This day gave me a crappy, slow marathon time. This day also gave me a second opportunity to run the world’s greatest marathon in front of the world’s greatest spectators in the world’s greatest sports city, my hometown. And I was going to gladly take it all.

I passed a Patriots fan on the right-hand side of Commonwealth Avenue. He encouraged me. I shouted back at him, “The Pats trailed 28-3 in the Super Bowl in the third quarter, right? Well, watch this. I am going to win the Boston Marathon!” The guy loved it and cheered louder.

I passed the good-natured, inebriated students of Boston College and soaked in their encouragement. Turning the corner onto Chestnut Hill Avenue, I saw my younger brother Jeremiah and his wife Joanne, expecting their first baby next month. As I ran up to them I told Joanne, “I feel your nausea!” I told them, too, that it was slow going but I would finish.

Turning up Beacon Street through Brookline, the cheers grew louder, the spectators simply willing all the struggling runners on to reach the finish line. I hit Mile Marker 23, which is at the corner of Beacon and Winthrop Streets, just two blocks downhill from another one of my childhood homes. Calli – as well as several of the other Team In Training runners – had written the name of a cancer survivor or patient on her arm for each mile. Mile 23 was my mile. Remembering even that gave me energy.

I began to call back to the spectators throughout Brookline. “Thank you, Brookline!” “Thank you, Coolidge Corner!” The encouragement from the sidewalks and Green Line tracks only grew louder the closer I came to Boston. The loudest cheers I heard in this neighborhood were not for me, but deservedly for a wounded serviceman struggling up Beacon Street with an American flag in his left hand and a prosthetic right leg. As I passed him, I turned to him and said, “you are doing a great job, and thank you.”

The joy grew deeper the closer I drew to the finish. From the top floor of an apartment building, some alcohol-fueled spectators called out to me. “Pass that guy!!,” they said, directing me towards a struggling runner about 25 feet in the distance. I felt extremely conflicted in this moment, but I could not resist the opportunity to please a cohort of drunken Boston sports fans.

“You want me to pass him??”

“YEAH!!,” they responded.

Hoping the struggling runner would forgive me, I kicked it into gear with my still-able legs and passed him. The drunken fans in the apartment went bonkers. This must be what it felt like when Scott Zolak led the Patriots to their only two wins in 1992.

A more wholesome kind of inspiration came at Mile 25 as I entered Kenmore Square. There is a woman named Sandy Dubuc, who lost her son Matty to leukemia some years back, and who is heavily involved with the Dana-Farber team for which I ran in 2016. Her older son Chris, now a student at Penn State, ran Boston last year for Dana-Farber and posted an outstanding time. The Dubucs stand at Mile 25 each year, and Sandy offers a hug to each of the Dana-Farber runners. Last year, I wasn’t expecting to see them, but she recognized me immediately and called out my full name: “Matt Brown!!!” I knew who she was and acknowledged her, but was a bit too far away and didn’t stop for a hug.

This year, I looked specifically for the Dubucs, as I wasn’t sure I’d be recognized wearing TNT purple instead of DFMC orange. Yet, amazingly, Sandy again saw me first and recognized me instantly. The Dana-Farber team has upwards of 500 runners. I have no idea how she does this.

“I had to call out your full name last year!”

“Not this time.”

She, her husband, and Chris all were there. She gave me a hug, asked about my race. We thanked each other, not teammates in uniform this year but teammates in defeating cancer. I continued on for the final mile.

Before getting to the finish, I would be remiss if I did not backtrack one-half mile and note that those aforementioned TNT Boston coaches, Caitlyn and Kevin, were both out on the course shortly before Kenmore Square to greet runners, accompany them for a stretch, and make sure they are all safely reaching the finish line. Both in Boston and Chicago, these charity program coaches do great work, and must be in excellent condition in their own right. Simply running back and forth throughout the day, they log an imposing amount of miles and receive no medal for their efforts. Their job is simply to make sure their runners finish, and do so healthily. I found both Caitlyn and Kevin to be relentlessly upbeat, friendly, and excellent overall. Even though I was only back home for a long weekend, they certainly made this adopted Chicagoan feel right back at home.

And yes, home. The home stretch. Under one last underpass. Right on Hereford. Left on Boylston. And East on Boylston Street for four final alphabetically-reversed blocks (Gloucester, Fairfield, Exeter, Dartmouth, everybody talk about Pop Muzik) which feel like a dozen blocks after you’ve already traversed 26 miles in the heat. The cheers kick in as you turn onto Hereford, and it is truly energizing. Then you turn the last corner (where I saw Ben cheering with his camera again). This is the point where I get other sports legends in my mind: the actual legends of Boston Marathons past. Meb Keflezighi bringing home the title for the USA post-bombing in 2014. Uta Pippig fighting stomach issues and winning in 1996. Ibrahim Hussein sprinting past my all-time personal favorite, Juma Ikangaa, to nip him by one second at the tape in ’88.

