My father has been running longer than I’ve been alive. As his son, without understanding or explanation, he expected me to run with him. He was a Marine, but he’d been running long before he enlisted. He escaped from an abusive, alcoholic home in North Carolina at age 16. He eventually found safety and structure at Camp Pendleton.
He was too young for Vietnam and separated before Desert Storm. He couldn’t fulfill the reasons why he joined the Marine Corps, but he still rigidly threw his identity into the military. Purpose was scheduled, designed, and predictable.
My father refocused on me when he missed the opportunity to fulfill a purpose overseas. After six years in the Marine Corps, he was convinced life would start outside of the military, outside California, with clean air and open spaces in Colorado. So he trekked us to Denver.
His father never went to college, so it was important that he did. He reminded me daily that his father was lazy and a drunk, so it was important for him to evolve. He traded morning PT for early morning study sessions.
He never saw his father work, so he proved himself different by clocking into two full-time jobs. He thought his father was corrosive, irrational, and unpredictable. And so I think that’s why my father never wept, never faltered, and was always reliable. He was a stone bridge over the Colorado rapids.
My father ran every Saturday morning. He thought it was important that I did too.
He was a machine, I thought. Always on. Some weekends, I’d wake predawn, too early for cartoons. I’d find him, already awake, staring at the bedroom wall of our apartment. The sun never touched his north-facing window. The blue hour seeped into everything and washed over his walls, his posture. His silence always made that place too quiet. When I asked if he was okay, he’d only rise and tell me he was waiting on me.
The running trail at Washington Park felt infinite when I was 15. It’s hidden in a Denver neighborhood where bars don’t cover every window; a 2-mile oasis bookended by man-made north and south lakes.
My father had only two kinds of conversations: long and too long—always about purpose, always asking for my opinion, always ending abruptly with grunts and a single head nod when I gave it. His purpose was teaching, and he knew it’d be fulfilled if he got his doctorate. His father hated teachers so he thought it was important that he become one.
But he struggled finding tenure. This security would have justified his suffering. Just a few more years, he’d persuade my mother. After the Marines and me, reaching tenure would be his new finish line.
Weekend runs with dad always felt reasonable at first. The first 17 seconds were always the easiest. I’d leap start. Forward. Exploding. Full stride. Everything blurred. He’s gone, pacing behind. Temporarily. Soon he’s upon me. Steadied and practiced. My lungs burn and my rabbit heart pounds, desperate and frustrated, while my legs fail me.
Without looking back, he’d bark for me to keep moving.
Clouds of hardwood pine pollen floated at shoulder height as he led me around the lake. He’d burst through them effortlessly; I’d follow through the aftermath as he counted intermittent cadence. I’d inhale everything and suffocate.
It’ll all soon be downhill, he said.
But the asphalt was level, hard, and weathered. Each foot strike sent lightning up my calves and burned my gut.
Hurt the pain, he’d say. And I’d wrench my love handle, denying any cramp from forming.
Soon I’d walk. His head would snap back just as I kicked my leg into a half-skip and jog before he could catch me slacking. I could hear him grind his teeth as he barked out another order: Keep your feet moving. One foot after another and it’ll be over.
Marines exist in the present tense; they always are, never were. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” But my father was an NCO in his physical prime, trained to motivate kids a few years older than me. I’m slowing down and he’s staring. He lets me walk and I know he wants to say something.
I keep looking at the sky. Pilots don’t have to jog endless miles, I think. Still, I’m larger than him and I can’t sprint more than 17 seconds. We’ll try again tomorrow, he says. One foot after another.
But 2 miles is infinite to me.
And all I want is to keep up with my father.
Expelling Weakness
Pain is weakness leaving the body. That concept was buried in me and in every late-’80s millennial. He assumed that pain—mental, physical, and existential—was equal and expected. Discomfort was required to become stronger, faster, resilient.
You want to believe this when you’re 15. Expelling something weak inside yourself inspires you when you’re 20. You echo it when you’re 30 and parrot it mindlessly when you’re 40 with a family. Pain is as necessary a part of life as breathing. Existing is pain. There is an expectation that it will eventually leave the body. Soon, you won’t feel. And not feeling this is a metric for growing stronger.
