It Runs in the Family

I was five years old, standing on the side of a road in Jhelum, Pakistan, waiting to spot my dad in a crowd of a few hundred runners. The race ran right past the housing complex we lived in, which meant our whole family didn't have to go anywhere to watch it. We just stood on the sidelines and waited for him to come through. He finished third that day. I don't remember much else about 1992 or '93 — I don't even remember most of that year — but I remember that.

There's something about waiting for one specific person in a crowd that fast that sharpens the memory around it. I can still picture the moment we spotted him.

I didn't know it then, but that was the first memory I have of running at all.

Where it actually started

He'd already been fast for years by the time of that race in Jhelum. In his early military days, he was known as the guy who'd run at the front of the pack, consistently, from a young age — and running stayed the thing he called his strong suit long after that. He told us stories about it often: what it took to hold that pace, his own technique for how to actually run properly. The 1992 race wasn't the start of anything for him. It was just the first time I was old enough to be standing on a curb watching it happen.

Whatever was in those stories didn't land on just me. My older brother was a sprinter all through his younger years. My younger brother is a long-distance and endurance runner, and he's won a number of trophies for it. All three of us ended up running, in different ways, off the back of the same stories from the same man.

For me it was different. That race is where running starts, as far as my own memory goes. I kept running after that — to school, through high school, through university, wherever I could fit it in — without ever really deciding to. I've never really had long stretches away from it. Whenever I've had the opportunity to run, I have. I watched Olympic marathons on TV the way other kids watched football, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Once you've stood on a curb waiting for someone to run past, marathons on a screen aren't abstract anymore.

Running is in our family. I've believed that for a long time without being able to point to much more than a feeling. Yesterday I got the closest I've ever come to actual proof.

Yesterday

My dad is seventy-one now. He's visiting me at the moment, and yesterday we did a local parkrun together — his first parkrun ever, and the first time the two of us have run in an actual event together. Not just running near each other. Running in something, the way he was running in something in 1992 while I watched from the side.

He wanted to start with the front pack. Seventy-one years old, and that instinct hadn't gone anywhere. He finished second in his age category. I finished fourth in mine.

We're a competitive family, so that's not nothing. My seventy-one-year-old father technically out-placed me. It's a strange thing to sit with, and also exactly the kind of thing he'd never let me forget if the numbers were flipped.

I don't have a clean way to describe what it's like to go from being the kid on the sidelines watching your dad disappear into a crowd of runners, to being an adult running next to him at a parkrun three decades later. It's not nostalgia exactly. It's closer to watching a thread pull all the way through — the same thing that made him fast in the military, that had him at the front of a few hundred runners when I was five, still there yesterday morning, just older.

The bug I know I caught

I can say this safely now: I inherited the running bug from him. Not just the habit of it — the pull toward it, the thing that's had me running whenever I've had the chance to, for thirty years, without ever really treating it as optional. It started with standing on a curb in Jhelum, watching for one man in a crowd, and being proud when he came through.

Running isn't the only thing I got from him, either. He's always loved mountains, and somewhere along the way that became mine too. We've already been out on a few hikes together, and we're planning more this coming summer here in Australia. I can't wait to show him some of the mountains here. That's a separate story — I'll write it up properly another time.

Yesterday I wasn't watching from the sidelines anymore. I was running next to him. I think that's the actual story here — not the race in '92, and not the parkrun yesterday, but the thirty-some years between the two, and the fact that we got to close that gap while he's still fast enough to start with the front pack.