If you grew up watching this great race, as I did, you think of all these runners as you turn onto Boylston and tread the same ground. I, and most of the other runners on this course, do not have the talent to ever dream about competing with marathon champions. I could quit my job, devote myself to marathon training year-round, take up a diet of organic kale, beet smoothies, supplements, and free-range ostrich, and the best I could ever hope for under ideal circumstances would be to achieve a 3:30 marathon one day…. maybe.

Yet, it is possible to gain a spot on the same course. It is possible for us mere mortals to gain entry into the realm of sport immortals. In the case of myself and other runners doing it for cancer charities, we are doing it to help our fellow mere mortals live longer, more productive lives. I don’t know whether that makes us worthy of sharing the same stage as the elites, but it should make us worthy of something.

As I titled my previous blog post prior to this race, any day you can run a marathon is a great day. This was not my fastest day, and few great days include a queasy stomach, but this was indeed a great, great day. Talent had no role in it, nor did intellect, nor did education. This was all guts (figuratively, not literally, because those guts were screaming) and, yes, persistence.

Next marathon is in Chicago this October, when persistence will be the order of the day yet again no matter what the day should bring.

Thank you to the LLS, the Boston coaches and teammates, the security and volunteers, and all the running community and city of Boston for a terrific race.

And thanks to Joe Vijuk for inspiring me to keep pushing.

That is all.

Anyday You Run a Marathon is a Great Day

Nine years and two months ago, I sat in a doctor’s office as an oncology nurse presented me a set of four cards. Each card represented one of the four drugs I would soon be administered on a biweekly basis, my chemotherapy regimen for Hodgkin’s Disease. Approaching a decade later, I cannot recall off the top of my head the full names of the drugs represented by the acronym ABVD, but whatever… we may as well call them Atrocious, Blech, Vomitrocious, and Dastardly, because that’s what these drugs are. If you’re not familiar with chemotherapy, the concept in a nutshell is, “we are going to poison you, not quite enough so that it physically kills you, but just enough so that it kills the cancer dwelling inside you.

Keeping in mind that these drugs are really just fine-tuned varieties of poison, the side effects listed on the cards the nurse read to me and gave me make more sense: Severe nausea. Sore throat. Fever. Muscle pain. Bone pain. Extreme tiredness and lethargy. Headaches. Feelings of disorientation and/or confusion. Constipation. And the dreaded “metallic taste.”

As the nurse ran through all of these “probable to occur” side effects, I listened and indicated I fully understood them. She gave me the cards to take home. Later, at home by myself, I read through them again and I laughed at them.

An explanation is probably necessary. There is no denying that the side effects of chemo are no picnic. Some of them, chiefly among them the “metallic taste” – a sensation which can best be described as the taste of an emptied, open can of tuna fish rising into your mouth continuously from the back of your throat – take away any desire you may have had to have a picnic.

I knew these side effects sounded bad. Yet, at the same time, I also knew that bad as they may be, there was no way they could hold a candle to what I’d experienced with Hodgkin’s Disease. Twenty-five pounds of muscle loss in two months. Tiredness. Confusion. Memory loss. Slowed speech. Lack of appetite. Soaking night sweats every two hours. And none of these things were happening to a body on the mend, but one headed towards death if nothing was done to reverse the process. And so, in comparison, the side effects of chemo just sounded funny to me. It was the only way I could get better, so who cares about a little inconvenience? Bring it.

On Monday, I will take to my hometown course to run the Boston Marathon for the second straight year. It will be the 12th marathon I have finished, all of them occurring post-cancer. Six of those 12 will have been run to support cancer charities, including this Boston Marathon for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and its Team In Training program.

Tonight, the Team In Training Boston Marathon team held a start-of-the-weekend Meet and Greet event. Coming from out of town as I did, the one person at this event whom I’d met prior to tonight was my friend Calli, who ran for the charity in Chicago prior to moving to Boston a couple of years ago. Calli and I are both Hodgkin’s survivors, indicated by the fact that we each have the same fading scars from a lymph node biopsy on the right sides of our respective necks. I suppose she is my scar sister and I am her biopsy brother.

