The best hug is when you don’t know who is healing who. – Nitya Prakash
The 1981 Jacksonville River Run 15K had a lasting impact on both winners. Patti Catalano and Dan Dillon are forever linked by those victories and so much more. Here’s the story as told by Dan.
Sometime around the late ’80 or early 90’s, Patti had disappeared from the Boston scene for a couple of years. Rumor had it she was living in a cabin in Vermont. Doing who knew what.
Very few of the people in the Boston running community knew anything about it.
Almost all of my morning runs in the late 80’s and early 90’s were on the dirt trails of the Middlesex Fells Reservation just north of Boston. One morning I was about halfway through my 10-miler and saw a figure coming toward me from the opposite direction. At that early hour I was sort of used to having the trails to myself. As this other runner got closer, a woman, she started to look familiar.
“Danny?!” She asked.
“Patti?” I replied.
I immediately changed directions, so that we could catch up with what had been going on with each other’s lives, since we’d last seen each other several years ago. Turned out she had just sold her business in Vermont and moved back to the Boston area where she was living in a property that abutted the reservation with a group of friends.
I briefly ran into her on a couple of other occasions on the trails in the following weeks. After that I didn’t see her in there again. Patti had vanished. Again.
Fast forward a few more years…
In mid-August of ’92, after we were both sort of retired from our “professional” running careers, we happened to run into each other outside a downtown parking garage in Boston where I was working at the Jewelers Exchange Building.
Patti had moved out to Newton and had been working as a nanny for a couple that owned a wholesale jewelry business in the same building one floor below my office. We greeted each other excitedly like old friends would.
Patti said said something like “Hey, I saw your wife’s name in the Falmouth results, but I didn’t see yours. Didn’t you run?”
I sadly explained I hadn’t been doing much running lately, and added that I was suddenly single again. Patti wrapped me up in a hug that was sympathetic and at the same time electric.
On our first date, two days later, I saw the Jacksonville ’81 trophy at the home where Patti was staying as a live-in nanny. I jokingly said “Hey, there’s MY trophy!”
Patti didn’t remember we had both won that day. I reminded her of how her American Record performance that day was above the fold in the press while she had relegated my mere course record performance to below the fold!
She reminded me that she set another American Record in Boston the very next day! I had let that amazing fact slip my mind.
During that time she was in the middle of a phenomenal stretch of running 48 races in 52 weeks, winning 44 of them. Several World and American Records among them all.
We were married five days after what we refer to as “The Hug”.
How long between the hug and your marriage?
Five days.
And if you feel shocked by that, imagine how I felt! I was still ultra bitter about the failure of my first marriage. I had just gone out days before to Ethan Allen and bought a twin-size sleigh bed. Swearing to myself that I had no reason to “complicate” my life ever again.
But the powerful vortex of the hug was that undeniable and irresistible.
My daughter’s home birth occurred on that sleigh bed a few years later. Ha ha!
You are a lucky man.
I truly am.
Twenty-seven (27) years later we have a grown son and a daughter and still enjoy our long runs on the rural backroads and wooded trails in Windham, Connecticut.
From time to time Patti is still asked to do some public speaking at running camps and such. I sometimes tag along. Whenever I am asked about my running recollections, I usually like to remind the young athletes of two things that were “take aways” from my Jacksonville ’81 race.
First, work hard to improve the aspects of your running arsenal that you know to be your weak suit. Even if you hate doing it. If it’s hills, do more hills, if it’s speed, work on speed, endurance, work on strength….
Next, don’t expect your PR’s or records to come as a result of pushing through tremendous pain in a race. It probably won’t come like that. The top runners that Patti and I have known over the years share a common experience with us. Most of the pain comes in the months and weeks of intense preparation before race day.
Many times the records happen on the day that you lose yourself in the competitive moment. You reach that point early in the race where you expect the pain to start. But it doesn’t start yet. You slowly begin to push a little harder expecting the pain to come at any time. But still it doesn’t come. Before you know it the finish is right there, but there is nowhere near the pain you expected.
You can look back at the workouts that you repeated over and over pushing yourself, but that yielded less than the result they were supposed to. That’s where the pain was, right where it belongs.
Right where it belongs. Like those two trophies side by side.
Feel a bit like Miruts Yifter in 1971 when he appeared to outkick Steve Prefontaine in a United States vs Africa match in North Carolina before realising he had timed his sprint finish one lap early.
But wait! There’s more.
Hi, Jack, Patti here.
