The First Ice and the Last Ducks

SUNDAY arrived with no wind and a white sky. The little duck pond just off of 103rd Street had pulled part of a sheet of ice up over itself, getting a late start on a long winter's sleep. The ducks at the opposite end were still snoozing as 5000 runners came down over the hills for Joe's 10K.

Joe Kleinerman, that is. Who's he? Well, he's the guy who thought up the idea of running a race in age groups. You don't think of something like that as being thought up by someone. You just think it's always been that way. Like you don't think about lot of things in sports having to have come from somewhere- who was the first ref to use a whistle? Or who thought up the rule in football/soccer that the goalies have to wear other colors from both their teammates and the opposing team? Is the name of the person who dreamed up the designated hitter on the tip of your tongue?

Of course, these are all sports barely out of their infancy-- baseball, soccer and basketball are all modern inventions, running as a sports competition goes back before the Greeks and the Macedonians, before the bricks were laid in the city of Ur. Probably on some as yet undiscovered cave wall there is the declaration that Igkophra ran to glory in a race against all the peoples. Running, despite it's agedness, uh, agelessness, had remained remarkably unchanged for almost all of it's 6000-8000 years. There was a start and a finish, sometimes just two lines in the sand, sometimes the victor had to grab something like a banner or a flag to win. If a creaky forty year old wanted to run with the twenty two year olds that was fine as long as he didn't mind suffering the constant humiliation of never being close to the skinny greyhounds at the front.

Joe Kleinerman fixed that.

Now people who are 50-54 can see how they stack up against all the other codgers out there. The coots who are 60 like me run against the other 104 coots 60-64.

Oh, and did I mention Coach Kleinerman's other contribution to running? He promoted the very radical idea that women should be allowed to run with the men. (I am old enough to remember how a woman attempting to run in the Boston Marathon was tackled, yes, tackled to the ground to prevent her from competing.) Joe Kleinerman is probably the guy most responsible for the revolution in women's running worldwide.

So we all lined up in the cold to salute a great man, a great runner, a great coach and, to hear all the stories, a great friend.

I ran hard the whole way and for the very first time beat sixty minutes for a 10K, almost seven minutes faster than last year in this race. I'm getting better, stronger. It was funny in this run, as I came around the hill at five miles my brain was playing slow down a little and I was all hell no . I had to keep pretending that this was not a six mile run but a ten or a thirteen mile run. My brain likes to try to cruise in for a landing instead of pushing to the limit at the end. I feel like I have to take a meeting with it sometime over this issue.

I did see another bird in the woods after the race.

And I did check on the ducks tonight, Tuesday, those last ducks apparently intend to stay until after Christmas and with the way the world is warming maybe they won't leave at all.