I don’t know why, but Mexicans find it difficult to write letters to each other.
When I left Mexico, both times, I said I would write back and send pictures. Well, it took me a while took write back, but I finally wrote back! And guess who wrote back? One cousin to whom I didn’t even write. So, I felt guilty and wrote her a letter.
I wrote to my aunt and then she relayed a message to my cousin who e-mailed me telling me that my aunt said hello. This same aunt still had letters that I had written to her thirty years ago. They were tucked away in her picture box along with my Chicago Marathon medal, which I have no idea how she obtained it. Perhaps, I gave it to my mother before she went on one her trips to Mexico.
Now it’s starting to come back to me. My mother said if I wanted to give something to my aunt, so I gave her my marathon medal. Actually, it was a lot easier than writing a letter. Even with the Internet, we don’t seem to be writing to each other any more frequently. I still have a long list of relatives to whom I will write before my next visit. But even if I don’t, we’ll pick up the conversation right where we left off the last time. My cousin likes to IM me and that’s fine when I have time. It is a lot easier than writing letters.
I’m enjoying my summer vacation from teaching so far. I get up whenever I feel like. I have a cup of black coffee while I rub the sleep from my eyes. I more or less kill time and stall before I go out my front door for my morning run before it gets too hot out.
Lately, I’ve been slowing down on my runs. I’m not sure if it’s due to age and/or allergies. Of course, I’ve had these experiences before, even when I was in my twenties.
I have been running, on and off again, since high school. I first started running competitively at Divine Heart Seminary when I joined the cross country team. For some reason I wanted to be on a school team because I thought it would be cool to be a high school jock.
My first race was the Marshall County Cross Country Championship in Indiana. Since I didn’t know any better, I ran alongside the lead pack right from the start. After about a mile, I suddenly slowed down to a crawl, or so it seemed to me. I’m not sure where I placed, but I received a ribbon.
I have one run that I will never forget: I was running on some backwoods road in Camp Pendleton when I felt a presence running alongside me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a coyote. At first, I was startled, but I continued running as if this were normal. The coyote and I ran together for about five minutes before we went our separate ways. Well, enough stalling! I am now going out for my morning run.
Everything happens for a reason. Or so I’ve heard. I just can’t figure out why.
Anyway, a while back, I was driving in Lincoln Park on Chicago’s north side. It was dark and it was raining, which meant I couldn’t see the road very well. With my impaired visibility, combined with my occasional inattentiveness, I didn’t see a stop sign on a major street as pedestrians crossed the street. They assumed that I would stop at the stop sign. Well, I didn’t apply my foot to the brake until I saw a pedestrian directly in front of my car. I would have hit him if he wouldn’t have jumped back! We both realized that I almost ran him over. He started swearing at me and beating the hood of my car with his umbrella.
Suddenly, we look at each other’s faces in recognition. We actually know each other. “Greg!” I shout. And he stops beating my car. “Dave?” he asks in disbelief. I open my car door and he gets in. I had not seen Greg Rubenstein in about five years because he moved to Oklahoma where his company had transferred him. We used to do the print layout together for the CARA’s magazine The Finish Line and we both ran for the University of Chicago Track Club.
He apologized for denting my hood and I apologized for almost running him over and leaving him a quadriplegic. I reminded Greg that the last time we met was for dinner at a restaurant and that he had treated, so I owed him a dinner. Just by chance, this incident occurred at dinner time, so we went out to eat.
We were both impressed by our fortuitous encounter and how it was such a coincidence. So he told me about another recent coincidence in his life; apparently his life is full of coincidences (and so is mine!). He traveled to Europe on business. He was at Heathrow Airport when someone bumped into him from behind. He soon realized that his wallet was missing! So chases the man who bumped into him. Since Greg was a runner, he’s closing in on the thief. Greg is yelling, “Stop him! He stole my wallet!” A man coming from the opposite direction tackles the pickpocket. They both hold the thief down until airport security shows up. When Greg and the Good Samaritan get a good look at each other, the man says, “Greg you are always getting in trouble!” They went to high school together!
Proudly wearing the Marquette Park Track Club colors of black and gold!
When I returned to Chicago after three years in the Marine Corps, I moved back to Marquette Park. I lived at 3006 W. 64th Street for six years before I moved to Bridgeport. I loved living so close to the park because then I could go running every day. While in the Marines, I began running seriously after I ran a marathon in California. I thought that if I trained well enough, I could become a good runner. I joined the Marquette Park Track Club after running the Roy Bricker Memorial 5 Mile Race where I placed third in my age group. Roy Bricker was the best runner that the club ever produced. All thanks to Coach Jack Bolton whom all his runners adored. The club would meet every weeknight at 5:30 p.m. rain or shine, snow, or sleet. Jack never missed a practice.
