Footfall

At the time he died, Mateo Sepulveda hadn’t run for two years. Some say he died of a broken heart.

In the eulogy, Mateo’s son, Stephen, shared, “Since his running streak ended, you were never sure where an anecdote about your morning jog would take him. You’d risk causing him great pain, witnessing the sadness in his eyes.”

When the streak started—March 20, 1979—Mateo was setting out to be the best at something. He was the youngest of three and had lived in the shadow of his brothers for 11,106 days. And his brothers had both recently completed their 12^th 100-mile race, both at personal records. So at the age of 30 years and 149 days, Mateo started his streak.

It would be a lonesome endeavor, as always. His brothers were 8 and 10 years his senior. It wasn’t that his brothers completely ignored Mateo, but the mere two years between the older two and their love of running had made them close. They had been on the same cross-country team in high school, and they were both instrumental in Our Lady of the Vine Academy bringing home two Central California Section championships. As adults and still best friends, the two older brothers trained together for 100-mile races—running most weekends through the almond and apricot orchards, but sometimes training full weekends in the Sierra Nevada near Donnell Vista. Over the years of the actual races, they traded good-natured ribbing as they alternated besting each other in the century races. Through all this, they were each other’s best men, godfathers to each other’s kids; their two families vacationed every summer together and would travel together to the ultramarathons. By the time Mateo was 21, he moved with his pregnant bride to a job 75 miles south of their hometown. That distance proved to be too much to establish any real bond the three brothers might have shared over fatherhood.

Mateo was a runner, well, because his older brothers were. But he didn’t like the pressure of timed races, the strictures of rules for this activity he loved. And he was always too worried of twisting his ankle when running off-road. So he excelled at neither track and field nor cross-country. Nor did he make any lasting friendships from his time on those high school teams. He was just the distant brother of Our Lady of the Vine Academy running royalty. But he was an addict to the endorphins; running was a means to an end: adrenaline. And through his 20s, he chased that high on the weekends, the only time his wife was home from work and could stay home with the kids. Mateo lived for the weekends and running down that fix; he would run and then be a super-dad and super-husband. He would play with the kids after his shower, do all the yardwork, all the laundry, and cook meals for the family. All that and he would have energy leftover for a weekly roll in the hay with his wife.

But he was downright rotten during the week. His management job—IT in the early days of computers, when they were the size of two men—sapped him. When he’d get home, he would only be able to muster the strength to break ice cubes into a lowball, tip four fingers of Christian Brothers brandy into the glass, and splash a bit of 7-Up on top. By dinner, he was silent. After two glasses of wine with his meal, he was catatonic. Falling asleep on the floor in front of the TV most nights, he’d go to work sore and slow.

“We all lived for the weekend,” Stephen told a cousin at the reception after Mateo’s funeral. “Before he started the running streak, Dad was pretty terrible during the week. At breakfast, he was in such rough shape from the night before that he’d grill us about school—we were barely out of kindergarten when he started asking us why our A-minuses weren’t A’s; he’d regularly remind us of how good we had it, how the three of us Irish triplets had built-in friends for life; he’d leave the house in the morning for work the same way he came home: silent and sullen.”

One night in mid-March 1979, Mateo took the kids to his Monday bowling league. Mateo had had two pitchers of beer over three games and had driven the kids home. Suffice it to say, he and his wife got into a row later that night.

“I remember that night clearly,” Stephen said to another cousin as the funeral reception was wrapping up. “We’d never been to the alley with him, and it was a weeknight. I think he wanted to give Mom a night alone. For us kids, it was so cool. Dad gave us each a plastic tumbler full of quarters; we were in the arcade all night. But the next day, things changed forever.”

By the time the kids got up for school that Tuesday, Mateo was in the kitchen fixing breakfast in his stinky running clothes. His black hair wet and matted to his forehead, he greeted the kids one by one with a kiss on the head and a sweaty hug. Asking them if they slept well and if they had any interesting dreams, he was met by the kids’ suspicious looks. The youngest asked if they had all slept all the way through Saturday. Not realizing his own humor, the kid stood perplexed as the other three laughed and dug into their tamales, over-easies, and crispy bacon.

So that was the beginning. During the following 13,538 successive days, Mateo’s goal was to be the best at something. He was the best at more than one thing, as it turned out. He had realized that being a good dad and husband on only 28.6% of the week was a dismal record. Running every morning was his meticulous repair of the damage he had caused to his family relationships during his drunken years. It was a better penance than anything his priest could have given him. He became both self-contained and selfless: work didn’t drive him to drink anymore; he showed up to every one of the kids’ school and sports events; he helped them with their homework; he became better in bed with his wife. Years later, each of his kids had him officiate their wedding. And on the morning of each of those weddings, Mateo and his kids went for a run together.

Everyone in the family knew early on how important running was. And they cheered him daily. An ongoing joke was to ask him, “Did you run today?” But the usual question was, “How much did you run today?” The answer was usually between five and six miles. When the kids were in junior high and high school, they’d run with Mateo on Saturdays for the first half of his run. Excelling at baseball, softball, and basketball, they frequently piled back into the house those mornings chattering about the godliness of Mateo’s daily mileage.

