August 3, 2006 Issue                                       

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Run news is more than running

By the time this paper hits the newsstands, the annual Run for the Hill of It will have finished four days ago. If you’ve picked up this paper, you’ll see we chose to feature the Saturday race on the front page. You may wonder why we chose to make such a big deal about it. It’s the middle of summer but there must be bigger news than a weekend 5-mile run, right?

Maybe there is news that is more important to many of our readers. A bus crash at Stenton Avenue and Phil-Ellena Street is big news. SCRUB and Mt. Airy USA are fighting to remove billboards from key areas of Germantown Avenue. Mt. Airy USA’s director Farah Jimenez was appointed to the Community Development Advisory Board of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. Merck is being investigated for a chemical spill that killed nearly 1,000 fish in the Wissahickon. These are important stories, sure, but the Run For the Hill of it is news that goes beyond the details of a one-day race.

Every year the people who put together the Run — the Friends of Erik and the Chestnut Hill Rotary Club – choose a family to benefit from the race’s profits. These dollars are earned by sponsorships, registration fees and donations. The meeting is always tough. As someone in the group told me two weeks ago, there are so many families who need help, it’s hard to pick just one.

I first learned about the Run more than five years ago when I interviewed John Dougherty. Dougherty who is now a member of the Friends of Erik had a son suffering from many challenges. Talking to him, it was clear that the impact the Run has on these families is staggering, perhaps so much so that the many stories we run about the Run and the families who benefit barely do the Run justice.

The reality you learn from speaking with those involved is that the families who are chosen to benefit from the Run are in dire need of help. The children these parents are raising have challenges that many of us can’t begin to imagine. The normal difficulties of raising a child are compounded by doctor visits, expensive treatments and complicated routines necessary simply to care for the child.

And the prospect of a financial windfall isn’t just a nice thing, it’s a life-changing event. Treatments that cost thousands of dollars become possible. Expensive equipment that can help a child get around becomes affordable. So many things that can improve the lives and health of children with disabilities are so often beyond the financial reach of most American families. Having the money to finally buy these things can dramatically improve the lives of entire families.

This year’s beneficiaries, Ethan and Hayden Dahmm and their mother should be ready for life to change in a dramatic fashion.

So, the Run is front-page news, and perhaps its bigger news than we can ever honestly capture in the stories leading up to and following the run. Several hundred people running along the Wissahickon on a Saturday morning seems like a thing of small importance, but the race has changed a family’s life.

And the run, the charity part, doesn’t stop at the finish line. The Friends of Erik and the Rotary club have planned a dinner dance on October 28. Those proceeds, like those of the Run, will go to the Dahmms.

For more information on the Run, the Friends of Erik and the dinner dance, visit www.runforthehillofit.org.

Pete Mazzaccaro

The older I get, the better I was
by Chestnut Tim

By the time you read this, if you read this, I will have completed my 11th “Run for the Hill of It.” I say “if you read this,” not because I think most people who buy the Local do it only to see how much the houses near them are going for, or to read their own letters to the editor about killing deer, or not killing deer, or saving baby foxes only to learn in the following week’s letters from sundry experts and humanitarians, that they were in fact blinded kittens and, in any event, no one should touch wounded house-pets found on Forbidden Drive unless he first calls Maine and gets permission from Lloyd Wells. I don’t think that at all.

I say “if” because I feel, as I have with all of my previous Runs, there is a good possibility, that, somewhere approaching mile four, I will die.

It’s not that I’m not prepared. I’m not one of those fools who shows up at the race wearing high-tops and jean shorts, then goes like hell for the first half-mile only to find himself leaning over the fence just past Bell’s Mill, chumming the creek with the remnants of a Friday-night Schmitter. No, no. I’m another kind of fool entirely.

I have a time in my head that is the upper limit of respectability for a 5-mile run. Somewhere in my years of running this race, I decided that if I could not at least run it under that time, I was washed up. The thing is, I am washed up. I’m forty. I don’t sleep well. My back hurts. My knees are shot. The gray is coming in as fast as the ear-hair. I’ve switched to an all-bran cereal, and I’m ready to eat dinner at 4:30. The race has become the athletic equivalent of a comb-over.

Then there’s the issue of physics: as I get older, I get heavier. One of Newton’s laws says something like “acceleration operates in inverse proportion to the mass of you’re a – –.” I may be a bit off on the wording; I’m pretty sure Newton wasn’t a rhymer. Making my time means the race gets less enjoyable, more painful, and, yes, more likely to result in my death — or at least my wishing for it as I near mile four.

I run enough that I could actually enjoy the race. It’s for a great cause. Anyone who has been at the starting line and listened to the parents of the beneficiaries speak knows that each year is uniquely touching. If that weren’t enough to get me beyond myself, the run along the Wissahickon is Thoreauvian. Edgar Allan Poe, writing of the Wissahickon in 1843, called it a “remarkable loveliness.” And that was before he went nuts. All I have to do is take my time and enjoy it. My wife says that to me every year. She says, “Take your time and enjoy it.”

She also brings my children along to cheer for me. That’s no help. Chances are my five-year-old will say to me what she said last year, “Eww, Daddy, you’re all sweaty … Why didn’t you win?”

I try to explain that doing your best is what’s important. Finishing is the real goal.

I often lie to my children.

I don’t win because I wasn’t made to run long distances. Many people aren’t, in the same way that many people on the CHCA Board aren’t meant to handle money.

Like them, I know what the goal should be. I can even say it out loud and write it down, but when the race starts, something else takes over.

I should make better goals. I should avoid stepping in gargantuan piles of horse dung. I should avoid gettting caught staring at women in Spandex jogbras. I should, after the race, in that crowded and usually humid location, as I sway toward the banana-orange-bagel-water table, make it my number-one goal of the entire day to avoid bumping into other sweaty men. These are good goals, attainable and enjoyable — I would even venture that the last one is worthwhile as a life-philosophy. But instead, I focus on a time.

There are people who find pleasure in running. A priest that I know tells me he enjoys the race. He takes his time, appreciates the scenery, thinks about things, says hello to people. Some years he’s in better shape than others. He goes faster or slower, but he never thinks about his time. That’s nice … but he’s a priest. He’s operating on a whole other level. He’s probably channeling Ecclesiastes: “The race is not to the swift … ” I haven’t had that kind of inner peace since the womb. Plus, when the results get posted, his time doesn’t matter. People see it and say, “That’s cool. Father ran in the race.” If someone sees my name, he’ll say, “Wow, I thought he was in better shape than that. Must be that huge butt that slows him down.” My wife points out that no one but me is interested in how I do.

She’s right, of course, and, in the end, that is exactly why I run, and why I focus on a time, no matter how blue the sky or green the Wissahickon.

Something in me wants to know. Like anything we give ourselves to, a race reflects us. It’s a test. It’s a measure. It is honest. There’s a limit to how fast I can go — though, sadly, seemingly no limit to how slow. I will run as well, and feel as good, as I deserve.

So, despite my possible death, I’ll run. It’s a chance to see old neighbors who’ve moved to the suburbs. It’s a chance to share the gift of the Wissahickon with hundreds of people. It’s a chance to give support to kids and families who need it. That’s not a bad way to spend a Saturday morning.

I invite you along next year. (But if you’re an 84-year-old woman with a crookback and a limp, could you please not pass me again at the finish — there’s only so much a guy can take.)

Note: Chestnut Tim ran, experienced wracking pain, and survived. He hopes to run, and write, again.

|