The Haunted Doctor TAT – Entry 2

          Some marathons, like life, are remarkably simple in design: essentially flat; no major turns; straight out to the orange cone, and straight back. Thirteen miles each way. The Bayshore Marathon in Traverse City, Michigan, is just such a race.
          The Haunted Doctor TAT, poor chap, was training hard for that marathon in his early 40’s. He had something to prove, a question to answer. Was he washed up as an athlete? Was he on the downhill slope of life? Or did he have something left to accomplish?
          He had been incapacitated ten years earlier from fibromyalgia, barely able to walk to his mailbox. It had taken him a year to rebuild the strength to walk a mile—and that was the hardest year of his recovery. But ten years later he was running again, like a teenager, quite well and still progressing. It seemed to him he was triumphing over his disease, fighting back against his unseen assailant the only way he knew how.
          The time commitment was heavy: twenty hours and seventy miles of running each week. “This is what I have to do to function, to keep my job,” he told his wife. “I want our kids to know that I overcame something, and they can do the same. They have permission to try something hard. They have the freedom to fail.”
          Locked into this mindset, he completed half a dozen marathons, including the Boston. Meanwhile, his wife was raising their five kids, essentially alone. TAT felt as though he had some control of his disease—and his life—so long as he ran. And yet, he could identify no upper limit to his physical training: to slow down was to regress. To lose.
          Then he sprained his ankle, and like Forrest Gump, he stopped running. At last, injury accomplished for the Haunted Doctor what self-reflection never could. Through a minor affliction, he discovered the end of what he could do as a runner.
          He also learned that life is an out-and-back course, and at the midpoint, there’s a big orange cone. Everybody must circle the cone, in due time, then head back the other way toward the finish. Those who are young, still on the outward journey, pass many others who have gone further and are coming back up the other side. Sometimes the two groups wave to each other. Rather quickly the younger ones, themselves, reach the midpoint, and they circle the cone. Then they wave and shout in passing to those who are younger still, urging them to take heart but pace themselves.
          The finish line awaits, but the mile markers are strangely absent. Something seems to have changed beyond the midpoint. The course design is still simple: it’s straight, it’s flat, with no major turns. But the wind is now to the front, and also the sun. Everything seems different.
          How stark the new horizon beyond the cone.

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