My Dad, the Running Man
He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day’s work. -Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching I’d seen dead bodies before but never anyone I knew. So when I entered my father’s room to see him I asked my sister to come in with me. She had been with him for a few days and was used to seeing him without life in his body. My three brothers and she had gone to the morgue with his best clothes, dressed him and brought him back home for a last family reunion. Now when I arrived he was lying in his casket, on his bed for his final sleep. A sheer cloth covered his body so that he looked mysteriously distant. Oh no, no, Dad. This can’t be. Not you. You are supposed to be indestructible. I asked my sister to take the cloth off. I wanted to see for sure that it was he, to look him face on but I couldn’t do it myself. The veil between life and death was lifted. It was Dad’s face, pale, waxy and cold, his hands gently cupped by his sides. I looked closer. On his forehead was a floret of skin and blood where he had hit the ground. I waited, looking hard for a twitch in his fingers, a glimmer of a smile on his lips, a flare of breath in his nostrils. I half expected him to suddenly jump up and laugh, ‘just kidding!’ Nothing. Dad was dead. * * * * * * * * * * * My father, Gordon Moller, was born in Hawera in1925, the fifth child of eight. His father taught his boys to box, and Gordon was fighting in tournaments from the age of ten. His boxing career might have taken off but the war came along and Gordon, eager to join his older brothers in fighting for freedom, turned his year of birth from 1925 into 1923 and signed up. When his father found out he gave young Gordon a kick in the pants and a pat on the back at the same time. At the age of sixteen Gordon was on a warship headed for battle in the Coral Sea. I cannot imagine the horrors that a teenage country boy from New Zealand witnessed. Piecing together stories from Mum, and the odd snippet from Dad himself, I can only conclude that his leap from childhood into the adult world was too high, too wide, too deep. In the next five years before he was twenty-one, Gordon saw action, destruction, death, cruelty and depravity. It was not just his ability to deliver a fast, fat, well-placed wallop that earned him the nickname of “Punch Moller” in the navy, it was also that his idea of a good time was a “decent bloody scrap”. My mother tells me that at this time, while at port in Auckland, he got in a fist fight with a Yank and beat the guy up so badly that he almost killed him. Gordon was put in Mt Eden prison while they waited to see if the American would pull through. He did and Gordon was released. Meanwhile his ship, the Leander, had moved to another port and when Gordon caught up with it he was disgruntled to find that his post on the 4 inch gunnery had been reassigned to another sailor. Gordon had earned that position by topping his class in target shooting and he was loath to be put on the other side of the ship in what he considered a lesser post. A few weeks later during a battle with Japanese naval forces for occupation of the Soloman Islands, the Leander was torpedoed, and the reassigned sailor sitting at Gordon’s former post was catapulted overboard by a torrent of water that rushed to fill the vacuum created by the blast, never to be seen again. In cleaning up the ship after the bombing, Gordon was assigned, along with others, to mop up the damaged hold. In his later years Dad had confided to my brother that as he reached into the watery soup to pull out debris, he realised that the slimy mess in his hand was a decaying spinal cord still attached to its backbone. This was just one memory that haunted his sleep for the rest of his life. With the Leander out of commission Gordon transferred to England where he joined the British Navy aboard the HMS Bulldog, which sailed in the North Atlantic convoys. This destroyer was one assigned to escort supply ships through enemy waters to the Russian port of Murmansk on the Arctic Circle. The rate of attrition on these voyages was horrendous with enemy attacks and heaving waters that would freeze you to death in minutes. But most frightening for Gordon was the witnessing of younger sailors being raped on the deck down below by seasoned homosexual predators. From that day on till the day he died, Gordon always slept with his back to the wall and his face to the door. Dad never told me directly of this. I read it in a confidential doctor’s report that was found in his personal belongings when he died. * * * * * * * * * * When the war ended it is no wonder to me that Gordon was disturbed, restless, guarded, and probably always somewhat sleep deprived. My mother tells me that he refused education and skill training offered to ex-soldiers. Instead he took a job driving a tanker for the Plume Petroleum Company. It was midnight and Gordon had made a late night run to deliver petrol to a sheep station in the back blocks. On his way down a long hill he fell asleep at the wheel. BANG! BANG! BANG! Gordon was jolted awake as he careened into the tiny township of Apiti and skittled three petrol pumps of the town’s only
Athlete Know Thyself
