What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [13]
Margie also runs each year in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Nashville, one of 120 5K runs and fitness walks around the globe to raise funds and awareness for the fight against breast cancer, to celebrate survivorship, and to memorialize those who have died of the disease. In 2008, Margie not only finished first in her age group, with a time of 23:55, she was the first survivor to cross the finish line, first in her age group for the sixth straight year.
One of her favorite runs is a bit unusual. Unfailingly, twice a year, Margie drives to the Charles Bass Correctional Facility, a minimum-security state prison in West Nashville, to compete in races with the inmates. “Except for a few bad choices, many of the young men could be my sons,” she said on the way there for the spring 2009 Striders and Stripers 5K. After being cleared through security, she and two dozen Nashville Striders entered into the prison yard. A large, hand-painted sign announcing “The Jaunt in the Joint” greeted them. Despite her earlier affliction of shyness, Margie made her way without hesitation to a knot of inmates—including some three times her size and some old acquaintances—to begin catching up and talking, with warmth, ease, and grace. “There was a time when I couldn’t have done this,” she said. “I still have to force myself, but I do it because I know it’s the right thing. My religion is simple: Be nice to others.”
Many of the prisoners knew of Margie’s stature as an elite runner and were anxious to see her compete. She ran, as I did, in the second heat of the 5K. It required running nine laps, each one-third of a mile, on a path of mowed grass inside barbed-wire-topped fencing. Margie started with her long, low, and seemingly effortless strides. She has, in runner’s parlance, good biomechanics: her footstrike is flat-footed, her stride neutral, and her motion consistently forward, as opposed to bobbing up and down, allowing her to cover as much ground as possible.
By the end of the first lap, she had caught up to and then moved past the runners who started quickly. With each succeeding lap, she stretched her lead over men one-third her age. Margie lapped me the first time on her fifth lap. Having tried part of Margie’s track workout earlier in the day, I (Excuses! Excuses!) was fighting off a biting tightness in my hamstrings, being out of shape in the late afternoon Tennessee sun, and the possibility of humiliating myself by collapsing in front of the inmates.
As I began to falter, some chanted encouragement—“Come on, Blue.” Then, as she glided past as if on roller skates, in a sweet but firm voice, I heard her say, “You have to finish, Bruce. It would be a bad precedent for the inmates if you didn’t. You can do it.”
Though she had trained for my benefit for an hour and a half in the morning, Margie made no excuses (she disdains excuses) for not having one of her best runs. Still she crossed the finish line to a burst of applause with a time better than all but a couple of twenty-something men. Soon, she was sitting under a tent, steering conversation onto their efforts and encouraging them to keep training. “She’s amazing. I hope I’m in that kind of shape when I’m half her age,” a twenty-four-year-old inmate serving time for auto theft said.
On the drive back to Nashville, Margie spotted some oak leaf hydrangeas and became practically loquacious, rattling off the names of varieties of hydrangeas, including Annabelle hydrangeas, French hydrangeas (an old friend said that Margie once reacted with uncharacteristic displeasure when she criticized the brilliantly blue French hydrangea as gaudy), climbing hydrangeas, and peegee hydrangeas. She began growing the flowering plant in the 1980s when she and Hans bought a lake house in Mount Juliet with a couple of Annabelle hydrangea bushes. After an older neighbor gave her a little education, Margie became an aficionado. She was soon propagating them with abandon.
She opened her own business, Hydrangeas of Braid Cove, in 1993, and began selling dried hydrangeas