A Minute

George Rowe’s bib finished the Falmouth Road on Sunday. He ran in a time of 52:28 which was quite good considering he had died a few months earlier. As for the living, he would have been 8th in his age group (men 60-69), a unsuspecting minute behind the legendary Bill Rogers. In an ideal world there would be no camera pictures of the journey nor rankings on a website.

It is, of course, illegal to transfer bibs even to a nephew who wanted to run in his uncle’s posthumous honor. That nephew with George and the rest of his family watched the Falmouth Road Race over the years as it went from a contest between two bars to one of the premier eastern runs. He even wrote a short piece about his mother’s (George’s sister) voyage at the ancient age of 37. They watched Bill Rogers when he was young as he would run by Church Street. They saw Frank Shorter and Alberto Salazar. They saw the rebirth of running.

The legends still come back to the race - Joan Benoit stayed with George Rowe a few times before doing the Falmouth Road Race herself, and this year’s african winners looked as fleet as usual. But the race remains more about family lore. A new set of grandkids watched their parents try the thing only to wind up with the same set of ice bags and bandages that they got themselves from to kick a can or capture a flag. The summer was full of the lightly infirmed; bruises are the perpetual souvenirs of summer.

The day after the race, the nephew took George Rowe’s grand children on their first distance swim just off shore where the runners traveled. It was the first time that the kids had jumped off of the dock and were a little surprised that you could actually swim in the ocean. “But there is fish and seaweed” they protested. They weren’t natural at it - the grace of swimming comes from repetition - but I would like to think it gave them the taste about going far, how a journey can seem brilliant at first, foolish towards the middle, and finally satisfyingly draining at the end, how worse conditions can mean better stories, and how the best adventures are the ones shared. An athletic life can be a long thing, and my hope is that perhaps one of them will come back sixty years from now and run their own race while the world cheers. And that they will be quite pleased from finishing a minute behind a legend of their own.