Martin Duffy Obituary in Boston Globe

He was captain of the track team at Durfee High School in Fall River.
Like many high school track stars, he set aside running when he went off to college, attending Tufts on an academic scholarship. That, it would seem, would be the end of his athletic glory, right?

But wait... Let's pause the newsreel for a moment.

I think that sometimes we make high school sports seem like the be-all, end-all of life. We rightly celebrate the accomplishments of teenagers, but then forget about those athletes when they graduate and their lives branch out into other interests and broader themes. I've always thought that it was a little bit sad to think that someone might feel their best days were behind them before hitting their 20th birthday.

Martin Duffy, a member of my running club, passed away on November 29th, 2010. There is a nice obituary of Martin in today's Boston Globe. Martin was a really interesting and impressive person, brilliant and generous and full of life. But every tribute to Martin will lead with his running accomplishments, and here's why:

When he was twenty-nine and more than a decade removed from his high school exploits, Martin took the first steps in a remarkable streak that towers above all those races he won as a teenager. He ran the Boston Marathon. That was in 1970.

He ran it again the next year, and the next, and the next.

In 2009, a few months after being diagnosed with throat cancer, Martin Duffy ran his 40th consecutive Boston Marathon at the age of sixty-nine. In addition to running despite battling the disease that would eventually take his life, his streak included one year when he ran the race on what he later found out was a fractured foot. It included numerous other times when injuries would have stopped a less determined, less positive person than Martin. Somehow, he finished the race with the broken bone, as he finished all the others, by taking them a mile at a time.

I doubt that Martin knew what he was getting into when he started the streak. I'm sure he didn't think it would be such a large part of his legacy. Maybe at the old age of twenty-nine it was just something to do, something to stave off the chill of approaching middle-age. I don't know, and I don't think it matters.

What I do know is that there's more to running than the part that ends with your final high school meet. If you can find room in your life for them, there are other worlds to conquer, other goals that are meaningful. I also know that no one should be afraid to start something new and daring and ambitious -- not at twenty-nine, thirty-nine, or fifty-nine.

So if time seems to be passing too quickly, if you feel over-the-hill, consider that there's always some new challenge out there, waiting for you. Who knows? It might be the most impressive thing you ever do.