This great edict is written above the temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece, and has often been attributed to the ancient philosopher Socrates. There is nothing like the athletic journey to know oneself. We prepare for our goal race over a time period. During this time, if we have trained well, our bodies have been remade into something stronger, more enduring and faster. When we stand on the start-line of the race itself, we are nervous for we know that we are literally putting ourselves on the line to face a direct confrontation with our inner self. Whether we emerge from the race victorious is how willing we are to face off on the limitations of the ego, and allow ourselves to manifest our goals. Yes, it is a physical event, but during the race we become acutely aware that the outer journey is reflective of the inner journey. As Socrates was inferring and quantum physics suggests, everything tangible originates from mind. During the throes of competition the untamed mind will instantly translate a negative thought into one’s physiology, and provide excuses that seduce the athlete from their threshold of greatness. On this 40th anniversary of my 3rd Olympic marathon this moment of reckoning is singed in my memory. (Excerpt from my memoir “On the Wings of Mercury”) 1st of August 1992— Summer Olympics Women’s Marathon, Barcelona, Spain As I watched my competitors warming up the following afternoon at the start line of the Olympic marathon in the outskirts of Barcelona, I could see that Arthur was right. Ninety per cent of these women were already in the throes of selecting their demise from the unwritten running manual, 101 Ways to Run Below Your Best. The heat was already proving today’s popular choice, next would be the hill where many would quit, followed by the distance, the smog, the pressure, the side stitch, tummy ache, shoes that blister, muscles that hurt, not enough water, too much water, not enough sleep, indigestible breakfast, last week’s cold, etc., etc., etc. I had used them all at one time or other in the last twenty years. Now, inside my bubble there was room for none of them. Even the asthma that had bothered me so badly over the past year had become a non-issue, although I carried an inhaler in my pre-race kit as a precaution. My ferritin levels had topped out at 28, as high as they had ever been. I felt fit. This was time for business. I was here to collect on the energy investment I had made a year before: to meet my future waiting just 26 miles away in the stadium: to win. Bang! We were underway — a caravan of 60 women vying for glory at the top of the hill where the Olympic stadium stood, 26 merciless miles away. We ambled along, cagily saving ourselves for the battle. For the first time in the Olympic Women’s Marathon there were no heroics at the outset with some frisky whippersnapper from nowhere racing ahead of the pack thinking she could steal the race. We knew the fiery dragons of Barcelona would eat such foolishness for an appetiser. I ran at the side of the front pack, biding my time and keeping out of trouble. The first ten miles were my warm-up. Occasionally, when doubts began to surface in my mind, I ran to the front of the pack for a few yards. It made me feel as if I was winning. Just a few steps and I had enough of a shot of confidence to settle back into the pack for another few miles. At precisely half way, several runners fled from the front of the pack for their winning bids. They were following their coaches’ instructions: “Stay in the pack until half way, then take the lead and win!” I could bet they would not finish well, for they still had fat in their cheeks and had not yet learned to feel the race for themselves. But I knew I needed to be within covering distance, for it would take only one unknown prodigy to hang on to that lead and take my place on the podium. Along with the other sets of mature legs defined by sinuous pistons and pulleys working under translucent skin, I gave chase. Over the next few miles, runners burst ahead like Icarus taking flight, and one by one they fell back to earth with melted wings and were swallowed up by the ensuing flurry of feet. These bids swiftly reconfigured us from a running sisterhood to a frantic string of chased, chasers, and stragglers. Soon tall, terraced apartments buildings with wrought iron balconies enclosed the streets that were thick with cheering onlookers. We were approaching downtown. I was expecting to see the honeycombed towers of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral at around 14 miles. I had deliberately selected this landmark as a mental milestone, but we were almost at 15 miles and I must have missed it. It did not occur to me that I had raised my eyes from the ground only long enough to sight my next turn and plot a straight line to it. I wondered how I could have overlooked such a glaring structure but I would not commit the sacrilege of turning my head away from my goal. “Don’t look back!” the peppery old coaches back home would bark to lanky, barefooted lads and lasses on grass tracks. Such pragmatism had made an indelible impression on me. I rarely looked back and never cast my thoughts back either. My concentration was purposefully locked in forward gear. I first became aware of my surroundings on the long stretch of Las Ramblas. I had walked this famous avenue many times and I was comforted to recognise where I was in relation to the finish. I was a chaser and I could sense the aura of the Japanese runner hitchhiking on my pursuit as I picked off runners in front