When someone asks me why I run, I’m never quite sure how to respond. My first thought, though, is always of September 13, 1991, when I showed up in the parking lot at Fresh Pond in Cambridge, MA, for my first practice with the high school cross country team.
Joe Quintanilla
The day is memorialized with a "3.5" scrawled in marker on the yellowing opening page of my running log. I can still recall the details beyond the mileage, though: While the rest of the team headed out into the streets of Cambridge, the coach sent Joe Quintanilla and me off to do loops of the Pond; me because I couldn’t keep up with the others, Quintanilla because he’s blind.
Over the next three years we ran hundreds of miles together, racing each other countless times. While I’d help Quintanilla when he needed it, he was, for the most part, a typical training partner—far more time was spent comparing goals or arguing about the Red Sox than talking about his visual impairment. Still, there was no way not to be inspired by his accomplishments.
Two and a half years after that first run, a teammate and I met Quintanilla and our coach at the base of Heartbreak Hill to pace them through the final miles of the Boston Marathon. Watching them fight off fatigue to meet their goal of breaking 3:20, sharing in the applause that followed us down Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Street, and then seeing the finish line appear as we made the final turn onto Boylston Street—those are feelings that I’ll never forget. Though I’m no closer to articulating exactly why I run, I knew at that point that I always would.
Visiting Quintanilla today in his office at the Massachusetts Association for the Blind, I see only a few hints of his impaired vision. Tucked in the corner is his white and red cane, which he reluctantly began to use after graduating from high school. On his desk is a computer monitor that is shut off, though Quintanilla is typing away at the keyboard. Finally, slung over the back of the door, there is a United States Paralympic Team jacket..
Back in the judgmental hallways of high school, Quintanilla knew that his visual impairment wasn’t a secret. But he also realized that without the click-click-click of a cane guiding him to class every day, people weren’t judging him at first glance by what they perceived as his limitations. A few years earlier, in elementary school, he hadn’t yet developed that confidence.
Quintanilla’s condition is a degenerative one, retinitis pigmentosa, which allows him to see light and dark, though his ability to distinguish between the two continues to deteriorate. The greater the contrast the better he can see, so if he threw a baseball up into the air against the background of a light sky, he could catch it. Picking out a ball released from a pitcher’s hand against a multi-hued background was another story, though.
"When we played in gym class or at recess, I always wanted to do what the other boys were doing," Quintanilla recalls. "Being chosen last at recess was something that bothered me quite a bit, and so when we would do a fitness exam in gym, I would think, ‘Here’s something where I can compete with the other kids—I can run as fast as they can.’ That motivated me and drove me. It was self-rewarding, because I could show the kids that I was just as physically fit as they were. I just really liked that—being better than the other kids at stuff."
Fueled by a feeling of accomplishment, he began to pursue running. When the other kids were playing something he couldn’t, like badminton or lacrosse, Quintanilla would ask the gym teacher if he could run laps instead. Upon reaching high school, he overcame his shy tendencies and joined the track team.
The transition wasn’t always smooth, but Quintanilla stuck with it. He spent most practices doing laps of the indoor track or running with the sprinters. Though he didn’t yet know what his limitations were, most of the training was uneventful. "Then there were moments when I felt extremely embarrassed," he recalls, citing a particular day when he collided with a teammate as they were doing strides. "I thought they might think ‘This kid is going to hurt somebody—he shouldn’t be running because he’s knocking people over.’" But for every incident like that, there were several that were rewarding—and more importantly, Quintanilla was finding an outlet for his competitiveness.
"In my third race, I beat two kids. There was a pretty good crowd in the field house, and they were all cheering for me," Quintanilla recalls fondly. "I don’t know what got into me, but I wove myself through the two of them and took off. I think that was the first time I felt like I could compete."
As he felt more comfortable in the sport and accepted by the team, Quintanilla’s interest in running grew. He began following the elite side, watching events on television. When he describes his identity as a runner back then, he uses words like "tenacious," "determined," and "self-motivated." His mileage, barely 20 miles a week as a freshman, took a leap in 1991, when he began training with the distance runners. He could easily follow us through the streets, and while we would let him know about approaching curbs or potholes, we would also swerve around signposts and pedestrians without a second thought.
