Texas Relays marathon April 4, 1981
Friends
This photograph was taken on April 4, 1981. I’m the runner on the left and my friend, Matt, is on the right. It’s near the end of the Texas Relays marathon, my first marathon. Matt wasn’t running in the race, he was watching me run and jumped on to the course excited to see that I was actually going to finish the race.
My time was 3-hours-3-minutes-53-seconds. I didn’t know how to run a marathon then, so I started slow. I ran the first 13.1 miles at 7.5 minutes per mile running with a stranger who told me he’d run several marathons and seemed like he knew what he was doing. He crashed at 13-miles, and I was alone, running with my own rhythm. My pace picked-up considerably to 6.5 minutes per mile for the second 13.1-miles. When Matt ran on to the course with about a mile left in the race, he shouted at me: “Do you know how many people you’ve passed?” I didn’t. I was “in the zone.”
Matt was my friend from the weight room at Gregory Gym on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, where we were students. Matt studied architecture, and I studied biology. My college job was to open the weight room, workout for four-to-six hours, and then close the weight room. Sweet. It’s where I met Matt, and we worked out together, pushing each other through tough routines.
At the time of this picture, I was in my last semester of college. I’d broken my left shoulder in a snow skiing accident and had surgery a few months earlier, in January. I couldn’t lift weights while recovering so I increased my running, running with my left arm in a sling for the first 6-weeks after the surgery. Matt had recently returned from a semester in Italy where he didn’t have access to a gym. He came home a lot skinnier.
In the gym, Matt was a beast, bench pressing over 300-pounds. He looked like Adonis, and I was occasionally embarrassed by pretty girls whistling at him when we were walking together around campus. Memories fade over time, and forty years is a long time, but I remember those days as a happy time in my life.
Matt had a trophy made for me with two small figures: a runner and a weight-lifter, and the words “World’s Finest Athlete” inscribed on the base. He gave it to me as a gift a week or two after the marathon. Nobody else I’ve ever known, outside of my immediate family, has ever given me such a thoughtful present, or one that meant so much to me.
I left Austin two months after this picture and started medical school in San Antonio, Texas. I never spoke to Matt again. He finished his Architecture degree and went on to a brilliant career in big cities like Washington, D.C. He became interested in helping inner city people. He got elected to a city council position where he could have an impact on architectural planning that affected people in poor neighborhoods. Later, he moved to California where he started two nonprofit organizations to help the homeless. He now works in Houston for an organization that does community development for people in need. Oh, and he raised two children, who sound terrific.
I know all this because I looked for him on the internet last week and found him. We arranged for a phone call today and talked for half-an-hour. He was on his way to the grocery store to buy fish for dinner. He still works out every day and pays attention to what he eats, as do I. “It’s in our blood,” he said. It’s how we both deal with the obstacles of living.
This picture has been on my desk since it was taken, wherever I’ve lived. I’ve picked it up so many times and wondered about Matt. After I hung up the phone, I had the same feeling of admiration for him that I had all those years ago when we worked out together in Gregory Gym.
Matt and I are two people whose paths crossed briefly in a gym for just a few years a long time ago. I haven’t maintained friendships with anyone I knew in high school, college or medical school (except for Jenny, the girl I married thirty-six years ago in medical school). I’m somewhat of a loner, and definitely not a guy who has ever had a lot of friends, but I’ve always thought of Matt as a really good friend. We agreed to stay in touch. I hope we will. Neither one of us has enough time to wait another forty years before our next phone call.
Monte