Knowing the Distance

First grade. Sports Day at the International School of Hamburg, Germany. I am on the starting line of the 50-meter dash. My father, a runner, has given me one piece of advice for the race: “Do not look back.”

Every weekend my father goes to the track to run loops. I try to keep up, but he’s too fast, and my legs are too small. All I want to be is fast and strong and able to run forever like my father, so I run after him until I can’t anymore and wait for him to circle back around to chase him again.

I am a stubborn child.

This is also why, near the end of the 50-meter dash I am winning, I think of my father’s advice not to look back and ignore it. I want to see who is behind me as I win this race.

I turn, which naturally slows me down, and all my classmates whizz past me. I do not win the race.

I feel like a five-year-old fool, so much so that I never again ignore my father’s advice.

Summer before my senior year of boarding school. In the Volvo. Tegucigalpa, Honduras. My father is driving. I am crying. I have just been to the dentist, where the dentist discovered three cavities. My braces were recently removed, so I am sorely disappointed that I have spent any time believing my teeth are perfect.

My father asks me why I am crying, and I tell him, “It doesn’t matter that I suffered years of braces and headgear. Now I’ll always have cavities. My teeth will never actually be perfect!” Boo hoo hoo.

My father, not without an edge of impatience, says, “Nobody has to know. Just don’t tell people.”

It occurs to me how simple it is to control how I want to be seen. My father has reminded me I control my narrative. Just don’t talk about cavities!

I stop crying.

I am 16 years old, and I can be whoever I say I am.

A few weeks before I run the NYC Marathon. On the phone. I tell my father about my 20-mile training run that almost got me to Coney Island. I ask him what was the furthest distance he ever ran.

“I only ever ran a mile.”

“What?” I am flabbergasted. My whole life, my father was the runner I wanted to be. I ran because he ran. I am following in his track-running footsteps. I am training for a marathon because that’s what runners like my father would do if he wasn’t always at work. What does he mean he’s only ever run a mile?!

“Yeah, just four loops around the track usually. And pretty slow too. I was never very fast.”

Every weekend afternoon of my childhood, the scent of Bengay would fill the house, and he would put on an old ratty Solidarnosc t-shirt and gray sweatpants. It always seemed like he ran for hours, around and around, because I was small and impatient. He was a runner, just not the long-distance runner I had decided he was. I never asked him for details, and he never told me. But I told him about my track meets in high school, my adoration of Olympic athletes like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and my training for races as an adult. My mother, not a runner, would ask me, “When are you going to stop running?” My father always wanted to know more. We never ran together after I moved out and went to college, I still believed running to be our thing. Had I decided this is how we related because it was a way to make him proud? Or because I didn’t know what else to talk about? Or is it my father’s skill, nay superpower, in having a conversation, gathering information, without ever revealing himself? I know he is proud of me, but I want to know more.

I need to ask more questions.

I want to remedy how little I know.

Christmas. Visiting my parents in Northern Virginia. My kids are napping. My father and I are in front of the TV. I’m sitting on the ottoman with my back to the screen facing him, and he’s half-watching a sport. I am taking advantage of the quiet time to ask my father leading questions. The last time I did this after he had a “spot of cancer” on one of his kidneys, I asked how he felt after the cancer diagnosis. He said, “I think people think I am more complicated than I am. I had cancer. They got rid of it. Now I don’t have cancer. That’s it.”

He does tell me about the 5K he did with his office. His toes are so folded up upon themselves that it makes it hard for him to walk long distances, but he still finished the race. He shows me how long he can plank and proudly shows off a piece of paper with his strength training routine. The race, the paper, the plank, it’s proof he’s still strong.

I try to dig deeper without blowing my cover, but still, he skirts my inquiry.

“You know, my whole life, I’ve had to keep all the parts of myself in different boxes. Compartmentalized, so not any one person knows everything.”

I chuckle because he seems proud of being unknowable, and I know he’s spent over 40 years exceptionally devoted to my mother. “Except for Mommy, right?”

“Not even your mother.”

A child wakes up.

My mother walks in.

My father focuses on the TV.

The conversation is over.

A week before Christmas. The first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. My father’s bedside. He is in hospice. He has cancer again. This time in his lungs. My family has descended upon my parents’ home in the midst of another wave of Covid, and in spite of it because we have been told he has a week to live. My mother and siblings are in the kitchen, and I am alone with my father, giving him a head massage. I move to his hands next. I quietly speak of silly things like my children's antics and doing Pre-K learning over Zoom, despite having made a list of all the important things I was going to ask him. My four-hour solo drive down from NYC to Northern Virginia to be with him, I prepared a lengthy interview consisting of in-depth questions: Tell me the whole story of meeting Mom, tell me the whole story of your career, tell me the whole story of growing up in Washington state. I will not miss my final opportunity to know everything about my father, I told myself as I drove down I95.

But my father is truly dying. He can barely speak. Every breath takes a great effort. The air looks as though it has been sucked out of his body, his skin draped on a once strong frame. He sleeps most of the day and has a waning interest in drinking the mango juice and chocolate Ensure that has become his only sustenance.

I tell him I love him as I rub his palm and stretch his fingers with my fingers. He shifts slightly and opens his eyes, desperate. In one breath, his voice, quiet and deep,

“Julia, tell me I’m going to get through this.”

I nod immediately, confidently, “Yes, Daddy, you are going to get through this.”

I tell him what I want to hear. I lie because I know he’s stubborn too, and maybe he will get through this.

I omit that I know his body is shutting down. I create the narrative we want. And I know my father as much as I ever will.

Two years later. Today. Three Sisters hills of the Central Park loop. I’m training for the Marine Corps Marathon. On my long runs, there is a lot of time to think. I think of mantras to keep my mind occupied and my body moving. I can slow down, but I don’t have to. My body is a machine. I’m just warming up. Time to fly. Phrases that, when repeated, become true no matter how my body feels.

I think of how I wish I could tell him about all of my training and how I’m getting faster, and how I think of his advice from my first race in first grade all the time. I look forward, but I also cannot help but look back at my relationship with my father and wish he hadn’t felt the need to be so secretive about so much.

I think of how many friends I have who have lost their fathers. How many people are grieving all around me as I run through the park. The people I pass, the people who pass me. We are all trying to get through this series of hills. These ups and downs. This mourning.

I think of how I signed up for the Marine Corps Marathon with my brother, Byron, almost three years ago, before the pandemic. I deferred, but Byron trained and ran the distance virtually in October 2020. Our father sat in a car in my brother’s driveway to see his son finish 26.2 miles. It was one of the last times my father left the house. My father and the Marine Corps share a November 10 birthday. I think about how I’ve always associated one with the other.

I think back to a half marathon race I did earlier this year where just before the first mile I saw a guy holding up a sign that said, “Who Do You Run For?” My first thought was my father.

But it’s only partially true. I run mostly for myself. To see if I can do it. To keep looking forward, no matter how curious I get about what’s behind me, where I have been, and what I may have missed while I was there. I run on to the finish line, however far away it may be.

But I am still stubborn, and I keep looking back because sometimes I feel obsessed with the idea that I didn’t know my father. And then I worry I will forget all the ways that I did.