About once a year, Quintanilla had what he considers a serious accident. He once missed a turn and flipped over a fence. On another occasion, we were running along a crowded path when one teammate swerved to the right to avoid two women, while I went to the left. Quintanilla was following us, and in the congestion ran straight into a metal pole. That was the worst incident, resulting in strained muscles in his neck and a nasty knot on his forehead.
"When I had my accidents, it never entered my mind not to keep running," he says. "If I crashed into a lamppost and hurt my neck, or fell down or hit a sign and cut my eye, not once did it ever enter my mind, ‘Don’t do this because you’re going to get hurt.’" Like a twisted ankle or a pulled muscle, those injuries were simply part of the sport’s toll, nothing more
By his senior year, Quintanilla was doing more miles than any of us, getting ready for the Boston Marathon, and his success had attracted the local media. Looking back, Quintanilla recalls that some of his classmates from elementary school would barely recognize him anymore. "Running absolutely gave me a ton of self-confidence. I used to use academics as a way to measure myself against my peers, but it’s not something I would talk about, or, if I knew the answer, I wouldn’t raise my hand," he recalls. "Once newspapers and TV stations started to interview me, I started to realize that I could talk. It really did give me a ton of self-confidence and self-worth."
Running also had some therapeutic value: "What tended to happen with me was that if I was upset about something, or felt like I was being slighted or not treated well, the thing that I felt confident in was that I was a pretty decent runner. It motivated me to run, and I got a lot of fulfillment out of what I thought I was accomplishing with running."
When asked what his proudest running accomplishments have been, the first that Quintanilla mentions is, interestingly, one of the loneliest. Having run 3:19 in the 1994 Boston Marathon, Quintanilla was now focused on the Paralympic Trials, which were being held as part of the 1996 Los Angeles Marathon. Three thousand miles away from his friends, family and teammates, unsure if he would be provided with a guide for the race, and not entirely confident in his training, Quintanilla began to have doubts. Even though a sub-3:20 performance could qualify him for the Paralympics in Atlanta, he thought about pulling out of the race.
Quintanilla made it to the race, though, just in time for the Paralympic start, five minutes before the rest of the field began. "When I got in the starting area and took off my sweats, everything changed," he says. "I was no longer scared, no longer wondering why I was doing it." Quintanilla had a guide for the initial five miles, after which he was on his own—the only time he’s run a marathon unguided. At five miles he joined another blind competitor and his guide, but after a few miles, feeling increasingly confident, Quintanilla set off alone.
"It felt really easy, comfortable," he recalls. "I didn’t have any doubts. It’s the only marathon where I didn’t feel tired at any part." Navigating the course without trouble, Quintanilla admits that he was probably holding back as a result of being without a guide. Still, his final miles were his fastest since the opening five, and he crossed the line in 3:17:17, placing him in the top 600 over all. Roughly 15,600 runners finished behind him.
Quintanilla estimates that he’s only run about 1,000 miles in the past five years. Injuries, along with an increased reliance on finding guides for every run, have kept him from reaching some of the goals that he established years ago. Yet when asked if he feels that his deteriorating vision has held him back, Quintanilla doesn’t hesitate. "No, uh-uh. I really don’t think it has," he says. "In my mind, it should not be a factor. If I don’t run 2:45, and all training conditions are optimal, it won’t be because I was visually impaired. It will be because I wasn’t as good as I thought I could be."
Todd Coulston
Somewhere near the three-mile mark of the Los Angeles Marathon, Quintanilla was forced to the side of the road as the parade of lead vehicles rolled past. Moments later, the elite men flew by, followed eventually by the sub-elites. Somewhere around five miles, perhaps just as Quintanilla’s guide was leaving him to finish alone, a young law student and marathon rookie named Todd Coulston passed him, on his way to finishing 81st overall.
Like Quintanilla, Coulston was a competitive kid. From running the quarter- and half-mile for the local church league team, Coulston moved up to the mile in high school, and slowly the sport grew on him. "Just doing well and succeeding," he says, were all the motivation he needed to keep running. In particular, he admits—sounding slightly embarrassed—he was driven by the desire to run faster than his friends.
Coulston lived for the competition, and now laughs when he recalls his strong preference for racing over training: one competitive goal was leading directly into another. First it was earning a varsity letter, then breaking five minutes in the mile. Once he did that, he chased 4:50. A 10-minute two miler as a junior, he graduated a year later with a PR of 9:24 and headed off for the University of California, Irvine, where he competed as a Division I athlete.
