In Good Company


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February 27, 2009
Media: In Good Company

You have a roof over your head, shoes on your feet, and clothes on your back. Someone pays you to do a job that you like more often than you don't. Someone at home is rooting for you. You are not generally dodging fists or insults. You can have another piece of fudge. These are the things we expect out of life. At the next level are the things we gratefully enjoy and for which we thank our good fortune—you're paid well to do a job you love all the time, the person who roots for you also thinks you're occasionally attractive, you can eat the whole plate of fudge. The outer limits of good fortune are reserved for the things you don't deserve no matter how smart the choices you've made in life—you win the lottery or you save a life or you shovel the snow and don't feel your back.

Running seems to have a similar set of paradigms. You get up in the morning and go for a run because you deserve that from life, or you get up and run in a beautiful place and thank your good fortune. But if you get up and occasionally meet with a running partner who is watching your progress, skillfully pushing you forward, laughing at your bad jokes, ignoring your slow speed and blotchy red face and pounding breath—if you've been tapped by the running gods of extreme good luck, then you have a Gerry.

I had known Gerry for years without knowing that he was a runner. Before I'd started running, I loosely clumped anyone who exercised at all into a collective gym of generic fitness and didn't much care about what they actually did. I knew he was in shape, but it never occurred to me to ask him how he got that way. When I was only a few weeks into running myself, my wife told me by way of dangling carrot that I might want to run with Gerry someday. She said he runs every day. Every day. It was demoralizing enough to imagine running with a person at almost any level much less someone who did it every day. You don't learn how to swing a racket one week and jump onto the court with Roger Federer the next. The idea of running with someone who does it every day wasn't a carrot, it was a cherry bomb.

"It's true you're running?" Gerry asked me one Saturday night while filling my wine glass. We were at his house with a few friends. "If you can call it that," I said. "Probably better to just say I'm getting out." He suggested we get out together some time. I asked him if he meant that in a hypothetical sense—an it's-the-thought-that-counts sort of thing that I could acknowledge and promptly forget.

"No," Gerry said. "Let's really do it sometime." "That'd be great!" I fired, nodding too fast, gulping the wine, thinking, Fat chance. "How about tomorrow?" he said. What followed was a rapid-fire dodge and grab disguised with shucksy smiles and backslaps. Me: I'm extremely slow. Gerry: So am I! Me: But I'm not kidding. Gerry: Me neither! Me: I'm like a turtle. Gerry: Smart way to start. Me: A grumpy old turtle who is no fun to run with at all. Gerry: Is morning good? Me: I only go a mile. Gerry: You're up to a mile! That's great! Me: But you do like, 10, right? Gerry: Let's do a mile! Me: And you try not to laugh at how tired I get. Gerry: Seven in the morning? Me: Nine? Gerry: Nine is the middle of the day! Me: Eight? Gerry: Eight and we'll need sunscreen! I'll swing by your house at 7:30!







Previously, Marc Parent learns to fantasize on the run.