Jack Bolton came from Ireland many years before, but he never lost his Irish brogue. We all loved it. Some of the runners imitated him lovingly. He was a world-class miler back in Ireland and when he came to the U.S. he coached high school teams in Chicago. He always had great runners running for him.
When I first joined the club in 1981, all the practices began with six laps (one mile) on the cinder track at Marquette Park. Jack would lead the pack, and everyone had to stay behind him. This was a group warmup. Jack’s philosophy for this warmup was twofold. 1. Runners learned to run in a pack and 2. Runners learned to run at someone else’s pace, as sometimes happens in a race. In later years, Jack’s ankles gave out on him, and he didn’t run the warmup with the club anymore.
Jack especially loved working with younger runners. He was known for the female runners that came out of his club system. In fact, some high school girls would join Jack’s club in order to develop as runners and qualify for running scholarships at the universities of their choice. Most girls achieved their goal. Of course, many boys also received running scholarships, too.
What everyone loved about Jack was his eternal optimism. He always believed that one of his runners would win the race outright, no matter how overwhelming the odds. I once entered a race and learned at the starting line that Jack had predicted that I would win. I wanted to live up to his expectations, but I had a difficult day and faded halfway through the race. But Jack was always touting some up-and-coming runners from his club. He was usually right, too.
Click here to read an article that I wrote about Jack Bolton for the CARA Finish Line the January/February edition of 1985:
After Carlos Mojaro moved back to Mexico, we just didn’t have as much fun as before. Most of the time we just played baseball in the prairie or just sat on somebody’s porch talking about the good old days. Then we saw the Mexico City Olympics on TV, mainly because our parents were so proud of the fact that an international event could take place in Mexico City. So all my friends and I watched the Olympics religiously.
I especially liked the track and field events, but I also liked women’s gymnastics. Whenever we talked about the Olympic events we watched, we couldn’t help but act them out. Soon we started up our own Olympics. For the shotput, we through a brick in my backyard. Luckily, we weren’t strong enough to throw it out of the yard. We had competitions in many events. We even made charts with the athlete and team standings and the “world records” that we had achieved. After watching the Olympic marathon, we were amazed that anyone could run 26 miles. However, as we discussed this amazing feat, we realized that when we were very active on those long summer days, we ran quite a lot distance without realizing it. I even suggested that we could probably run a marathon if we tried. There was some dissension amongst us at first. But then we decided to put ourselves to the test.
There were about fifteen of us and we decided that we would run the Mexico City Olympic Marathon. I felt as if Carlos Mojaro was still with us. Well, we didn’t exactly know how a long marathon was, and since our mothers wouldn’t let us cross the street, we decided to run around the block until we competed the marathon or dropped dead like Phidippides. I didn’t know much about running back then, but I did know that we had to pace ourselves to go the distance.
After the opening ceremony, we toed the line and ran at sound of the exploding firecracker. Douglass sprinted from the start and only made it around the block once. The rest of us ran as a pack as we had observed the Olympic marathoners do. I’m not sure how long our Chicago city blocks are, but I believe our block at 4405 South Wood Street was about one-third of a mile when we ran completely around. As we ran around the block we would shout out the lap number as we passed my house. It was getting dark fast. We were actually having fun running around the block in the Mexico City Olympic Marathon.
My mother came out to see what was going on because a crowd had gathered in front of my house. We didn’t actually expect to have any spectators. This was just like the Olympics! By lap ten, a few runners had dropped out of the race. The spectators shouted out the lap numbers with us. About lap twenty, my mother said it was time to go in the house. My friends’ mothers were also waiting for their sons to go home. My mother insisted that I go inside so my brothers would go home, too.
I knew if I went in, then the marathon would stop and everyone would go home. I begged my mother, without breaking my stride, to let us keep running a little longer. We ran a few more laps and we were still having fun, but we were also getting tired and starting to feel pain in our legs. When we reached lap 27, my mother said that if I didn’t go in right now, she would beat me: ¡Te voy a dar una paliza! That was just the excuse we needed to save face. There were only six of us left running and we all complained to our mothers about interrupting our marathon. But we all went home, secretly thankful to our mothers for saving us from embarrassment.
However, we always felt great about our running accomplishments. We always talked about how much farther we could have run if weren’t for our mothers stopping us. Of course, we never attempted to run another marathon either.
Chicago USA 