Coulston’s competitive successes continued at UCI—all-conference honors and a 14:36 5,000m PR among them—but as running became more of a priority, his appreciation for the sport was evolving. "You get into it because you like the competition, you like the camaraderie of being with your friends and teammates," he recalls. Yet he was now enjoying the sport’s benefits outside of the competitive arena. "I found real peace running out in the woods, thinking about life. It was kind of a place to get away. I’ve always needed places or time on my own, whether it was just shooting hoops in the back yard or going out on a run on a trail, just being alone with my thoughts, being introspective," Coulston says. "It’s a perfect vehicle to do it. It’s a very personal, selfish type of escape, where you can really think about your life and dreams, and really put everything together. I think that’s the one thing about running and why I continue to do it and why I’ll always do it if I’m physically able. It spurs you to do great things in all aspects of your life. It holds you accountable: if you don’t do it for a while and you come back to it, it tells you. It just becomes a part of your lifestyle."
Unfortunately, that lifestyle was threatened early on. Coulston contracted mononucleosis during his sophomore year at UCI, and his blood tests suggested that there was something wrong with his liver. The doctors were baffled, though, and for the next year they tested Coulston for a variety of illnesses. Finally, after a liver biopsy during the summer of 1992, he was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). Coulston admits he was relieved to finally know what was wrong, and though PSC is a serious condition, he was still asymptomatic. "They said, ‘Go live your life, and we’ll keep monitoring you,’" he recalls. "I had the perception at that point that I wouldn’t have to worry about this disease until I was 50 or 60 years old."
Though his health was fine, Coulston’s running career soon came to a crossroads as he graduated from UCI. Reflecting on what he’d accomplished and looking ahead, he knew that he wasn’t going to feed himself as an elite runner. The competitive component that had been so critical to attracting him to running in the first place had now been balanced by his enjoyment for the more tranquil side of the sport. "At that point I was ready—I knew I had done what I could; I knew that I had pushed myself pretty much to the max of my abilities and was pretty satisfied with that," he says. "That was a great chapter in my life. I really liked it, but I was looking for another arena where I could apply what I’d learned."
Law school and marriage followed over the next five years, and Coulston continued to seek a regular escape in his running, heading out for 50 or 60 minutes every day. He regularly competed in local road races, though he was no longer at the level he’d reached in college. Then, in the fall of 1995, Coulston decided to run the Los Angeles Marathon the following spring. He began upping his weekly long runs and running half marathons.
In Los Angeles Coulston had a typical first-timer’s experience, cruising through 18 miles before hitting the wall. Still, he finished in 2:45:13. In hindsight, Coulston wishes he’d run the 1997 Boston Marathon, but by then he was in law school and training for a marathon would have been prohibitive.
Throughout the mid-1990s, Coulston’s health was fine, then in 1999 the effects of PSC, which obstructs the bile ducts leading out of the liver, became noticeable. Slowly he became more fatigued and jaundiced. As the disease progressed, he lost weight and suffered frequent nosebleeds and broken blood vessels under his skin. "Even through the symptoms I was determined to keep running," he recalls. "[But] the disease started to impact me, and I started cutting days out of the week. I would maybe run four or five days a week. Then it was shorter time periods, only 25 or 30 minutes instead of an hour." The running still gave Coulston pleasure: "It was frustrating not to do more, but it was still good because at that point I’d started practicing law and maintaining a very hectic schedule as an attorney, so it was a relief to get the stress of the day out and try to clear my head a little bit."
Finally, he says, "by January of 2001 I pretty much had to shut down altogether." In July 2000, Coulston was told he had 18 to 24 months to live; by 2001, he was given just three to six. Now unable to run, Coulston no longer had the outlet he’d grown accustomed to over the past decade. "It just drives you nuts," he says. "You get used to that endorphin kick and that way it makes you feel, and not having that, you just feel sluggish and, probably, kind of on the edge emotionally. It was a little bit depressing." Running, however, was not the top priority. Coulston and his wife were expecting their first child, and now suddenly he was in danger of dying long before his name would reach the top of the transplant list. As a last resort, the couple temporarily moved to Florida, where the transplant list was shorter, and waited.
