{"id":11338,"date":"2017-04-19T10:09:18","date_gmt":"2017-04-19T14:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/?p=11338"},"modified":"2017-04-20T08:29:52","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T12:29:52","slug":"true-grit-switzer-steve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/?p=11338","title":{"rendered":"True. Grit. Switzer. Steve."},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifty years ago today, on April 19, 1967, K. V. Switzer ran the Boston Marathon as number 261. She was the first officially registered woman who got a bib number to do the race\u2026 and her appearance on the course resulted in a series of photographs that were rightly hailed as changing the world. The race organizer Jock Semple did his best to get her pulled from the field; nonetheless she persisted. It was a seminal event in a long running effort for social justice and equality.<\/p>\n

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Great, huge, mammoth strides have been made before and mostly since that race, spearheaded by Kathrine Switzer and many others. There are a lot of great reflections and think pieces swirling about this 50th anniversary, all the more so given that Ms. Switzer just ran in the 2017 Boston Marathon to commemorate and honor the moment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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She and many others are inspirations; they are reminders that it takes great effort and preparation to achieve the momentous and that very moment is the building block of something more. We all should build upon the momentum of others and ourselves; it is the essence of training to achieve a goal\u2026 and then using that goal as the springboard for the next big thing.
\nSo many others are better suited to tell the tale of Switzer\u2026 including herself in her wonderfully engaging memoir Marathon Woman<\/a><\/em>. As a result, I thought I\u2019d write a little something about one of my favorite inspirations.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s my brother, Steven Hanna.<\/p>\n

I got to stay with Steve this weekend up in Boston. He\u2019s been fighting a nasty bug for the past two weeks, his body ravaged by a hacking cough and exhaustion. He kept apologizing for not being a better host but I had a great time hanging out with him, meeting Alexis, seeing Meg, and catching two nights of the Magnetic Fields. Oh, and running the Boston Marathon. It was a great trip for me.\u00a0 I do wish he felt better but I had a great time.<\/p>\n

During one of the delightful dinners we got to have together, we inevitably chatted about running; so much of my life is wrapped up in this hobby\/obsession. And to be fair, I was there to run the storied oldest marathon in the USA. I think I was saying something about the heat advisory the BAA had just announced, saying the temperatures were on the rise and that might mean a tougher day. Steve mentioned the variety of tough day races over the races \u2013 from food poisoning in Austin to the mad temperature swings at various events. I mentioned how proud I was of him in Pasadena. He was surprised by this as he said he always thought of his Pasadena Marathon experience as a low point of his running experiences. I couldn\u2019t disagree more and I tried to tell him.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m more of a crooner working in a road side dive bar when it comes to telling stories; Steve is a poet who makes words sing and dance and can alchemically turn even the most leaden tale into a bit of narrative gold. But I\u2019ll do my best to try and give you the Monarch Notes version (superior at least to the Cliff Notes version\u2026 and if you\u2019re a millennial reading this, it\u2019s a bit better than a Wikipedia entry currently under review).<\/p>\n

In May of 2012, Pasadena was holding a series of events starting in and around the Rose Bowl that then wound onto their city streets. One distance was the marathon\u2026 a distance that they haven’t since offered for political and logistical reasons, the latter which can be illustrated in Steve\u2019s story that I’m about to relate.<\/p>\n

The 2012 course included a three-leaf-clover section, wherein runners would go out and back on three different angled \u201cspokes\u201d from a central water station point (which FYI ran out of cups and water by the time I passed it the third time\u2026 and I was in the top third of the runners). The spokes weren\u2019t particularly well marked and the course marshals weren\u2019t entirely clear on the directions either. So Steve circled back from his second spoke and came upon the Mile 22 marker\u2026 but knew he couldn\u2019t possibly be at that point yet. He realized he had missed the turn for the first spoke and done the 2nd and 3rd already. The course marshal told him to just skip it, no one would know, and go on to the finish. It was a hot day and Steve was struggling.<\/p>\n

The temptation was huge\u2026 and yet here\u2019s the key to this story for me. Steve, through sheer grit and strength of character, took a deep breath and headed out on the lonely spoke he missed. By this point, that spoke was virtually deserted as it was the first one but Steve carried on, doing the distance he had signed up for, running a marathon. He didn\u2019t take the short cut, he didn\u2019t cut the course. He ran the race. It was not easy; marathons are never easy. Nevertheless, he persevered.<\/p>\n

Steve has told me before and told me this weekend he was so defeated and disheartened by the race, he felt just depressed. After he finished he went back to the parking garage and he remembered climbing the stairs, even though he was parked on the ground floor, and sitting in the stairwell to get away from any people so they wouldn\u2019t see him break down and cry. At dinner I told him he should\u2019ve been proud then and should definitely be proud now \u2013 he rose to the challenge, he fought through, he overcame adversity and finished. That\u2019s a victory beyond victory. That\u2019s true grit. That\u2019s true success.<\/p>\n

Steve shook his head, grabbing another dumpling, and then told me that when he got home after the race, he opened his front door and a wave of exhaustion came over him such that he just slumped down, halfway in and halfway out of his door. He fell asleep on the threshold, his torso indoors, and his legs on his front porch. He slept so long that the sun burned the back of his legs. Again Steve reiterated this was what he considered one of his greatest low points of running. Again, I disagreed (although I was sorry about the sun burn!). I considered it a great highlight.\u00a0 Steve gave it his all that day, under extremely adverse conditions. The weather was punishing, the course was a mess, and the lack of water and cups was inexcusable. Despite all of that, Steve found the courage and gumption to run 26.2 miles\u2026 not 22.2 as the course marshal suggested when Steve realized he had been misdirected past the first spoke. Twenty-six point two freaking miles.<\/p>\n

I know my brother has been feeling a bit down, like this illness will never end. But, Steve, you are a champion. You have the heart of a hero, one who puts in the time and the commitment to making it through. Some days are tougher than others; on my tougher days, I try and remember what others have done, what they have endured to get to their finish lines. Kathrine Switzer ran Boston when people were ignorantly and arrogantly saying women were too delicate to run that far and needed to be protected. You ran through hell and rather than stopping amidst it, you just kept going to get through it.<\/p>\n

Sometimes we don\u2019t even know what an inspiration we are to others\u2026 or should be to ourselves.<\/p>\n

And so on this running anniversary, I will lace up my shoes and do some miles. I hope Steve is feeling better and can, if not go out for a run himself because of the lingering hacking cough, appreciate that he will run again, he will get to another finish line be it at an event or in writing a paper, and that he is an inspiration.<\/p>\n

Here’s a shot from that May day in 2012, when Steve and I passed each other on one of the out and backs — he was running in, I was running out.<\/p>\n

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To my brother Steve \u2013 Long may you inspire. Long may we run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifty years ago today, on April 19, 1967, K. V. Switzer ran the Boston Marathon as number 261. She was the first officially registered woman who got a bib number to do the race\u2026 and her appearance on the course resulted in a series of photographs that were rightly hailed as changing the world. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}