A LIFETIME ACCOMPLISHMENT

(Photo: Jacob Jonas and Hannah McIntire, the front runner for the girls team)

There he was, at the top of the hill. The last two hundred yards of the three mile race lay before him, all of it downhill. And Jacob Jonas was in the lead. And all alone . . .

The crowning of my oldest son, Jake, as the top high school runner in his district this year, as a junior, began many years ago. At least for a boy of sixteen it has been many years--the vast majority of his life.

Jacob was four years old at the time. It was a bitterly cold night in December, shortly after his birthday. I had missed taking my wolf dog, Loup, for her run earlier in the day and felt guilty for it, so I decided that in spite of the cold that seemed to gnaw into your bones, a cold magnified by winds of twenty or more miles an hour, I would take Loup for her run. But in this case, I did a personal cop-out, because she was going to be running alongside me while I drove in the nice warm pickup. Loup was half timber wolf, half malamute, so the cold was nothing to her. In fact, she preferred it. She could come in the house for five or ten minutes in the deadest of winter nights because it was too warm for her inside, even though we keep our house at a fairly consistent 62 to 65 degrees.

Debbie, my wife, wanted to come with me, and of course we brought the baby, Clay, and Cheyenne, my daughter and oldest child, would never miss an adventure, which a ride is to her. So we all bundled up and ventured out into the cold. Behind our house was a dirt road that wound up into the mountains at an incline of somewhere between 5 to 12 degrees, depending upon the stretch. It was a road I loved to run, but not with a wind chill of twenty degrees or less.

This night there was ice covering most of the road, and there was no moon, so it was fairly dark, and the stars sparkled like ice chips in the sky. I had only gone a hundred yards or so when Jake began saying that he wanted to get out and run with Loup. Mind you, Loup was then 9 years old, and what I would consider an extreme athlete. She could run with me for a dozen miles, but her "miles" were double miles, because she would sprint back and forth, checking out some mystery of nature ahead of me, then coming back to make sure I was still tagging along. She was the ultimate sled dog, just without the sled.

Jake was a four-year-old boy with a big imagination. He imagined he could run alongside this world-class athlete who was my dog. He was very adamant, and as I drove along I told him several times he could not get out. It was too cold, too steep, and too slick with ice. I knew he couldn't last, and I would be stopping the truck right away to let him back in. It was nothing but a pain in the butt.

Yet Jake was insistent, and so finally, with a knowing glint in my eye, I relented. We made him bundle up, tie his hood down tight, and then he hit the ice. I looked at Debbie as the door shut and said, "I'll give him half a minute."

Well, I gave him more. A full minute. Then two, then three. Debbie and I started to get a little worried, so we started opening the window and asking him if he was ready to get back in. Hardly looking up at us, he would just shake his head and say, "No." Jacob has always been a boy of few words.

So on and on Loup ran, and on and on Jake stayed with him. Like the protective girl she was, Loup started going back and forth, this time checking not on her daddy, but on his little boy. For tonight, this miniature of his father had become her friend, her partner . . . her charge. She wasn't about to let him fall behind.

There is a point a mile up in the mountains and eight hundred feet or so higher that the road dead ends. Little Jacob Jonas was still running by the time we reached that dead end. He was running, and running strong. By this time we had stopped asking him if he wanted to get back in where it was warm. It was obvious that this four-year-old had determined to stick it out as long as Loup did. He would not be deterred by any biting wind or freezing ice.

At the turnaround, Debbie and I finally made the command decision that all parents at some time must make. We forced him to give up and get back in. He wanted so badly to run all the way home, too, but with the icy road going downhill didn't seem like the best of ideas. That and the fact that we had another twenty minutes or more ahead of us if we allowed him to have his way forced us to draw the line.

But that was only the beginning for my son. In the 7th grade, he joined the cross country team, and one of his first races was an invitational for all family members and friends. I was the only adult who took the team up on this invite, and although I got endless harassment from Jake's team mates, telling me no forty year old could keep up with them, I placed fourth (beating all of the naysayers by a LONG distance, I might add), and came in behind Jake. And my boy had won it fair and square. Yes, I tried to catch him. He beat me by four seconds.

He has been running off and on now for twelve years, and although I was still easily able to take him as an eighth grader in an eight mile run, by the next summer he was blowing my doors off by ten minutes in an all steeply uphill six miler. And I was doomed.

All through grade school I had coached all of my children about starting out too fast, about pacing themselves early and overtaking those who insisted on sprinted out at the gun. The grade schoolers always ran a half mile run in the fall and another in the spring, and about the fourth grade it switched to one mile, fall and spring. Jake came in first on every one he ever ran, as did his little brother, Clay. But I learned in the last few years that although Jake doesn't take off from the mark in a sprint he might as well, because it is certainly a sprint compared to mine.

My last hold-out, the last ace in the hole, was my 100 yard dash. Even last fall Jake had no chance against me there. But this summer he beat me by an easy 10 feet. My reign, in all arenas (well, except for weight lifting) has ended. Jake is the king of the track, not only the top runner for Pocatello High School in the three miler, but the top runner on the track in the spring as well.

I guess as parents we all want our kids to do better than we did, to reach a higher mark. Jacob has reached this in all areas of his life. I struggled to be a B to A minus student, while Jacob is consistently at over 100 percent in all of his classes and seems to hardly ever study. (Don't ask me how they figure OVER 100 percent, as I have never grasped that.) He has the girls flocking all around him all the time, although he is shy like I was and pretends not to notice. I had none of that--and if I did I truly DIDN'T notice. Jacob, it would seem, has it all, including a sweet personality, the best trait of all. So he has indeed come in far ahead of his father, as a runner and as a person.

As for the district race, for the first half this year the runners had to come past the starting line, and as Jake came around a runner from one of the other schools was still ahead of him. Jacob has been a second place runner many, many times, and I feared this was his lot again. So I generally go out about two hundred yards or so to cheer him on, to work him into a hard sprint at the end of the race. I did this for the district meet.

In this case, I went up the hill, the last stretch, then down a steep hill that comes just before the summit. Here is where I thought I would have to cheer him on to come anywhere near that other boy. I got in position. I waited. Then I saw Jake. He was alone. The other boy was nowhere in sight!

I sprinted up the hill with Jake, cheering him on. We reached the top, and I yelled for him to give it everything he had. It seemed like the entire school was there to cheer the other boy on, and they knew their boy had this race. But their boy had disappeared. Instead, they had Jacob Jonas and his much-too-excited dad running up the last stretch, to the top of the hill. From there, Jake had it. He took the last two hundred yards at a sprint, and nowhere in that two yards was another runner. Jacob took the race, and he took it by leaps and bounds.

I just finished watching the video of that finish, the finish Debbie saw, but I could only watch from the top of the hill two hundred yards away. I don't mind admitting I watched the end of the race through tears. There he was, that four-year-old boy, the little winter runner. It was a beautiful autumn day, and he was flying across the line, all alone--at least to everyone else's eyes. I knew different. Loup's spirit was right there beside him.