At the beginning of the year, my sister asked our family if we’d like to make a 5-person marathon team. Each person would run one-leg of a five-leg course that stretched 26 miles in total. My sister is a trail runner. The rest of us…not so much.

My sister has run marathons and ultramarathons. She’s even written essays about running. 

My brother-in-law, her husband, was in a triathlon club when they met. At their wedding, he said: “I realize I don’t have to pace her, I just have to crew for her.” A pacer runs alongside a runner during subsections of an ultramarathon, while a crew person cheers for the runner as they pass aide stations and makes sure they have snacks, making this probably the most romantic sentence about running I’ve ever heard.

My brother and my uncle both served in the Marine Corps, which is basically a professional running club. And though both are out of the service now, they say “Once a Marine, always a Marine“, which is good because at 77 my uncle was one of the oldest runners on any of the marathon teams.

So when I say the rest of us aren’t really runners…I guess I just mean me.  

Anyways, in August we ran the Point Mariah Trail Marathon:

Our running team, plus my dad, Calvin and Lawrence
(at picture time, my uncle had already run off somewhere else)

While I trained to run (editor’s note: one-fifth of) a marathon, I realized almost everything I was taught about running in high school was wrong. This seems odd. We had a class called physical education (PE). PE was a mandatory part of our school curriculum—an education in physical activities like running.

Those PE classes had the educational substance of a biology class run by a teacher starting: “Welcome everyone, now before we begin it’s important everyone understand the earth is only 5,000 years old.” Though one might anticipate this sort of education if someone named “Coach” standing in front of a class.

I digress.

In my (editor’s note: again, very limited) runner training experience, I’ve found running to be more pleasant and fulfilling than I had remembered from PE. Perhaps this is because of the lies. 

This is my attempt to correct the record:

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