Running together again
Marathon for her father
Jim Leggett and his daughter, Susan, ran the first 17 miles together, side by side. But the weather was cold and it was getting harder for him to keep up.
The 1998 Columbus (Ohio) Marathon was the first marathon they ran together. Somewhere before the 18th mile, though, Jim let his daughter go.
“Just go,” Jim said to Susan. “Go run your race.”
She did. They both finished, and Jim even pushed through to run a subfour hour. But all these years later, that moment sticks with Susan Leggett Day.
Susan and her dad had dreams of running the Boston Marathon together ever since that day in 1998, but in 2004, it all changed.
A day before that year’s Boston Marathon, Jim went out for his regular long run in Ohio, but the 58-year-old never made it back home. A heart attack cost him his life.
It took eight years for Susan to run a marathon again, a result of grief, guilt and other factors. Through timing and strength, she persevered.
Next week, she plans on honoring her dad’s memory in the most appropriate way: by running Boston, the race her dad always wanted to run with her.
Susan’s journey to this point has been anything but easy, but she thinks back to that moment in 1998, when they separated between mile 17 and 18. It’s that memory she hopes will carry her over Heartbreak Hill and give her the strength to finish for him, and finish the dream they once had together.
“Where he left, that’s where I have to go out and finish,” Susan said. “We ran together those first 17 and they were pretty easy, and it was those last nine that were so hard and symbolically, that’s where he left me in my life. That last part is where I have to dig in. He’s still with me spiritually.
“Those last miles, that’s the kind of stuff I’ll be thinking about.”
Susan ran cross-country in middle and high school, but it wasn’t until she was a teenager when her dad began running. She was happy to have him join her as a partner, and their runs were often therapeutic. Quiet time to talk about anything and everything without judgment.
“We probably could have never sat down face-to-face to have a lot of those talks, but running just kind of allows for that sort of thing,” Susan said.
After Susan ran the 1997 Columbus Marathon, her dad said he would do it with her the following year. It was a cold October day, and he suggested they run a marathon in warmer weather.
That’s where Boston came in. “He liked the idea that you had to qualify,” Susan said. “He liked that challenge, he was kind of competitive. There was a guy in our hometown who had run it every year, and he said, ‘If Frank can do it, I can do it.’ ”
For no particular reason, they didn’t get around to it, Susan said. Two weeks before the 2004 Boston Marathon, though, Susan gave birth to her first baby. After that, it seemed Jim wanted to run Boston the following year.
“He’s like, ‘Well, all your excuses are gone. You got married, you’ve got your baby, this is the year to train. Let’s shoot for Boston before you have another baby,’” Susan recalled.
Jim was just two blocks from his house on April 18, 2004, when he died. Susan said there were no apparent signs. He had blockages in his heart, but only specific tests could have given any indication.
It was obviously hard on Susan. At first, she even felt guilty.
“Even though I knew it wasn’t super logical, my thought was this was my fault,” Susan said. “If he wasn’t running, he wouldn’t have had a heart attack.”
The Boston dream was put on hold. Susan didn’t think it would be fair to do it without her dad, and her family had concerns about her medically. If her dad didn’t know he had a disease, how did she know she didn’t?
But things eventually turned. Tests showed she didn’t share her father’s condition, and a cardiologist assured her the running isn’t why Jim died. It just happened to be what he was doing when he had the heart attack.
Susan ran the 2012 Columbus Marathon in honor of her dad, then really set her sights on Boston again the following year. She vividly remembers coming home from a run during that year’s marathon, and was watching on TV when the bombs exploded. For the next few days, she was glued to her TV as she watched the coverage that included interviews of the survivors.
“They’re saying, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to stop me, I’ll be back next year,’ ” Susan said. “And there are people with prosthetic legs. Like, oh my gosh, I have such a gift with running. I have nothing wrong with me physically. My only hang up is mental and how could I not do this?
“It made me feel silly. Just watching those resilient people and thinking I want to be like them. How cool is it that I could do something cool and honor my dad? Like how could I not?”
Susan got back to training. She ran the 2014 Columbus Marathon, but she missed her qualifying time by a minute. She wasn’t worried, though. When she turned 45, it increased her qualifying threshold by 10 minutes, and she qualified for this year’s Boston at the 2016 Columbus Marathon.
Susan doesn’t quite know how next Monday will go. She’ll have support from her husband Joe and her younger sister Sara, who is flying up from North Carolina. She’ll also have her dad’s Columbus bib from 1998 with her, although she’s not quite yet sure what she’ll do with it.
However it goes, she’s grateful to have the opportunity to honor her dad in such a special way.
“I don’t know if it’s closure, but just finishing that run for him and finishing that goal that we set together. It took me a long time to figure out, of course, that’s what he would want me to do,” she said. “Never in a million years would he have thought, ‘Well, I don’t want her to run anymore’ or ‘I don’t want her to do that,’ that’s silly . . . . He would not want anybody to not do something because he was gone.”