Calli’s training season has been complicated by injury, though she will run and finish the race Monday. I asked her tonight how she is feeling about the race, and she said that while she knows it will not be her fastest race, she remembers watching me run the same race last year. She and other friends were stationed in Newton just before Heartbreak Hill. She said tonight that last year when I reached Newton I looked like I was really struggling (and she’s totally right, I was struggling and I ran like hot garbage that day), but she also remembers how happy I was after the race despite the struggle, and how I would call it my favorite race i had ever run. She expects the same for herself on Monday. It will be a battle, but the support and joy of running Boston will carry her through. It will be a great day.

I do not expect to run like hot garbage on Monday. I have done all the “right things” in training the past couple of months. I am feeling and running as well as i have felt and run in probably close to three years. Not to be overlooked, I now know what to expect on the Boston course and not to go out too fast on the downhills of the early miles because they will beat your legs to a pulp before you reach Natick.

Yet, you never know what a given day will bring. It’s conceivable I could cramp up at some point. The weather might play a role. Something entirely unexpected could go wrong at any time. I might, by luck of the draw, happen to draw a day where I am simply not feeling it and I do race like hot garbage. It happens. And, well , bring it.

No matter what happens, Monday will indeed be a great day. When you have driven down a highway and suddenly forgotten your entire drive, when you have sat in bed at night by yourself choking back tears praying just to please feel normal and healthy again one day, when you have been in the vise grip of the most feared disease of our time, and then through the miracles of modern medicine and the grace of God you have made a full recovery to become not merely normal again but stronger and healthier than you were before? After that happens, every day that comes afterwards is a good day.

And any day when you can take your place on the starting line of a marathon, soak in the support of the crowds, and battle through all 26.2 miles of fatigue and pain to reach the finish line? Whatever the day brings, all of it – much like those dreaded chemo drugs – is much less painful than cancer. And any day where you can be part of a marathon is, indeed, a great, great day.

See you at the finish line on Monday, no matter how long it takes. I don’t plan to keep you waiting too long, though.

 

The Wonder of Sports

When I began writing this piece 17 days ago on the first Thursday of March Madness, I had correctly predicted 10 of 12 NCAA basketball tournament games correctly, including both upsets. That’s an 83.3% success rate, which makes me sound pretty insightful and prescient if you don’t know any better. But my six-year-old daughter filled out her bracket with zero knowledge of basketball, only knowing that the teams with lower numbers next to them are better than the high-numbered teams but they don’t always win, and picking teams based on nicknames, and her record was also 10-2. And, what would someone’s record have been who selected all favorites? You guessed it, also 10-2. In other words, giving yourself too much credit for predicting most college basketball tournament games correctly on Day 1 is a little bit like a generally young and healthy person waking up in the morning and saying, “hey, I don’t have a cold today. I must be taking great care of myself. Go me!” While you didn’t do anything obviously wrong, it’s most accurate to say you just sort of glided into the most probable outcome which happened to be generally positive.

Sports have been an enormous influence on the trajectory of my entire life. If you total up the number of sporting events I have watched in my four decades on this planet, it is almost certainly in the five figures. Though several of my teachers during my childhood did not understand my love of sports and attempted to either belittle it or steer me away from it, I have worked in the sports industry ever since I graduated college. That’s going on 17 years. During that time I have researched sports statistics and history, written about and analyzed sports, and worked with customers in the sports media. On a few different occasions, I have even invented new statistics. None ever particularly saw a wide light of day, but the formulas worked. With all of that experience, you would assume I am an expert, that I can predict the outcomes of games and the success and failure of players and teams with much greater accuracy than the layperson. And, to a certain extent, you would be correct. I tend to win the fantasy football championships of between 15% and 20% of the leagues which I enter, which is about twice the expected rate of success in a 12-person league. I have won multiple March Madness office pools, which carry still smaller odds of success. If you were to ask me to break down an upcoming baseball or football or basketball game and predict the outcome, in most cases I could deliver you an in-depth, reasoned analysis and a good healthy stab at the outcome. Yet, despite all the years of experience and the tens of thousands of hours observing these wonderful games, that’s all it would be. A good healthy stab. It might be right. It probably has a slightly higher chance of proving accurate than the guess of Joe Blow on the street. But, you know what? Joe Blow will still outpredict me a large percentage of the time. And, you might be surprised to read this, but this very unpredictability is what makes sports irresistible.

When I first began working in sports in the summer of 2000, nobody had ever heard of baseball metrics like WAR or xERA or FIP or BABIP, which are now commonplace. For that matter, in the summer of 2000, you rarely even heard the term “metric” when it came to sports. Today, we are living in a different world. The company I work for tracks each team’s win probability continuously with each play of each game, and monitors and records every small movement of every player on an NBA basketball court. These innovations, too, are becoming commonplace.

