songs of experience

I don’t think Betsy will mind my sharing this. After writing about my training partners, I pulled out some old journals and came across a letter I had saved from Betsy that she gave me a few days before the 1996 Olympic Trials. I want to post it here, today, so that other seekers-of-joy (through running) might feel the love.

“Joan, you have used your running as a mode of expression, an artwork, since the day I met you. I have seen the struggles, the elations, but most of all the JOY. It is in this process, the process of expression, that the Olympic trials final fits. Not as an ending, not as the pinnacle, but simply as an act of 25 laps of joyous effort!

From the age of six, I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I had produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At 73, I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, of plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am 80, I shall have made more progress; at 90, I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at 100, I shall have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am one hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.

- written at age seventy-five by me, once Hokvsai, today Owakio Rojn,
old man mad about drawing

Joan, this quote describes you at age 75, with your family, your coaching, your running and your writing. And it describes you today, going into this race. The best is yet to come! We’ll be there at the track yelling and cheering like crazy from the sidelines. RUN WITH JOY!
Love, your friend Betsy”