"Welcome Back"

I'm still trying to digest the fact that last week I finished my 30th marathon.

Four years ago I was a pacer in the New York City Marathon. I was the guy who held up a sign that said 5 hours and those that stuck with me finished the marathon in 5:01:30. I thought that was the guy that would do that every fall and I thought every spring I was gonna go find a rural marathon and see how fast I could do it.

Then GBS happened. I got a freakishly rare disease that nobody ever heard of and doctors lined up to tell me I'd be fine in a year. WTF, fine in a year isn't something you tell someone to make them happy. It might be something a gardener would say about someone's shrubbery, but I was a human being. Whatever, I've accepted the fact that I'm never going to be fine.

So after I finished this marathon I got like a gazillion Facebook comments. The one comment that meant more to me that all the rest of my came from a friend I've met through the Achilles running club. From a man who knows exactly what it's like to be beaten down by something that's not in his control. A man who had climbed out of that deep hole. A man who prefers to be called by his superhero name, "The Ultimate Running Machine". John Pierre summed it up in two words, "Welcome Back!"