Well, yeah, sure, I guess. Five days does sound short, but we were adults. lol!!!! And there’s a tad more to the story.
1978. Franklin Park . The New England Collegiate XC Championships.
At the time I was going to a lot of cross-country races to learn and see racing. How it developed, who made a move, who answered the move, who ran with heart and the outcomes.
This race, the talk was about a new kid from Ireland running for Providence College. I watched and followed along the race course with Jack McDonald, the Athletic Director for Boston College.
The race was fierce. Gerry Degan, John Tracey, this new kid from Ireland, Dan Dillon, all up front battling. INTENSE and exciting. I was witnessing true pure racing.
I don’t remember Danny taking the lead. I do remember him running with an intense ferociousness I hadn’t seen before. I knew this was what I was wanting to see. Danny finished third behind John and winner Gerry. At the finish line at the “cage,” the PC team had gathered and were changing into sweats. I just had to go meet “the kid from Ireland.”
I was so nervous that I couldn’t talk to Dan.
Couldn’t even look at him.
We all thought he was from Ireland. I listened to him talk to his teammates, congratulating them and he sounded normal. No accent. I forget how we all found out he was really a local kid, Chicopee Comp. He beat The Rookie, AlSal at the State xc Championships his senior year.
So I stood next to him while he was changing his socks, while I chatted with John Tracey. (John and I still laugh about it. We see each other once a year at Manchester, CT Thanksgiving Day race.)
Off Danny went to warm down with the team.
Later that night on Channel 5, the sports segment ran a piece about the race. LOL!!!!! ‘Patti Lyons was in attendance to WATCH PC win the championships.’ And they showed a brief clip of Gerry winning and an interview of me.
Now Danny and I both ran for Athletics West. He ran the XC side, I ran on the road side as NIKE only wanted me on the roads. So we really never caught up again with each other until August 13th, 1992.
I had been married and divorced once again. Third time. This time, I had to live through – and overcome – homelessness.
I had packed all of my stuff to take to my brother’s house in Colorado. I was going to go help with running on an Indian Reservation. I didn’t know which one; it didn’t matter as I was trusting the universe.
I was a nanny of sorts for a family in Newton. I wanted to go to say goodbye to everybody at the Bill Rodgers Running Center, so the lady of the house, Nitza, drove me to town and we parked in the Jewelers Building garage. Her hubby was a diamond dealer. We were standing waiting for our car to come down when I noticed a huge white SUV drive up near us and I glanced over and I recognized the profile…DANNY DILLON. Told Nitza I’d be right back. I know that guy and I want to say, HI!
After Danny parked his car, I called his name. He turned and looked right me and smiled and said “Patti, how good it is to see you.” We gave each the familiar hug, ya’ know the one you do to all of your peers. The greet hug. I asked him how come he hadn’t run Falmouth as I saw his wife’s name in the results. “We’re divorced, I didn’t run it”.
I went to give him a sympathy hug… but… but… something transpired in that briefest of moments. It was electrifying. I felt something I never had felt before.
Meanwhile, my ride was beeping the horn, time to go. I fast-talked to Danny I was going to live on an Indian reservation to start a running program and he should come with me.
I’m leaving in two days.
We exchange numbers.
I immediately call him when I get home. I felt it! This is him…this is the one. OMG! OMG! OMG! I’m praying now that he felt it too.
When I call, he tells me he can’t get together until Thursday! (I’m leaving Thursday in my VW Bug with my Golden Lab Molsen) Hmmmmmmmm, okay, I say… thinking I’ll just wait. But I’m furious. How in the heck could he not act on the hug. OMG! Did I not read it right?
Hmmm.
Thursday came, he was early. I wasn’t ready. We took the kids out to the park. All the kids in the neighborhood came over as I was the grownup who played like a kid with the kids. We all had fun.
Danny and I interviewed each other on the Mystic River the day away. I told him, I wanted to be an at-home mom, to have home-birth and home-school the kids. He was so happy for all of it. The only thing he wanted for me was to register to vote. DONE!
I told Nitza and her husband Kobe. He was a rabbi. He married the two of us immediately. And we drove out to Colorado, got my stuff from my brother’s, and moved around in the Southwest. No, we didn’t have a running program. We fostered kids instead. We took the foster route thinking I’d never get pregnant. I was “older.”
Two months into our marriage, I was pregnant. Our son was born in June.
Which brings us to the end of the greatest weekend in road racing history.
Three course records, two American records, Larry Bird and a private jet, twenty-seven years of marriage and two kids.
I think we have a winner. Couple of them.