Our family received news in the winter of 1998 that would greatly affect us all for the next 2 years.  My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.  The news was almost unbelievable.  She had diligently gone in for her regular checkups, and had only recently had a breast exam that was negative. Suddenly, in the spring of 1998, there she was undergoing a mastectomy. It was really not until the operation was over that we truly began to understand the seriousness of the situation.  Even though the doctors thought they had removed all of the cancer, something just did not seem right.  It was shortly after the operation that we learned that the vast majority of the lymph nodes taken during the mastectomy were riddled with what one doctor described as an “angry cancer”.  I remember the emotions we all felt as me, my wife and children came to visit her that summer. The not knowing what would happen was the toughest part of all.

I guess it was around that time that I started seeing and thinking of what she was going through during my training runs.  It made me realize that although a marathon is a tough goal to accomplish, it was nothing in comparison to the struggle my mother was enduring.  I began to think about the fact that whenever I felt extremely tired, fatigued or not like going on during a training run, I could make the pain go away by just stopping and walking in. My mother did not have that luxury.  Her daily battle inspired me deeply for the next 24 months.

In October of 1998, she was admitted into an aggressive and experimental stem cell replacement program at Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, just south of their home outside of Dayton, where she was given chemotherapy continuously for 5 straight days.  The ward she was in was completely sterile and all of the other patients around her were deep in the throws of cancer, most of them terminally ill.  I have never felt so blessed to be healthy, and at the same time, so helpless to not be able to help others who were so sick. I spent a total of 3 weeks there prior to and subsequent to her being admitted for her treatment. I saw so many people who were so helpless, yet I never saw anything but smiles on their faces when I looked at them. I saw one man who was perhaps my age who literally looked as if death had transfixed itself already upon his face.  He walked diligently every day, pulling his chemotherapy drip bag with the IV tube right along with him.  I know for a fact that his daily walk up and down those short halls, although maybe a total of 100 feet, was far more demanding on him than any intervals or 20 mile training runs I was doing.  But, he did it every day and he did it with hope and promise in his eyes. As sallow as his face was and as weak as his body was becoming, I never once saw him without a smile.

As I would leave the hospital each day after visiting my mother, I would go back to my parent’s house in Ohio and run. The hills were great for me from a perspective of a different type of workout than the flatlands in Houston, but the one aspect that drove me harder and faster in these runs was thinking of my mother and the people in that ward with her.  I felt compelled to run for them, to somehow honor them through my efforts.  I remember thinking it would be a waste of my good health to sit around and be doing nothing.  I returned to Houston the first week of November, 1998, and ran in the 25K race (15.5 miles) that is part of the Houston Marathon Warm-Up Series. With my mother and her co-patients as my inspiration, and 3 straight weeks of intense hill training in Ohio behind me, I ran what was perhaps the strongest race of my life, finishing in a time of 1:48:17, a pace of 6:59 per mile. It is the only race over 15 miles that I have ever competed in where I ran a sub-7 minute mile pace.

After my departure back to Houston, my mother spent a little more than a month in that ward, and returned home in a very weak state in early December, 1998. We were not able to spend Christmas with her that year due to her lack of energy and from fear of infection to her, but her blood counts and strength began to raise slowly back to normal levels over the next few months.

Prior to 1997, I had run 3 marathons in the previous 12 years. In 1997, the year prior to my mother being diagnosed, I began my training quest to try and qualify for the 2000 Boston Marathon. I wanted to do it in conjunction with my 40^th birthday (which would fall in December of 1999) and the millennium. From the time I had begun my training in 1997 until January of 1999, I had run nearly 4,000 miles just in that stretch, competed in numerous races ranging from 10-20 miles in my preparation, and had completed 4 more marathons, and had failed to make my Boston qualifying time in each. It was shortly after this in February of 1999 at the Austin Marathon, my first time to run that marathon, but my 8^th marathon overall, that I made my qualifying time for the 2000 Boston Marathon by a mere 24 seconds (less than 1 second to spare per mile). I remember calling my mom and dad to tell them about having finally made it, and letting my mother know how much she had inspired me. That summer of 1999, unbeknownst to us at the time, we would make our last visit as a family to see her in Ohio.

