Addicted to running

By Phil Marsh

It's 6 a.m. Sunday morning. Soon, more than 3,600 runners will arrive to begin the 42.2k journey to the finish line of the Ottawa Marathon. Among them will be a small group of men who have been battling a lifetime of alcohol or drug addiction. For these eight runners, this marathon will not only be the adventure of a lifetime but one that could very well extend their lives.

In March 2007, I began coaching a number of residents of Harvest House, a residential treatment facility in Ottawa. Program director and recovering addict Gary Wand, a runner himself, had decided that the best strategy for addicts was to replace an unhealthy addiction with a healthy one. And what better way than to share his passion for running with a group of men who have spent much of their lives on the run?

We trained the runners for the 2007 5k and 10k events in Ottawa, with weekly meetings on nutrition, health and lifestyle changes. After the race, I decided my next goal was to train some of the guys to run the marathon in 2008.

With any training group, you can expect to have a few members drop out because of injuries, family and work commitments. As a coach, I often tell my athletes that real life gets in the way of things like running. With this group, we were also facing the daily challenges of addiction and the risk of going back to the lifestyle they were trying so hard to escape. And yet, we selected eight men and our instincts about their character were better than we could have imagined. All eight of them - Peter, Josh, Eric, Tom, Brent, David, James and Trevor - were on the starting line, along with Gary and me.

In my 22 years of coaching runners, from beginners to world-class athletes, I have never had an experience this challenging or decided early on in the race that this would also be my last marathon, knowing that I could never top this adventure of a lifetime.

After a group prayer led by David, the youngest member of the team, and some last-minute instructions about water and nutrition, we headed to the starting corrals. The gun went off and we went nowhere. A few thousand runners were ahead of us, but instead of impatience I found the guys chatting up fellow runners, looking around at the spectacle of it all and absorbing every moment. We finally began to move and I couldn't get over how relaxed and ready the guys seemed. The demons they battled seemed to have been replaced with a sense of belonging to a new community, running with, instead of from, other people. One by one, the guys get all the way through 30k. As James and I ran together, I remembered the conversation we had in March on a freezing run about both of our moms dying of cancer and I realized that they would both be very proud of their sons right now.

I had told the guys often that the last 10k of the race was unlike anything they had or would ever face. As the heat built and the sun became piercing, one by one they acknowledged that no truer words had been spoken. Along the route, people who had been following the team in the media cheered, "Go Harvest House!" or called out the names of some of the guys.

As Josh and I reached the 40k mark, the noise of the crowd became dramatically louder and the cheers for Harvest House grew more frequent. We heard people say, "We're proud of you" and I could see Josh grow stronger with every word. I backed off just as we reached the finish line and Josh crossed the line as John Stanton called out his name.

One by one, I took the runners to the finish line and then doubled back to find the next one. Watching Peter cross the finish line was like watching your child take their first steps, ride their first bike or walk through the doors on their first day of school. If they can meet the challenge of the marathon, they can also beat their addictions.

But addicts are quitters in everything they do, whether it's relationships, trust, work or school. Everything becomes secondary to getting that next fix. Brent has quit the program twice in the past few months, relapsing through bad decisions, but each time coming back to Harvest House because of his young son and his goal of finishing the marathon. I worried he might not finish and I knew that if he couldn't finish something he had made so important in his life, the outcome could be devastating.

That caused me to pick up my pace as I searched for Brent. But as I reach the curve at 41k, there he is, tears flowing from his eyes and an awkward gait. We have a brief chat, and as he realizes that he is going to finish, he begins to sprint. I stayed with him until a few metres from the finish, both of us knowing that it could have been completely different for all of us had he not finished. Tom finishes in a little over 5:30, a smile on his face, leaving a quitter label behind. All eight of these incredible men who started training in February not only made it to the starting line but finished. They are all forever marathoners. I don't think they will all run more marathons, but now they know they can accomplish anything they want in life and that they can be role models for all of us.