This was another combination of family visit and marathon, and they're connected. Running can make the pieces of your life fit together better than they would otherwise. Thursday morning I finished up a scramble of grading for my two spring semester courses plus miscellaneous independent studies, picked up my adventurous 4th-grader Katie from school at 12:30, and Katie, my son Sam and I loaded the van and headed up to Providence with the CD cranking out Van Morrison, John Hiatt, Little Feat, Bob Marley, Fabulous Thunderbirds, Lyle Lovett, John Lee Hooker, not much chick music except for some Patty Griffin. Everything went smoothly until we hit a major traffic jam on the Merritt Parkway and fought our way through beautiful downtown Stamford over to to I-95, which was no better. So we ate an early dinner at the Darien McDonalds while the traffic gradually got moving again. We arrived in Providence almost two hours later than we had expected.

My mom is alone at home. Following another fall at home and more rib fractures the previous Sunday, my dad has moved from hospital to nursing home for rehab. He is 82 now, and his balance and depth perception are gone, and he can no longer read which is a shame since books were his main recreation. Since December he has broken his back, kneecap, right arm and at least three sets of ribs in separate falls. And he's up to pee every hour or two at night thanks to a rotten prostate, and disoriented at night and too proud and stubborn to call for help. My mom was exhausted from trying to watch him 24/7 but convinced he'll be injured even worse in the nursing home. That night the nursing home called around 2 AM because he was trying to crawl over the end of his bed since he couldn't get over the side-rails, so my mom and I went over to see him and got him calmed down. We couldn't sleep anyway because of screaming drunk Brown students celebrating the end of their semester, a busy night for the fire station around the corner on Brook St., and the usual dope dealing on Hope St.

We got him settled, were back home about 4 AM, and got a few hours of sleep. After breakfast, I took Sam and Katie over to the nursing home for a visit, and my dad was his usual lucid self. Later in the morning my mom took Sam and Katie to the Providence Zoo to see the new baby giraffes while I stayed with my dad through bathing, lunch and meetings with case manager, PT, OT, dietician. We mostly talked about family. He remembers most of the recent things and is very clear about the more distant past. I admire my dad a lot. He worked too much when I was a kid, and he never took very good care of himself, but he is a virtuous man. Even at his most confused, when you get down to the core of his personality, he is gentle and kind, and this makes him easy to care for. In my own life I have tried to put my family ahead of my work, and to take good care of myself. Otherwise, I try to emulate him.

My parents are having a hard time dealing with his decline. They still expect to be driving up to Nova Scotia for the summer with the dogs in a week or two. My sister has been the reality check for them, and has endured their resentment for recommending the nursing home. I urged Dad to work hard on the PT/OT so he can regain some coordination and get back home faster. I had thought part of the problem was muscle weakness, but the PT said he's strong enough; the problems are neurological.

I got back to my parents' house around mid-afternoon Friday. Sam, Katie and I said goodbye to my mom and drove up to my brother Kip's house in Nelson, NH. Kip is an OB/GYN in Keene, specializing in high-risk deliveries, and when he's not delivering babies for fat screaming back-woods hippies who never bothered with pre-natal care, he's taking care of his sheep, chickens, rabbits, vegetable gardens, etc. Their house is next to the church on the village green, with barns and gardens to the back. Totally Yankee Magazine; May Sarton the poet used to live there. A few summers back we were getting ice cream on Main St. in Keene and met one of Kip's patients who asked which of us is older. I laughed since Kip is five years younger than I am, and I think Kip decided to start running right then and there. He ran Vermont City Marathon in Burlington last May, Montgomery County Marathon in the Parks last November (in a neck brace), and trained hard for this year's VCM, running a 1:35 half-marathon three weeks ago. He is definitely going to run a Boston qualifier time soon.

Kip has always had terrific sprint speed. When we were kids and my neighborhood friends and I would try to ditch him, and he'd run his little legs off chasing after us. Soon we couldn't shake him, so he hung with us and toughened up. He never topped 5'6", but by high school he was a phenomenal athlete and team leader: captain of the lacrosse team for two seasons, captain of the wrestling team, and then captain of Harvard's rugby team. Now he's building endurance. He did long runs peaking at 23 miles. The hills are unavoidable there. He runs with boiled potatoes instead of gels, which suggests ultra-marathoning in his future.

Kip's wife Sandy started running before he did, and actually got him started. This VCM was her first marathon, to celebrate turning 50 this year. She did a long, disciplined buildup, following the Chicago program but doing each week's program twice before moving on to the next week.