My father was faithful to this and enlisted with few options into the Marine Corps: nothing but the clothes on my back.
I was born on Camp Pendleton, and I felt that I carried his purpose.
But this responsibility was too heavy, especially when I floundered to find my own purpose and stumbled with the realization I wasn’t the son he hoped people would see.
At 15, I had no language for any of this. Keeping up with my father left me short of breath and embarrassed. My legs always shook nervously and my lungs felt like they were collapsing even on days off, outside of the park. Soon all I could feel and spit out to him was resentment and exhaustion: “I’m going to kill myself.”
No. You don’t know real pain, he’d say.
I hadn’t earned these feelings.
My father believed pain was a symptom of growth. Trauma and discipline would result in success and a stronger livelihood. And so he enlisted. And I convinced myself that I also needed to earn my own place. So later I enlisted, too.
But I joined the Air Force. Because they don’t make you run as much.
Chasing Purpose
As soon as I left his sight, purpose in the military felt superficial for me; belonging was somewhere else. When I separated, he acknowledged this disillusionment was expected, as if finally earned. My father searched for purpose anywhere but where he was, and freshly separated, so did I. New relationships, new city, new career. Stillness was a failure.
I moved from maintaining bombers in the Air Force to managing project assets in civilian call centers, from racking milestones in manufacturing to high-profile sales and acquisitions.
My father never got his terminal graduate degree. I thought it was important that I did. He had only known poverty in his mid-30s; I made sure I knew more. Purpose became outpacing my father.
He’s behind me now. My strides are wider. My successes are more extensive, albeit because of his push for me to succeed.
But because my only purpose was being where he wasn’t, I lamented to him: “I can’t do this anymore.”
But at middle age, he carried his own weight, searching for a grand coronation for crossing a finish line always out of reach. He would remind me: You’re not exhausted. Not yet.
So I caught control of my breathing, hurt my pain, and kept sprinting forward.
Years later, as I settled into middle age, in the predawn, my wingtips scraped against the linoleum of the office floor in West Hollywood. It’s the only hour of silence before the assistants scramble to prep the day. The blue hour washed the hallways to my office and I stewed at my desk, staring at the corner where the floor met the wall, thoughtless, grinding my teeth.
Eric, one of the new hires, fidgeted with the handle to my door and said, “Are you okay?”
What is it? is all I barked.
He apologized twice as he invited himself inside. He chewed his bottom lip. He was 30 and about to become a father. He hadn’t figured out his life and worried he wouldn’t before his son arrived. How can he determine a future for his son when he hadn’t found meaning? I gripped the face of my watch, and the scent of the janitor’s hardwood pine filled from the hallway. He wondered if he was worth more dead than alive.
Probably, I said.
Eric fidgeted with his hands and mumbled with nervous laughter, not knowing if I was joking. My silence was stark and borrowed from my father. His eyes were pensive. I couldn’t stay still this long, so I decided to end the conversation as cruelly as possible.
Life is indifferent. It carries on whether we decide to stay or not.
I told him to endure and to keep moving forward. I believed this because I’m sure my father would agree.
I stopped midstep.
I apologized.
But it was too late, and he nodded the same nod I’d given hundreds of times before. And I wondered if my father had sought the same guidance from someone like me only to hear: You’re not allowed to stop. Keep moving forward.
And if one day Eric may sit in his bedroom and stare at the wall while his son gathers his shoes.
The Finish Line
My father can never retire. He’s 70, working, pushing forward to an ever-shifting finish line. The pain in his knees and the exhaustion that once stopped his heart were the only weaknesses that ever left his body.
He endured—as a Marine in the present tense, forced to live the same endurance demanded by him and for me. Motion is survival and purpose.
I run alone now.
The sound of footsteps fading, steady, sometimes scraping, but always.
Persevere, son, he says. I know it feels hopeless. I’ve felt the same.
His discipline, passed down as love, is his legacy and burden. My father never knew when to stop. I don’t think he knew he could. It’s been a long time since I’ve been 15.
I know I shouldn’t run through the world as he did.
But I can almost see the finish line.
This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
