So Well, and So Long: When losing feels like winning

He has been ahead of me on race results listings before. But never has my 13-year-old son Joey actually beaten me in a race, straight up, with my trying as hard as I could from start to finish. Until Monday night. Most times lately, I will pace him throughout the race and then he outkicks me at the end. I don’t “let” him outkick me. He just has much better finishing speed than me, which puts my son into the vast majority of runners on this planet. So although he has officially “beaten” me several times, it wasn’t true victory for him and defeat for me. On Monday night, though, over at Minnewaska, the torch was officially passed. He won, fair and square. In fact, it wasn’t even close.

The writing was on the wall, as they say. The past few times I have run with him, it has been noticeably HARD for me. This wasn’t just “fun” running in races with my son anymore. It was WORK. But, I still always had a slight extra gear in there during the race. I still held the hammer. Not Monday. This was the third week of the excellent New Paltz Summer Cross Country Series, and Monday night’s race was an out-and-back 3-miler called Patterson’s Pellet. Nothing about the topography of this race favored the Old Man. I’m a terrible downhill runner. And my strength on uphills can only be garnered in very long races as relatively slow paces. So. This was a short race that started with a steep downhill, followed by a relentless uphill to the turnaround, followed by a continuous downhill, followed by a steep uphill finish. Joey announced his intentions of trying to average 7:00 pace, which I knew I could not do on this course. I told Joey I would take it easy on the initial downhill and try to catch him going uphill. That strategy did not work. He was ahead of me by about 30 seconds at the turnaround, a gap he would maintain throughout the race. He did not come close to his 7:00 goal on this challenging layout, but he ran well and blew me out of the water, so to speak. I have not seen the official results, but on our respective watches we had 23:05 and 23:38. Or something like that. I tried. I tried hard. My breathing was maxed out and labored right from the start of the hill climb. I was dizzy and gasping for air and staggering after the finish – pretty typical short-race stuff. And he beat me. Joey won. I lost. The dynamic of racing “with” him has changed forever.

One team member, in reply to a post-race text, asked if I was more pissed off or proud about what had happened. I admitted to being both. But on that proud/pissed off continuum, I was definitely far more on the proud side. My time has come and gone. I’ll keep plugging along every morning at 5:30 a.m, with my pals. But to quote a Dawes song that I really like called “So Well,” I have a “future much shorter than his past” when it comes to running. Fortunately, I am surrounded by young men and women who have seemingly limitless futures, and we can focus on that. In the meantime, next week’s series race is back at Minnewaska; it is 4 miles instead of 3 miles. Maybe this Old Man has one more rally in his bones …