We wandered around the small farm, checked out the new lambs and new meat chickens. Kip gets some type of chicken that has no appetite limit, so these birds just eat and grow until their legs can no longer support them. If you don't slaughter them in time, the flies are all over them. A stray dog had killed Kip's enormous free-roaming rabbit Honey-Bunny the previous week in broad daylight, and when Kip chased the thing down the road in his car and ran it over, it turned out to be a coyote. Animal agriculture is not as romantic as people think. We walked around the huge garden in the late evening sunlight, with Kip pointing out crops with different maturations. I got a few black fly bites, and found I'm just as reactive to them as I was when I left New Hampshire 25 years ago. We stayed up late talking, then slept hard in the cool night air. The sunrise woke me pretty early.

Saturday we had a slow breakfast, then I dug in some blueberry bushes with sulfate to acidify the soil, while Kip worked in the vegetable garden, then we packed up again and headed off to Burlington after lunch. We did the usual pilgrimage to the Ben & Jerry's factory off I-89. The company has been sold to Unilever, although Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield still promote the stuff, kind of like Colonel Sanders staying around shilling for KFC long after he'd sold out. I actually know these guys from their earliest days making ice cream at the converted gas station in Burlington. I love the fact that they won a First Amendment case against Illinois and some other dipshit farm states that tried to ban their labels saying their ice cream comes from non-rBGH cows. Jerry actually asked my ex-wife to marry him years back, but she married me instead--big mistake.

After the B&J stop, we drove to the Burlington Sheraton, which was packed with old ladies there for some Shriners' auxiliary convention. We got through that mob to the marathon expo. Sam had never seen so much running stuff in one place before. We got our packets. Sam was registered as part of Sylvia Wright's "Tips Trotters" relay team, along with Sylvia's cousin Leah; both of them planned to run the whole marathon, so Sylvia gave Leah the timing chip to run with. This was to be Leah's first marathon too, but she had actually trained for it. Sam runs 800 and mile and XC at Cornell, but his longest run ever was only 15 miles. I picked up two pairs of NB1020's for $50 each (yet another favorite shoe discontinued), a case of PowerGels and an extra shirt from last year's marathon.

We had stayed at the Sheraton last year, and it wasn't worth it; the last straw was when the complementary shuttle from the race finish back to the hotel never showed and I did 3+ post-race miles looking for it and then walking back. They probably have us on their "never again" list anyway: my daughters Katie and Sarah (8 and 9) and Kip's kid Eleanor (9) had their own room last year and spent the whole night trashing it like coked-up rock stars: they had visits from the staff and lots of angry complaints from neighboring rooms while we parents slept blissfully. This year we were back at the Radisson again with rooms overlooking Lake Champlain, only a couple of blocks from the start and finish. With only two girls, and Eleanor recovering from a recent concussion, things were quieter this year.

This was my third VCM. I ran the 1999 race in high-80's heat that had the locals dropping like flies, paced by a relay team of Kip's son Cameron, my wife Betsy, Sylvia, Kip and Sandy. I ran it again in 2001 after a tough Boston run, and that time Kip, Betsy, Cameron (age 14, breaking 4 hours), and Sylvia did the whole marathon too, and we met my cousins Lewis and Tim Lukens on the course by chance. My parents were along both years, and my mom arranged an evening get-together with the cousins after the 2001 race. We were all too stupid to talk much, so we mostly just drank beer and grinned at each other. My parents weren't along this year, and with all the distractions of the spring, and my dad's decline, I hadn't done the usual long training runs, and had no particular expectations for this year's race.

Considering this is Vermont, the VCM is not particularly hilly. The course is basically a four-leaf clover design centered on Battery Park: a 3-mile downtown opening loop, a 6 mile up-and-back to the north along a highway, a 6-mile loop to the south returning along the lakeside bike path to a long climb back up to Battery Park at mile 15, and then an 11-mile loop up North Ave. and returning south along the lakeside bike path. The race is limited to 2,000 marathoners and 600 relay teams (up to 5 people each). It's an interesting course with excellent logistic and crowd support including bands and drum ensembles along the way. This year's race sold out fast last October.

There was rain during the night, and the wind had blown down a bunch of stuff at the start and finish areas. We got up around 6 and had bagels and banana, then ibuprofen. The girls and Sandy's son Carl and his fiancé Emily walked up the hill to Battery Park with us to see us start.

