In a tavern, a runner once asked the acting race director for the Chicago Marathon to explain what drew him to road racing. The director grabbed a ladder-back chair and proceeded to relive competing in Alaska’s sled dog race, the Iditarod. He finished, “I love beings that run.” I always watch the Derby, Preakness and the Belmont despite ethical flaws in horse racing. Mammals move.

I’m speeding up the walking I’ve been doing since November because the

endocrinologist told me to. My bones have dwindled. I am almost 80 but my memory is clear. After decades of running, I still remember:

• Turning onto the northwest corner of an eight-mile loop around two hills in Portland, Oregon to see the beginning of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, earth blowing up.

• Running a ridge above a golf course and blowing into a crow call to attract the fall crows that hung out in the oaks. The crows dive bombed my running partner, an Australian cattle dog named Shadow.

• A small gang of elk ran up and down the dunes going my direction while I ran on sand to the Nehalem River jetty from Manzanita, Oregon.

• What tribal people on the Oregon coast personified as South Wind pushed me to a faster-than-ever pace twelve miles north on the Oregon coast from Gearhart to the Peter Iredale wreck in Fort Stevens State Park. The storm gale, complete with sleet, approached nearly 30 miles per hour. That stretch of undeveloped coast passes 3,000-acre Camp Rilea, the Oregon Army National Guard training ground. Wilderness, weather, and sand in my shoes.

• Going out on a January day at age 35 on icy roads and sidewalks, falling and

  cracking my tailbone.

• Watching Joan Benoit Samuelson become the first woman to win an Olympic

  Marathon gold medal in 1984 in Los Angeles.

• Finishing the Sapporo (Japan) Half Marathon that followed the Toyohira River as part of a Sister City trip.

• Moving with a herd of deer that ran beside our vacation family on the other side of high fences at a New Zealand export venison farm.

• At mile 20 of my third marathon, where some runners claim to “hit the wall,” I walked for a bit, letting my running partner go on ahead to finish before me. I listened to the voice of the second baby I miscarried months earlier tell me that I would have another daughter someday.

• Two weeks apart from each other on short training runs – one up a hill near my house and another on a snowy trail on Cape Cod – I experienced chest pains. KaiKai, the agile mutt running through the woods near me, knew something was wrong. We walked to the car with her glued to my calves. Mentioning the pain as I mopped my daughter’s floor, she insisted I go the emergency room. Pulmonary embolisms, one in each lobe. The pulmonologist at Mass General said what may have saved my life was lung capacity developed from years of running.

• 
  

Now when I run, I am slow. I jog or slog. No prizes. No medals, some participation tshirts stamped with sponsor logos. Yet, if I close my eyes, I remember the driveways, firs, houses and intersections on training runs of two, five, eight, and ten miles that I repeated dozens of times. The drinking fountains. The bathroom at Rose City golf course. The turn-around rest reward at the base of Neahkahnie Mountain to admire anemones in the tide pools. The panoramic view of Portland from the top of Rocky Butte on my twenty-mile runs.

As for why: I felt better, believed I was building bone, muscle and discipline and on the way to earning a new pair of Nike Pegasus shoes, what I run in. Now purple with a white swoosh.