Barely two weeks into their stay, the Coulstons were woken at 4 a.m. by a call notifying them that a donor had been found. Within 24 hours surgeons had opened Coulston’s abdomen from one side to the other. Six hours later, he had a new liver.
Even through the diminishing haze of the anesthesia, Coulston remembers feeling an immediate difference when he awoke. Rehab began almost immediately—first with a few steps, then with progressively more laps of the ward. Though he laughs at the memory today, he recalls the frustration of feeling so helpless: "I would have those thoughts, that ‘I used to be able to run 6.2 miles at all-out speed, and here I am and I can’t even walk 10 feet down the hallway.’"
Coulston was going on daily walks outside by the time he returned to California, but he couldn’t run yet. "I’d be tempted," he says. "I’d break out and jog, take a couple steps—but it’s a weird feeling in your stomach after a surgery like that. It takes a long time to feel normal." Finally, in October, Coulston was given the OK to start running again. "I went to the neighborhood park and just ran a couple laps around the fields. I think I ran maybe seven, eight minutes," he recalls. "I was very excited. Pretty emotional, too."
Slowly Coulston worked his way back into a routine. First he ran about 10 minutes, three or four times a week. Then progressively longer. He’d already set a goal of competing at the 2002 U.S. Transplant Games. In fact, he’d known about the Games for nearly a decade, since first being diagnosed with PSC. "I had joked with my doctor, ‘You should just do [the transplant] now so I can go and win all that stuff," he says with a laugh. Now his transplant was the motivation he needed to return to the track for the first time since college, to let those competitive instincts loose again.
"People tell me I get a look on my face when I’m running, or if I’m in a competition—a dead-serious, don’t-mess-with-me type of look," Coulston says. "The only time when I’ve felt that look is back on the track, at the Transplant Games. When that gun fires, you almost get to a different state of mind. Back in high school and college, that’s why I was doing it—to win, and have fun hitting the times and running fast. But it definitely changed, and in that process I came to love it and really see that it didn’t just apply to that context but to my lifestyle and daily life. That’s the greatest aspect of running."
Coulston’s entire family was in the stands cheering as he placed second in his division of the 1500m, running 5:37.31. Following the race, Coulston says he saw his father crying for the first time that he could remember. Though his pace didn’t even match that of his collegiate 10,000m best, that didn’t matter any more.
"Now the goals are more ‘What can I accomplish?’ and not necessarily ‘How fast can I go?" Coulston says. "It’s rejuvenated things—it’s a whole new challenge. Now that I’ve had a major organ removed from my body, what can I do now? It’s definitely motivating."
C.J. Howard
On Christmas Eve, 2002, C.J. Howard was still groggy when he joined his father in the kitchen, having undergone a biopsy on a lump in his heel the previous day. Until his father spoke, Howard didn’t realize how much his life was about to change.
"The power of denial is a pretty big thing," he says today. "You’re like, ‘I’m a healthy collegiate distance runner—I don’t have cancer.’" But he did. He now knew that the small lump on the left side of his left foot, diagnosed as a harmless bone cyst more than a year earlier, was osteogenic sarcoma, or cancer of the bone. Howard’s father broke the news to him. "I need to tell you that part of the course of action is a below-the-knee amputation," he said to his son.
"I kind of sat back for a second, and I looked up and said ‘OK. What are the world records for an amputee?’" Howard recalls. "That was my immediate response. I have no idea where that came from. To this day I don’t know if it was me being a smart-ass, or what."
Like Quintanilla and Coulston, Howard developed an interest in running before high school, and thrived as soon as he joined a team. "I was never good at the stick and ball sports, so that’s how I got into running—it was a process of elimination," he explains today. "For some reason I was always intrigued when I would see people running, and it was always something I was pretty good at."
Looking back on his high school days, Howard recalls having another motivation for running as well. "A big part of it was trying to formulate an identity, being a 14, 15-year-old kid," he says. "I needed it so I was somebody, to define myself in some way."
Having quickly developed a passion for the training, Howard soon felt a strong identity as a runner. "I would never miss a workout," he says. "If I had a doctor’s appointment and we had some ridiculous workout, like 16 or 20 quarters, I’d go and make that up on my own." Competition, however, didn’t come as easily to him.