The race went off at 8:05AM in a slight drizzle, mid-50's temperature, with Kip, Sam and me starting too far back in the pack, slowed about a minute by other runners in the first mile. We ran together for most of the first loop and spread out a little on the highway up-and-back. There was a pretty stiff wind from the south. The only front-runner I recognized was Gordon Bakoulis. The sky gradually cleared. I maintained a pretty steady effort level, basically a 7:30 pace on level ground. On the third loop to the south Sam got well ahead of me, and I didn't see him again until the top of the final loop at about 20 miles. I had a gel near 13 miles, hit the halfway point at 1:39:17. The hill climb to the 15-mile mark was longer but less steep than I remembered, and I felt good after the top and got back on pace quickly. Going north, the wind helped a little, and I realized I was still near a PR pace, but the sun was out and it was warming up, and I dreaded the final four miles when I would be facing the wind again. I had a second gel around 18 miles, and was surprised to see Sam's red shirt again, far ahead. I pointed him out to a couple of other runners and bragged uncontrollably about him until they moved away.

I caught up with Sam after mile 22. His usual stride is very smooth and efficient, but he was really laboring at that point, although determined to finish on the run. The trees along the bike path gave us better protection from the wind than I had expected, and Sam encouraged me to go for a PR. I was feeling better than I usually do at 23 miles, but I knew it would be close at best. There were a few stretches with bad wind exposure, but I was able to hold pace pretty well. The ibuprofen definitely helped. I counted down the minutes, skipped a couple of water stations near the end, heard the crowd at Waterfront Park and pushed it a little. I remembered how final stretch is deceptively long and cruel because the crowd makes you think you're almost done, but the course continues all the way around the bottom of Waterfront Park and halfway up again to the finish line. I hit the finish at 3:18:41 with a 3:18:17 chip time, 7 seconds faster than my old PR, 152/1,944 overall and 16/171 M4549, and over an hour faster than my 1999 time. I felt great. Of my 14 marathons, this was the closest I have come to a textbook run, a consistent pace averaging 7:34 overall, 1:38:53 net for the first half vs. 1:39:24 net for the second half with the long hill.

Sam finished at 3:20:42; net time of 3:20:18, 168/1,944 overall and 3/55 M1624...if only he had been registered for the marathon instead of the relay!  This is the last time I will ever beat him at any distance.

I got water and a massage, no waiting, and then loaded up on Ben & Jerry's chocolate fudge ice cream, pretzels, banana, juice, soda, etc. We met the girls with Carl and Emily; they had been back to the hotel for breakfast, made "Go Mackenzies!" shirts and watched us running the hill from the hotel room window; then they came down to see us finish and stuff themselves on post-race snacks. Kip finished in 3:38:33, about 6 minutes faster than his old PR. Sandy finished in 4:39:54. Family PR's all around. Sylvia finished in 4:47:15. Leah finished her first marathon in 3:46:21 as the "Tips Trotters" relay team, a Boston qualifier if only she'd registered for the regular marathon.

We walked the short uphill to the hotel, showered and napped briefly, then went out for a late lunch at an Irish pub with live music, then walked around Burlington's pedestrian street. Back at the hotel I called Betsy and my mom; Katie and Eleanor went swimming. Carl and Emily said goodbye before heading home to Portsmouth, NH; I told Carl he'd better not blow it; they should set a wedding date. We had a late pizza dinner, then the usual post-marathon fitful sleep, a huge hotel breakfast, and some shopping at Borders. I bought Bernd Heinrich's Why We Run, which turns out to be the same book as Racing the Antelope, which I'm reading now. Heinrich is at UVM. Then we headed for home. The drive was uneventful except for a horrible accident on the northbound Merritt Parkway and southbound delay caused by gawkers. We switched from the NJ Turnpike to I-295 at Exit 4 to avoid more traffic and got back to Newark a little after 7PM.

We really are a running family now. My daughter Becky qualified for NY State meet in the 4x800 the Thursday before the marathon; she didn't expect to go, since she's in the same section and school category and races the same distances as Molly Huddle, the awesome high-schooler who is profiled in this month's issue of Running Times. My stiffness was gone in a couple of days.  Sam has a stress fracture which got painful a couple of days later in his right foot, so he's running with the flotation belt in the pool for the next 4-6 weeks, swimming a lot, biking around to UD classes and thinking about triathlons.  Next up is planning un for the first Traildawgs Fat-Ass 50K, then the Relay For Life June 7th and 8th, Smith's Challenge on Father's Day, the Double Trouble on the 23rd and the Fat-Ass itself on June 29th. Plus Newark Charter XC runs on Wednesdays, the Hockessin Hash's 400th run June 1st, and lots more. I'm starting a year's sabbatical at the end of the month, and will have more time for running.  It is a meditation; it gives a structure to the randomness of life; it provides companionship, consolation and peace.