On the tenth anniversary of the streak, Mateo revealed that he had been recording all his miles. As fastidiously as a historian, as religiously as a monk, he also noted other incidentals related to the morning ritual. The coyote that once trotted parallel to him on the opposite sidewalk for a half mile. The bear that he encountered on one of their weekend retreats to the Sierra. The mountain lion that Mateo had scared off by running straight at it. The owl that occasionally hooted at him and that he had hooted back at. All of these stories had been told immediately after they happened and added to his myth, his hero’s role in a fable. So after he revealed the running journal on the tenth anniversary, the family would commune over a big breakfast and listen to a recounting of the year and the streak, including his annual and lifetime totals. He would also tell everyone how much currency he had found on the road while running; some of the stories of finding the money seemed unlikely—for example, the one where he found a $20 bill frozen in a bank of snow in 1982. But no one ever questioned it. The family loved the lore and the stats. His best year of loose change was 1986, in which he had snatched a total of $49.72 off the pavement. With the help of that money, he purchased a new pair of running shoes every March 20^th. He was so devoted to his running that he would have kept every pair of spent sneakers, bronzed them, and put them on display in the garage. But his wife drew the line there, saying that was too close to idolatry, each pair of shiny shoes representing a golden calf.

Keeping the streak alive was not without its drama. It was standard practice to run in spite of the occasional cold or a flu. But on a Saturday at the beach in 1990, Mateo got bitten by a sand flea. His foot swelled to twice its normal size. The whole family rallied around him, keeping him off his feet. But the swelling kept Mateo from running the next morning. When they got home Sunday night at 10, the swelling had subsided and Mateo ran a few miles before midnight, waking up at his usual 4 AM the next day to run five and a half before going to work. When Mateo started his own IT consulting business in 1992, he travelled quite a bit; early flights and inclement weather required more creativity to keep the streak alive. He told the story of running in a Wyoming blizzard and returning to the hotel looking like a yeti, scaring the bejesus out of a maid and a front desk clerk. Another time, the weather in Montana was so bad that he ran thirty-five laps around the hotel hallways just to keep the streak alive. And there was the time in 2009 when he was being treated for prostate cancer; yet during that time, he somehow made it out for at least a mile (the bare minimum, according to his self-imposed rules). He even ran the morning after his wife died of a heart attack in May of 2011.

In spring of 2016, Mateo sent an email:

April 13, 2016

2:44 PM

To: My Kids

From: Mateo Sepulveda

Subject: the end of the streak

Hi, kids.

The streak is over at 37 years and 23 days. I woke up this morning and my piriformis and sciatic (the same ones I’ve been complaining about to you for about a year now) were frozen; I have been in bed all day, trying to stretch, but nothing will loosen up. I know it is our custom to get together to reveal the stats and anecdotes, but this email is all I can handle right now. So here you are:

·      74,172 miles (or 2.978 circumferences of the earth). I needed 531 more miles to complete the third lap around the equator. The hardest part was running over water...Jesus helped me with that! 

·      5.478 average miles per day.

·      74 pairs of running shoes purchased.

·      $971.19 found on the pavement, mostly nickels and quarters; a surprising number of half-dollars.

·      Extraordinary animal sightings: coyote, kit fox, Great Horned Owl (~2x weekly; I swear it was the same one for all those years), black bear (x2), gray wolf (roadkill), bobcat, mountain lion (x3), condor (a special treat on that day in 1979; at that time, there were only about 30 left in the California wild), and a bald eagle (I know you still don’t believe me about that one).

Running was my daily communion with nature. It was an accounting of my spirit. It was my holy hour. After your mother passed, I spoke with her every morning, my words punctuated by my rhythmic footfall. And my weekly jogs with you kids (and your own kids) was the highlight of my week.

That’s all for now,

Dad

That Mateo had been in bed all day was a point of real concern. But Stephen was especially alarmed by “That’s all for now.” He left work and broke a few traffic laws speeding across town. He found Mateo sitting up in his bed, perusing his running journals.

“I’m okay, son. I just need a little time.”

Stephen made dinner for Mateo and stayed with him in near silence until well after 10 PM. When he got home, Stephen kissed his wife and put on his running gear, determined to keep the streak intact. And so he plodded four miles before midnight.

Over the next year, Mateo did all his PT exercises with great devotion. At 70 years old, he frequently joked that he was training to start the next 37-year streak. As it turned out, all he could manage was walking three miles a few times a week. Running was a fraught topic. When they shared about a 5K they had run with their own kids or a half-marathon they were training for, the kids could never be quite sure how Mateo would act. He would open up and speak fondly of his running years, or he would go silent, or he would berate himself for never stretching after his morning ritual run.

In spite of all this, Stephen and his siblings went to Mateo’s house on April 12, 2017. They pulled their kids out of school; they and their spouses took the day off from their respective jobs. But it wasn’t to observe a moment of silence for the streak, to memorialize the end of an era. It was to share their stats from the previous year. Rain or shine, Stephen ran four and a half miles on Mondays and Wednesdays; his siblings divided up the remaining days of the week. And in their separate Bay Area and Central Valley cities, each sibling each ran with their respective family on Saturday mornings.

“Over the last year,” Stephen said while reading from a poster that the grandkids had adorned with glitter, bright lettering, and pictures of them together after their weekly jogs. “We kept the streak alive, running 1301 collective miles, averaging 3.564 miles per day. Each of us are still on our first pair of shoes, and none of us intends to fund our next pair with grubby change found on dirty streets.”

The family laughed for a minute or so.

“And little Junie tells me, her Uncle Stephen, that she saw seventeen squirrels, three crows, two chipmunks, and one bunny.”

More laughter. And then silence as Stephen raised his coffee mug.

“To the streak. It will live on.”

Mateo died a year later. But it wasn’t from a broken heart.