Yet, despite all of those technological advances and statistical innovations, when it comes to predicting who will win one given game on one given day, we are scarcely any more accurate than an ink-stained sportswriter of the 1960’s who based everything on the eye test and only knew the handful of statistics that got printed in the 1960’s newspapers. And, this is just how it should be, just how it always will be. Because the beauty of sport, the true appeal of sport, does not lie in the ability to predict it. It lies in the fact that you cannot predict it, at least not consistently.

Now, some people are reading this right now and thinking, “Matt, you’re ridiculously wrong. Data shows that the sacrifice bunt is poor strategy. Teams should go for it more on 4th down. There’s no such thing as a clutch player. Etc, etc, etc….” And, in a way those people are correct, but they are correct in aggregate. Individual games are not played in aggregate. They are played one at a time. So, while the sacrifice bunt may cost teams runs over the long haul, that doesn’t mean it will cost the team runs in a given situation on a given day. And even if I may win my fantasy football league twice as often as the average person, there’s nonetheless a non-insignificant chance I will finish dead last this year.

As I return to this post to finish it 17 days later, it is the eve of baseball’s Opening Day and the Cubs and Cardinals are playing on ESPN on my TV eight feet away from me. Jon Lester is on the mound at Busch Stadium. This is a fitting backdrop for me to express my own love of sports. Like me, Jon Lester is a lymphoma survivor who emerged stronger after defeating the disease. Lester returned from his bout with lymphoma to win the clinching game of the 2007 World Series for my beloved Boston Red Sox. Less than four months following that victory, I was diagnosed. Shortly thereafter, tipped off by a couple of my colleagues at the office, Lester wrote me a short, hand-signed letter encouraging me in my own fight.

The story gets better still. In 2013, I trained to run a half marathon in St. Louis in late October. As luck and/or fate would have it, the Red Sox and Cardinals reached the World Series that fall and wound up in St. Louis at the very same time. Unabashed Boston sports fan that I am, I had no choice but to run the half marathon while wearing a Red Sox shirt and hat, and carrying a figurine of David Ortiz in my pocket (a “pocket Papi”). I got showered with good-natured boos on the course by Cardinals fans, and I egged on those fans and soaked up the boos. As many athletes in the past have attested, getting booed can be even more rewarding than getting cheered, because while cheers can be a Pavlovian response of a sort, getting booed always means that the fans care.

I do not believe I have ever run better overall than I did that October day in 2013, when I cruised through St. Louis and set a half marathon personal record that still stands. Then, the following day, my brother Ben – who had taken me to my first baseball game 30 years and one month prior at Fenway Park – caught a flight from Boston to St. Louis toting a couple of ridiculous fake beards (this was the year when the Red Sox all grew beards).

Ben and I sat down the first-base line at Busch Stadium wearing our Red Sox hats and fake beards that night and cheered ourselves hoarse as (yep) Jon Lester outdueled Cardinals ace Adam Wainwright in a 3-1 win, sending the Red Sox back to Boston with a 3-2 series lead. Two nights later, back at Fenway, the Sox wrapped up their third World Series title in 10 years.

Ben cheered me on the course last April when I ran my first Boston Marathon, and he will be there again in two weeks when I run my second. I like my chances to run stronger this year than last, but all the logic and preparation in the world only produces probability. You still need to show up and have things go your way on the course or the court or the playing field on that particular day.

The legendary Boston sportswriter Bob Ryan – like myself a lover of statistics who nonetheless acknowledges their predictive limitations –  has written several columns along similar lines in recent years. In the immediate aftermath of the Patriots’ remarkable comeback to defeat the Falcons in Super Bowl 51 earlier this year, he summed it up the greatness of sports with the following tweet:

And, yes, I do pity those who do not appreciate sports, who have not been able to see and enjoy what has enriched my life so greatly. Sports played an integral role not merely in entertaining me, but in teaching me statistics, probability, logic, physics, geography, psychology, economics… and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Sports is the ultimate in entertainment because it unfolds live, organically. For all its problems off the field – and there are many – at its best, one sporting event is still capable of invoking as wide a range of emotions and inflection points within three harmless hours as anything ever devised by mankind. Sports, when played at their highest level, can inspire like little else and, for a brief period, bring people from varied races, classes, and political persuasions all together for a singular cause. We need that today as much as ever.

Best of all, try as we might, we cannot truly predict sports. For what it’s worth, I foresee a rematch of last year’s World Series with the Indians prevailing this time and Corey Kluber taking home the MVP trophy, but what do I know?

Go Red Sox.