Be Kind To My Mistakes

"Sailing down behind the sun waiting for my prince to come
Praying for the healing rain to restore my soul again
Just a toerag on the run how did I get here?what have I done?
When will all my hopes arise?how will I know him?
When I look in my father's eyes,my fathers eyes
When I look in my father's eyes,my father's eyes
Then the light begins to shine,and I hear those ancient lullabies"

My Father's Eyes-Eric Clapton

We all have those pivotal dates I our lives when things changed,for me two of the biggest "game changers" fall w/in 2 days of one another and are separated by three years.
On Saturday October 27th 1984 I returned home from a rare Saturday at work on overtime to make the grim discovery that my father had died from a heart attack in his bedroom.
At 51 I hadn't seen that coming so it was a shock to the system to say the very least and suddenly life as I knew it had changed dramatically overnite.

Some 27 years have passed since then,there's not a day goes by I don't think about my father,had he not've died when he did I'm reasonably sure I wouldn't have ended up here in America three years and two days later but that's the kind of curve ball life throws you when you least expect it
and sometimes things happen for a reason that you just can't fathom how or why.
As a mark of respect every October 27th I go to the local catholic church in center city and lite a candle and say a prayer for him,gone but not forgotten and while I'm confident I've done things in the past 27 years he wouldn't understand or approve I'd like to think through my running I've made him proud.

My relationship w/ Kevin in running was often mirrored by that of Peter and Seb Coe,Peter Coe always said he had no running background to draw from but felt nobody was better suited to train his son than him,ditto for Kevin and me and like Peter Coe my father could be brutal after a race,the infamous post Moscow 800m final quote from Peter to Seb was a scene too often played out between Kevin and I,I resented his "second isn't good enough" approach to me when I was younger but in the subsequent years since his untimely passing that "fear of losing" has stood me in good stead,god forbid I went home after a race and hadn't won but his "tough love" attitude when I was younger is often the driving force these days to be the best I can be,it wasn't a fear of losing,it was a dread of facing him if I hadn't won that shaped my early running career these days his harsh attitude has molded me in to a tougher runner that I could ever of been if he'd sat back and placated me w/ a "you did your best,that's all you could do" attitude.

Surfice to say grey skies and the omnipresent threat of rain would not deter me from my 8 mile this evening,dead or alive that sort of attitude would not be tolerated by "the ould fella" so I got out and made the most of it,somewhere hopefully in heaven he's proud to see his iron fist in a velvet glove still holds court over a quarter of a century since his untimely departure