NOTE: I wrote this story a couple of years ago and intended to publish it this week as we prepare for another Hood to Coast relay.
I hesitated, however, when news came yesterday that a young man from my hometown tragically and unexpectedly lost his life. Ethan Cantrell was seventeen years old. I had the pleasure of watching him play junior high and high school sports alongside one of my nephews.
Ethan loved God and his family. Ethan’s family loved him; they were rightfully proud of him. Ethan belonged to a peer group who loved one another in a way that makes you pause, marvel, and feel optimistic about the future. All of this joy and love was contagious. I am blessed to have seen and felt it.
I don’t have the right words of wisdom to share in the context of such a fresh, unfathomable tragedy. But I am thinking of Ethan and his family today as I pack my relay bag and begin thinking of Will Krajewski, the young man our team “Will Power” runs to honor every year. I’ll be thinking about Ethan this year, too.
Both of these young men were kind-hearted, bright souls. They made the world a brighter place. Both were seventeen when they passed.
We don’t get to choose the length of our lives, but we do get to choose how we spend our days. My prayer for all those hurting from this loss, especially Ethan’s young friends, is that they might live with open hearts. Don’t waste a minute of this glorious, beautiful, brutal, magical life with the trivial lies of the popular world. You already know that love, joy, and goodness abound right before your very eyes, for you are all of those things. Take the good that life has to offer and give plenty back. Train up and run the best race you can.
That’s all there is.
2017 - Opening day was a scorcher for the Hood to Coast Relay that year, with temperatures reaching 98 degrees—damn near scalding for Oregon in August or any month for that matter.
My first leg was only six miles, but they were humid and hilly, and my pace and the distance were painful. But a lot of my life felt painful in those days.
I’d recently returned home to the Pacific Northwest after living in Nashville, Tennessee for nearly a decade. In Music City, I’d left behind a beautiful group of friends, a thriving (albeit booze-fueled) social life, and the only corporate job I ever enjoyed. I’d come home to be closer to family, gain distance from a spiraling relationship, and recoup any values I once imagined building my life around.
But old habits are hard to break. Once back home, I threw myself into a fancy corporate job, traveled every week, drank every night, and chased disinterested men who had no intentions of building meaningful relationships around old timey things like values.
Turns out, if you’ve built your life at the bottom of a gravity well, a change in latitude may not be enough to change your attitude. I thought moving home would change everything, but I was deeper in the hurt locker of my own mind than ever before. Looking back, I wasted a lot of time feeling disappointed in and sorry for myself, but I also had enough fight in me to cling to two things that have always kept me grounded: running and writing.
Whether hungover, jet-lagged, or both, I put on my running shoes and clocked the miles every day. Also: I joined a writing group.
We met every Tuesday evening from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in a second-floor studio in east Portland. Sitting around a table in a circle, my fellow writers and I drank tea, shared dark chocolate, and took turns talking about the writing we’d produced for the week.
It was in this class that I met Joe, a quiet man with a sad laugh, sarcastic wit, and the lingering remnants of a Boston accent. Joe showed up to class every week, without fail. He was writing about losing his seventeen-year-old son, Will, to osteosarcoma, a form of cancer.
Joe is an engineer by trade. His writing is often clinical, technical, like he might be describing the logistics of building a bridge in one of America’s largest cities or the new terminal at PDX. But instead, he walks the reader through heavy moments like when he stood over his son’s hospital bed and helped the kid mentally prepare for surgery. A nurse enters the room and announces, it’s time.
Often and understandably, Joe’s clinical inventories lack introspection. But sometimes, his writing seeps out from a crack in his stoic veneer, and all of his pain, the indescribable depths of his loss, trickles out. It’s a good thing I’ve never been opposed to ugly crying in public, because when Joe brings this more guttural style of writing to class, there’s no stopping the tears. Joe and his wife, Karen, were dealt the most brutal hand of all, and it’s like Joe is exorcising that irreconcilable unfairness every time he squares up with the keyboard.
“We run races for Will,” Joe told me one evening. We were making small talk before class and stumbled upon our shared interest in running. “That’s how we honor him. He loved to run. So, we have a Hood to Coast Fundraising Team called Will Power. We always need runners.”
“Count me in,” I said.
This invitation to join Will Power proved to be a greater honor than I had imagined. Joe sponsors several relay teams in honor of his son, and many of the team runners are nurses and providers who Joe and his wife, Karen, have met over the years and during Will’s cancer journey.
That first year I ran with Team Will Power, I was in Van 2. My five teammates and I stood in a field near Sandy High School, limbering up while we waited for the six runners in Van 1 to finish their first legs of the day.
“Are we running with Will this year?” one of the Will Power regulars asked.
“Of course,” said Joe, his blue eyes dancing.
I looked the blonde woman who stood next to me, balancing on her left foot while holding her right foot to her bum, stretching her quad. Her name was Nikki, and she was a nurse at a Portland-area hospital.
“What does he mean, running with Will?” I asked.
Nikki dropped her foot to the ground and swayed from side to side, loosening her hips. “Joe has Will’s ashes in a little glass jar, and we pass it along from runner to runner. We run with Will.”
Nikki trotted off to find a water station, leaving me in shock to process this information. I wasn’t sure how I felt about running with the ashes of a seventeen-year-old kid, and I quickly decided I wasn’t too comfortable with it. But when it came time for my first leg, chronic dehydration and the heat of the day made a little glass vial the least of my concerns.
My first run was brutal. I tried to sprint the hills, but my bones felt like concrete. My muscles wouldn’t respond. White orbs crowded my vision.