In September of 1999, less than a year after her experimental chemotherapy treatment, she went in for a checkup, and a routine scan made it appear that the cancer was in remission.  She and my father took off for a trip to Ireland and had a wonderful time.  When they returned in October, she went back in again for a routine scan, and we were all shocked over the news of the results. The cancer had returned with a vengeance, and was now in her bones and worst of all, in her liver. My mother continued to amaze me with her attitude, even then. She continued to tell me and everyone else that she was going to beat this thing. Imagine the strength I gained from her as I continued my journey on towards my training for Boston.

As the months after October, 1999 rolled by, my mother bravely came to Houston with my father to see us for Christmas.  She was very sick. It meant a great deal to us that she braved her condition to spend that time in Houston.  It would be her last Christmas.  In February of 2000, only 2 months before I was to go to Boston, my father called to tell me that the doctor had explained to him that all that could be done had been done and suggested bringing in Hospice care. I drove up to Ohio to see my mother and spend my last week with her. I reiterated to her while there how proud I was of her and how much her bravery had inspired me in my training.  On March 29^th, 2000, just 19 days before I was to run in the Boston Marathon for the very first time, she passed away peacefully while sleeping at home.

At her eulogy, each person in my family spoke, and I stated in my talk that Mom was going to be the only person in the family that was going to be able to see me from start to finish in the race.  I knew she would be there with me. A great thing that happened also was my extending an invitation to my father to come to join us in Boston for the race. He was overcome with emotion as he accepted. I think it was great for him and for us that he was to be there.

On April 17, 2000, the day of my very first Boston Marathon, I went to the starting line filled with the excitement of running in the greatest race in the world that I had finally after all these years qualified for, yet also torn with the emotion of having lost my mother less than 3 weeks earlier. On the Boston Marathon course, the first 16 miles are relatively flat or downhill, but beginning about mile 17 you enter the Town of Newton and the terrain becomes very hilly and very difficult for the next several miles. The coup-de-grace is Heartbreak Hill at mile 20.5, so named for the number of hearts it has broken over the years where so many runners have dropped out, collapsed, or been slowed down to the point of it costing them their goal time in the race (or for the elites, killing their opportunity to win the race). It is without a doubt the single most famous stretch of road in any marathon in the world, and the pain of climbing such a long steep hill at so late a stage in the race is indescribable. As you approach Heartbreak Hill, the crowds are enormous, literally tens of thousands of people cheering you on and encouraging you from before the base all the way to the summit. You turn a slight corner and see this little rise and think to yourself, “That’s all it is?”, then you turn again slightly to the right and suddenly the famous hill looms ominously before you like a giant mountain. I had not planned at all to do what occurred next, but at the base of the hill, I clenched my fists tightly together and raised my arms high and literally yelled as loud as I could, “MOM, THIS IS FOR YOU!”, and I honestly sprinted the entire distance up to the top of Heartbreak Hill and probably passed a few hundred runners in that one stretch. It was the emotion of her death and thinking about the pain she dealt with that helped me to overcome and push aside the pain I was dealing with. From that point on, the rest of the race for me was shear joy and elation as I ran those last few miles through the streets of Boston and crossed the finish line.

If you have anyone in your life that you have thought about telling how much they have inspired you, or how proud you are of them, I suggest you do it… now.  I will be forever grateful that after one of my races I told my mother from the heart how much I thought of her whenever I was getting tired or fatigued, and how much she helped me to go on. It meant so much to her, and now to me, that I shared this with her. Sometimes we let a chance to touch someone’s life by telling them how much they touched ours slip by.  I am very much at peace with myself that I took that opportunity.