"When I really started to love the sport was when I stopped making excuses. Sometimes I was upset with the sport, or I wanted to blame somebody else, and then I just started to accept it as my own failure, and I would just move on from there," he says. "I think it’s maturity—starting to realize that you’re the only one that can control what happens when you run."
Though the workouts weren’t always translating into results, Howard was taken with his new sport. "I liked the alone time, I liked being able to just mull things over in my head," he recalls. "If ever there was a problem, or if something wasn’t going right, I could just go out for a nice long run in the hills by myself, then I would come back and whatever the problem was, it just seemed to dissipate."
By the time he was a senior, Howard had lowered his two-mile best to 9:38 and attracted the attention of Vince O’Boyle at UCI, the same man who coached Coulston. Following his junior year, however, Howard had noticed a pain in his left foot. The problem was diagnosed as a bone cyst and stress fracture. Some rest cured the latter, and he returned to competition his senior year. By the time Howard reached UCI in the fall of 2002, however, he was still experiencing pain, and a large lump had developed on the outside of his foot. Unable to complete the cross country season, Howard sought another medical opinion. Finally, in December, the cancer was diagnosed.
As Howard endured the four months of chemotherapy that preceded his amputation, he says that the lessons he learned from running in high school helped him immensely. A negative attitude would have been excusable, but Howard was already looking down the road at returning to the starting line. "I definitely did look at cancer as a huge opportunity," he admits. "As I said, I’ve always thought I had a lot of unrealized potential, yet it would never materialize in races. So I looked at this as a huge opportunity for me to make a comeback after cancer, and after amputation, to running. I think a big part of it was that I’d overcome stress fractures, I’d overcome this heel pain, and I’d overcome these heel injuries, and each time I’d come back as a better, more mature, more successful runner. This was going to be the same story. I looked at it as another running injury."
Ensuring a smooth return to running meant researching the technology of high-end prosthetic running limbs, and talking with his surgeon about the amputation. "I’d heard of some amputees who can’t wear certain prosthetic devices because their residual limbs, or their stumps, are too long," Howard says. So he asked where the incision would be made, and when the surgeon drew a line around his leg just above the ankle, "I said, ‘No, no, no—you have to go higher than that!’ and he just looked at me like, ‘What?!?’"
Another round of chemo followed the April amputation, and then in October Howard was back in the operating room, this time to have a tumor (which turned out to be benign) removed from his lung.
Howard recalls feeling "a great sense of urgency" during this period, and that motivated him to start running as soon as he could. By November he was working out with a new coach, having elected not to return to the UCI team. By December he was racing again.
"I really needed to start running," he says. "I wasn’t sure if I was going to be around for another three months, six months, or if I was going to be here today. I really wanted to be able to say I’d made a full comeback." A full comeback for Howard didn’t mean simply running again—it meant fulfilling the lofty goals that he’d been formulating over the course of a year away from the sport.
"My biggest fear in the year after I finished chemo was that I wasn’t going to make it to set the national record in the half marathon," he recalls. By the spring of 2004 he was well on his way, having run 18:36 for 5K and 38:25 for 10K, times that are among the best ever recorded by a below-the-knee amputee. Finally, in November, Howard realized his goal, winning the national amputee title and setting a new record of 1:23:59.
Today, Howard isn’t feeling the same sense of immediacy. He’s been cancer free since his operations, is on track to graduate with his class at UCI next spring, and even took most of the winter off from running to snowboard. "I’m trying to do more than just run, trying to become more of a rounded person," he admits. But "once a runner, always a runner," he adds, assuredly.
Why do you run? Everybody has their own story, their own reasons. In speaking with Joe Quintanilla, Todd Coulston, and C.J. Howard, and listening to their stories, I kept hearing parts of my own.
My story began just like Howard’s, when I went in search of some way to define myself. Over later years, like Coulston, I discovered the pleasure of escaping for a run on my own. And like Quintanilla, I still wonder which of my goals I’ll exceed, and which will remain out of reach.
Through their experiences, these three men have each been forced to look within, to decide what’s important to them. As a result they were able to discuss the importance of running with far more clarity than I’ve ever been able to muster.
Fourteen years after our first run, I’ve realized that I’ve seen as much through Quintanilla’s eyes as he has through mine.