No matter how much Gatorade I drank, heat stroke rendered me nauseous and diarrheic for the rest of the afternoon. I ate a cheeseburger at Burgerville, then spent thirty minutes reconciling my life choices in a port-a-potty.
When time came for my second outing—an evening run—I stood on a two-lane highway somewhere between St. Helens and Western Territory, admonishing myself for being old and lost and sad and all things fucked.
I was the lead runner for Van 2, so when my Van 1 handoff teammate came sprinting into the exchange and slapped the timing bracelet on my wrist, I turned and bolted, praying I wouldn’t shit my pants. Everyone from Van 1 and 2 cheered from the sidelines.
I heard my handoff teammate holler. “Hey! You forgot Will.”
I jammed one foot against the country road. My knees protested as my body lurched to a stop. Annoyed, I said a choice four-letter word and turned and walked back toward my teammate. I. Walked. Toward. The. Man. Flashing LED lights on his safety vest danced across his chest like he was a carnival ride.
He held the small glass jar toward me, grinning broadly, sweat running down his temples.
“Thanks.” I reached out and snatched the jar then slid it into my belt. Turning once more, I trotted off into the night.
My shitty attitude had nothing to do with the little glass vial and everything to do with the mean girl narrator I’d allowed to join me on the run. She was waging an all-out war against my mind, obsessing over how I’d been fast, once. Not collegiate-level fast, but competitive in races like these. But now she was reminding me of how old I felt. Tired. A corporate shill who’d eaten one too many catered lunches and drank two too many beers at the airport bar. Chasing a soulless marketing career because I needed a paycheck. Wasting time on shitty men because I was lonely and bored. I wasn’t even a mile into my run and she had me convinced that I was the slowest motherfucker out there on that entire course.
The crowd and congestion of the exchange fell away. All I could hear was my panting and lethargic shuffling as I ran through rolling farmland, up and down steep hills, then deeper and deeper into a forest that swallowed me away. My breath quickened but my pace did not. I imagined cougars waiting in the shadows, stalking my slow ass for a midnight snack. I tried to regulate my breathing, focus on my posture, lengthen my stride. But I’d given too much mental energy to that mean girl, and she’d taken up residency in my mind, and that little bitch had caught her second wind.
That’s when I heard the sound of someone sprinting up behind me.
Phhp-phhp-phhp-phhp-phhp.
Fast.
He was coming up fast.
My shadow popped into view, illuminated by the halo of his headlight. I looked taller, leaner than I would have given myself credit for, but I didn’t have much time for vanity because the man blew past me in seconds.
“Good job,” he said as he passed, his body so close in all that spacious wild country that his shoulder brushed mine. The tone of his voice was haughty, like he was smiling.
The motherfucker was smiling.
I glimpsed the whites of his brand-new running sneakers and the flashing reflection of a swoosh on his sponsored gear just before he disappeared into the forest ahead. Still sucking air, I imagined him reaching the next exchange and slapping his timing bracelet onto his teammate’s lithe wrist then sauntering over to his van and marking another “kill” on the window with a paint pen. “Kills” are how the corporate sports bros who run Hood to Coast keep track of the people they pass out on the course. It’s aggressive and predictable and egotistical, and on that night, it was exactly what I needed to get my shit together.
Rich-ass, Lake Oswego-sponsored U of O corporate soy boys smoking my ass … When did I forget who I am? This is a race, damnit. Move your ass, Sapp! The time to stop giving out little bitch energy starts now!
This pep-talk was enough to pull me out of the forest and power me up a steep incline into a clearing atop a mountain. The land smoothed out from the road. The velvet sky hovered so close it felt like I might reach up and touch one of its million rhinestone stars.
Without knowing it, my brain climbed off its hamster wheel. I breathed easy, the cool air soothing my lungs. My core was engaged, my quads churning. The runner who had always been there was back out on the trail, doing her thing, and that’s when I heard it. Another noise. A faint swish-swish-swishing.
Someone else perhaps, running up behind me?
Except this sound was there, with me, on my body.
Sliding my fingers into my running belt, I felt the edge of the glass jar and pulled it out. The swishing sound was louder now, unencumbered by neoprene and exposed to the night. The young man’s ashes washed against the insides of the vial likes waves.
I thought of the bald teenage boy I’d seen in pictures, smiling, always smiling, his light shining bright. He was a Boy Scout. He loved Star Wars and teasing his mom and dad. He loved running. Six weeks after he ran in his first Hood to Coast relay with his father, the kid was diagnosed.
From what I’ve gathered, even before his diagnosis, something in that young man seemed to know that every breath, every step, every day counted. And he made them count, and I think Joe strives to lead by example and inspire others to make them count, too.
On the top of that mountain, I became keenly aware of what I was wasting. All that self-loathing and negativity was too heavy, too unnecessary, and it wasn’t contributing to any forward momentum on my run or in my life. Whether I was running the race slow or fast, I had to rediscover joy and gratitude for the simple fact that I was still out there running.
I imagined that mean girl narrator suddenly standing on the side of the road, red-faced and clinging to her rage as I ran past, refusing to look back.
My adrenaline surged. Warm tears streamed down my dirty face. I ran faster, harder, letting it hurt more and more and loving every step. Because I could, and I can, and I will for as long as I’m able.
The stars, Will among them, flashed in the sky. The remains of his earthly vessel washed against the glass jar, sounding like faint laughter. All of the world fell away, and it was just me and the infallible memory of a seventeen year-old boy running through the night.