It's a Dad's LifeWe have abandoned the kids for a number of days, making the trip over the water for me to run 26 miles through the five boroughs of New York with 40,000 other masochists. While the monsters are never far from my mind, this is a trip, or more a prolonged occasion, that tends to eclipse all thoughts of anything or anyone bar yourself. The last few days, for me, have been so far removed from the regularity of normal life that it's hard to equate the two.
The kids have been living it up in both sets of grandparents' houses. While they undoubtedly miss us (I think) this is their equivalent of going from Funderland to Santa's Grotto. They expect to be lorded and they generally are. It has become a self-perpetuating cycle for which we are very grateful, even though they invariably return to our care in the guise of over-preening and resentful Pollyannas. At the same time I've been running round Central Park with Eamon Coghlan.
My first memory of Mr Coghlan is during the 1980 Olympics. To my eight-year-old ears there had been huge hype, from which I discerned not only that he would take gold, but that gold was his God-given right. My mother sat with tears streaming down her face as some Ethiopian called Yifter gave me my first lesson in the fallibility of the press.
Three years later my mother once again bawled away as Eamon cruised home to become world champion in Helsinki. This time there was a very different emotion in the room but still, watching your mother get so wound up over this distant athlete was a little disconcerting. A quarter of a century later and we're all bantering away as part of the Eamon Coghlan team running in the marathon, but I'm looking at him thinking, "Hey chief, what was going on with you and my mammy back in the day?" But I have as much respect for him now for what he does with the rest of the crew in the Children's Medical and Research Foundation in raising money for Crumlin Hospital as I did for him as an athlete, and he was an icon in our house.
This trip has been astonishingly well put together, a feat eclipsed only by the experience of running the race itself.
Snapshots in my head. From that first gentle jog with all the other runners through the park the morning after we arrived, to lining up with tens of thousands of others at the base of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on Staten Island and gazing at the distant Manhattan skyline knowing that was where we were headed, under our own steam and taking the long way round. At mile four I passed some guy in an Uncle Sam outfit smoking a Marlboro to the delight of a baying Brooklyn crowd. Mile 11 went too fast as I was swept along in euphoria by the sheer noise and enthusiasm of the support. Mile 19 the pain started. Struggling along three miles later, I took great heart from a banner held aloft on Fifth Avenue: "Stopping Is Not A F***ing Option".
It never was.
At that point I had joined forces with a Corkman named Emmet and we pretty much urged each other over the last six miles. Some 200 yards from the line we passed a guy lying prostrate on the ground, both his legs in spasm, screaming in pain and frustration as he stared with mad-cow bulging eyes at the finish so near he could almost touch it. But 30 seconds later he was forgotten when myself and my new blood-brother crossed the line together and swore never to run again when taxis could be had on every street corner.
This was the marathon New York style - bigger, brasher and bolder than anywhere else. You could expect nothing else. Everybody should get to do this.
abrophy@irish-times.ie
