Athens. I am taking a taxi from my apartment at 4 a.m. The taxi driver is waiting by the curb, petting a stray cat. 

He is smoking a cigarette and he wants to know why I am up “so damned early.” My driver played college basketball in the US back when he still had hair. He enjoys cussing in English. “Is just more fun.”

We get in the cab. Athens nightlife is still going strong. 

I tell him I am running the Athens Marathon today. He is driving me to the starting line. 

“Why de hell you do dis?” he asks. “You crazy or something?”

He takes a roundabout. He drapes an arm out his window. 

“Why do you run?” he asks. 

We have a long ride from Athens to Marathon. He wants a story. 

So I tell him. My dad was a marathoner. When I was a kid, we spent every weekend at a race, or helping Daddy train for one. On Friday nights, my father and I would ride

country roads with two-liter bottles of water. We would pull over every mile and hide them behind fence posts and rocks, then tie a white flag so he could find the water during long runs. 

We spent summer vacations inside pop-up campers in Colorado so he could train on fourteeners for the Pikes Peak Marathon. He was fast. He was strong. Gifted, even. 

Then, one night after his forty-first birthday, he decided he didn’t want to live anymore. He used his brother’s gun. 

Only a few days before, my father had taken me on a run with him. I rode a bike beside him. I was eleven. I was overweight. My father desperately wanted me to lose weight. I could usually feel his disappointment…