We therefore talked about last lectures in\u00a0the tiny fishbowl closet our professor had moved us into on our second day because it afforded a better octagonal grouping of desks. \u00a0I think our professor was thinking about giving one and he waxed poetic about a colleague of his who a few years back had received a terminal cancer diagnosis.\u00a0 This collegiate English department colleague decided to keep working as long as he could, to keep teaching, and to go out, I might add, with a bang.\u00a0 For his course on Homeric epics, he decided to teach his own unpublished epic.\u00a0 It was entitled \u201cThe Ruthian\u201d and was the story of Babe Ruth as done in classical Greek saga prose.\u00a0 It told of a flawed hero with epic strength undergoing a quest and a perilous journey for greatness, using extended similes, metaphors, and in true Homeric fashion, a repetitive list of players.\u00a0 Unorthodox perhaps but what was the university going to do?\u00a0 He was a dead man teaching.<\/p>\n
As we were told this in the aforementioned fishbowl room, I recall us as the usual suspects in an Honors class – we all were, at least back in high school, something of Type \u2018A\u2019 high achievers.\u00a0 A lot of folks seemed somewhat mortified by such a syllabus curve ball.\u00a0 Me?\u00a0 It might have been the most engaged I\u2019d been in that class.\u00a0 I kept asking questions about the narrative flow, if they performed it aloud as epics always seem to work better spoken than read, and asked where I could get a copy.\u00a0 Professor Stumpf and the majority of the class wanted to move on to discuss Homer and I slumped back into my chair.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t love a good list of heroes on a battlefield\u2026 and it certainly wasn\u2019t that I\u2019m a huge baseball fan\u2026 but I was much more interested in this guy\u2019s decision to make his legacy a reality.\u00a0 He had written this thing and I bet it actually was a fascinating take on the epic filtered through the cow leather of a pitcher\u2019s mitt and the pine wood of a bat.\u00a0 I was intrigued as much in the making of one\u2019s own story as I was intrigued by as the story being told itself.<\/p>\n
In the quarter century or so since I first heard tell of “The Ruthian,” I’ve occasionally tried to track down a copy.\u00a0 The closest I’ve come is a throwaway line about David McGimpsey, a Halifax poet who is currently a faculty member at Concordia University.\u00a0 He apparently has a “Dante-esque” epic poem<\/a>… but from what I recall my white whale “Ruthian” was more Homeric than Dante-ian… and was obviously written by someone who has since joined the Great Bambino in the big Yankee Stadium in the sky.<\/p>\n This is an incredibly long winded way of saying that in some ways Run Kevin Run Dot Com is my \u201cRuthian.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a messy, chaotic story about how I\u2019m trying to go on my own heroic journey to be a better person.\u00a0 Not just at running but in general.\u00a0 The running is just a Trojan Horse to force focus and commitment to something bigger\u2026 something beyond.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a tough few weeks as I try and get back into fighting shape.\u00a0 The training montage in this epic is nothing like what you\u2019d see in a Sylvester Stallone boxing movie<\/a>.\u00a0 There\u2019s been a fair bit of setback and wrong turns.\u00a0 But this week I\u2019m headed out to Guam to run with my fellow US citizens on an island that has far too often been in the crosshairs of fire and fury rhetoric.\u00a0 It is my own little protest against the madness of our age.\u00a0 And in this case it’s about how this race isn’t about time or distance.\u00a0 It’s about place.\u00a0 And it’s about running not our of fear but out of love for my fellow Americans.\u00a0 I’m also holding out hope that Puerto Rico recovers enough from their hurricane and political damage to once again hold their marathon.\u00a0 They have far bigger things to restore there (so many STILL without months and months later…).\u00a0 As soon as they do I want to be there to support them as well.<\/p>\n If this were my presentation in a last lecture series, I think it might be about how sometimes there\u2019s an even better story behind the story being told.<\/p>\n Maybe, just maybe, there\u2019s a bit of that buried in these posts.\u00a0 Thanks for reading and thanks for listening.<\/p>\n And now once more I head to a starting line\u2026. and this time, though across the sea, it will still be on US soil.<\/p>\n
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