I'm Nike+ Pro 16, of the nikeplus.com Forums.  I'm also a longtime middle-of-the-pack runner--it's a good thing I like to run, because I'm too slow to win!  But I do like to run.  I really, really like to run.  I run in Forest Park, and on the waterfront, and on the berm during my lunch break, and to and from home every day, and in the occasional race.  Next up:  the Paris Marathon in early April, possibly one of the E.T. races down in Nevada in early August, Hood To Coast (of course), the Nike Women's Marathon, and then Boston next spring.  I can always be persuaded to run fun local races, assuming I have the day off and have the race fee handy.

Unlikely source of inspiration

So I'm tapering.  Also, I'm trying to shake a nasty cold I've managed to catch so that I'm healthy on race day.  What all this means is that I have a lot more spare time than I'm accustomed to having, and I've been haunting the sports psychology section of the library looking for words of wisdom--or maybe just verbal snake oil, I don't know--to help me find my game face on Sunday.

One book I read contains a fascinating exercise involving listing the people you know and gradually narrowing your list to include only those who somehow affect your sports performance.  Maybe it's an inspirational mentor, maybe it's a hated rival, maybe it's a long-ago coach whose voice still echoes in your head when you're running intervals.

My list contained a lot of the usual suspects.  The running partner who introduced me to this ridiculous pastime.  The run club teammate who's steadily chiseled his PRs downward through hard, focused training.  The seminal female runner who probably inspired a whole generation of women my age who run, and a few who don't.  Even the glowering oversized image of Bill Bowerman who greets me in the hallway each morning when I arrive at work.

There's one person on my list who didn't immediately make much sense:  David Ball, my high-school PE teacher.

To understand why this man played the role of "villain" in the melodrama of my teen years, you must understand how NOT an athlete I was in high school. 

I didn't hate running laps, and was actually reasonably good at it, but I was fairly awful at everything else.  I recall the first time I managed to serve the volleyball over the net, after hundreds of failed attempts, and how I automatically rotated to the next position.  "No, you have to serve it again," Mr. Ball explained.  Some reward!  I was the last one chosen for nearly everything, except perhaps dodgeball, which utilized my one skill:  avoiding all contact with the ball.

Mr. Ball was and is, it needs to be reiterated, a thoroughly decent person.  He loved kids and loved sports.  He wanted kids to love sports.  For most kids, he accomplished this goal.  I don't recall ever thinking that he hated me or was deliberately picking on me.  I simply dreaded his class and everything about it. 

Mr. Ball is a casual friend of my parents', and some time ago my mother mentioned to him that I had taken up running and had qualified for the Boston Marathon.  She reported his reaction--stunned, delighted, and full of questions--to me, and now tells me that he asks about my running every time they see each other.

This does my heart good for so many reasons.  I love that years after I left his class, he's still committed to the idea of me being an athlete, even if he wasn't able to make me one.  I love the fact that he, of all people, knows how far I've come as a runner. 

I have many people in my life who love and support me, and who know I haven't always been into sports.  My parents seem bewildered by it, and ask me well-meaning but clueless questions about how long my next marathon is.  My old friends seem disappointed that I've remained too absorbed by sports to turn out the Great American Novel I've been promising forever; they wonder why their shy, bookish high school friend from the "nerd" crowd had to go and join the "jock" crowd.

I have many current friends who have known me only as a runner, and take it as a given.  Of course I run marathons; everyone runs marathons.  Of course I qualified for Boston; the women's qualifying standards are notoriously soft, and I'm a respectable front-of-the-middle-of-the-pack type.  Of course I can't go out on Saturday night because I do my long run Sunday morning.  Really, who doesn't?  And when I tell these friends tales of my non-athletic past, I suspect they chalk it up to me being the self-deprecating goofball I pretty much always am.

Possibly, of everyone I know, Mr. Ball is the one who best gets it.  He knows how long a marathon is, and he knows how long a trip it is just to the starting line, to say nothing of the finish line, for a kid who would have sold her soul to avoid PE in high school.  I think that, to him, I'm living proof that there's hope for everyone.  And, to me, he's living proof that there are folks who just want you to love and excel at sports, no matter how long it takes for that to happen.