Walking Man

Our friendship is in great shape, even if I’m not.

He was my first accountability partner. Our friendship is in great shape, even if I’m not.

While I don’t recall the first time we met, it is likely to have been on the sidelines of our daughters’ soccer game. Mark was an enthusiastic fan who enjoyed the game of soccer and cheering on his kids. We were probably the proudest (and loudest) fans in attendance.

As the girls advanced in the rec leagues and the number of parents willing to volunteer to coach weekday practices and Saturday games dwindled, Mark and I filled the void–at the mere cost of an all-day training for new coaches, which covered fitness drills, rudimentary first aid and basic soccer strategy. Approaching our fifties, we agreed that basic fitness was a requirement for both of us. What we didn’t realize was that volunteering to coach would also begin a friendship journey.

It began with “dynamic stretching.”

I recalled static stretching, or stretching without any limbering up was the standard from my earliest days playing soccer. At the coaching clinic, Mark and I learned that a brief jog, followed by stretching while moving was recommended, for better performance and injury prevention. We agreed to meet the next week at the local high school track to begin our fitness regime of dynamic stretching, walking and even some jogging, when and if the spirit moved us. Mark became my first accountability partner.

Our pledge became a daily routine for the next 10 years.

Mornings began at 5:45 a.m. with a one-word text inquiry: “Status?” If all systems were go, meaning I had slept decently and I had no early appointments, the counter-sign was “Giddyup!” (H/t to Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer) While it wasn’t the Enigma code, it sufficed for the sleepy, stocky specimens we were.

A fast friendship developed. We both grew up in Maryland’s Montgomery County, discovering that we had both briefly lived in the Rosemary Hills neighborhood, albeit at slightly different times. From these common roots, easy conversation ensued with gusto. From politics to economics to technology, I found that Mark’s interests ran wide and deep. We found topics that made it easy to share stories of mutual interest, often starting with family life and local community affairs, moving to national and international politics. Together, with our daily routine and weekly soccer schedule, we watched our children grow up.

We navigated the aftermath of 9/11, where the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the nearby Pentagon felt tangible and terrible. It was closely followed by a rash of shootings by the “Montgomery County sniper,” including one at a local service station across from the 7-11 where we mistakenly took our team for a postgame treat days after a deadly shooting. (Coach training had not yet included active shooter drills).

We also became health counselors for each other. Beyond the usual aches and pains and challenges with excess weight gain that no longer disappeared with a little exercise, we discussed mental health, fitness, vitamins (for many years, a side business of Mark’s), as well as hypertension, heart health, and cancer. I wasn’t always eager to talk about my health, but with Mark it not only seemed natural, it felt better to have someone to listen to as I processed out loud.

Not only did my walking buddy and I like many of the same things, we also disliked the same things. Litter, for example. We did our part to police the high school track of any debris we found. On mornings when we encountered a field heavily littered with plastic bottles and other trash left behind by sports teams, we either gathered it all and placed it in the lacrosse goal or made creative patterns with it in the center of the field in the hopes that those responsible would get the message.

At the heart of both accountability and friendship is commitment. Mark and I started a commitment to fitness that blossomed into a close friendship. It may have gone another way: a breakdown in discipline, a long hiatus caused by travel, illness or injury, or even a simple loss of interest in the routine. We weathered it all and maintained our 5-6 day a week, one-hour workout. The length of our socializing streak may have had something to do with a willingness to occasionally treat ourselves to coffee and bagels, even foregoing the walk if the need for company outweighed the need for a walk.

Imagine having a conversation nearly every day for 10 years without running out of topics to discuss. I credit this to the areas of overlap and diverging interests. Mark followed the tech and financial press more closely than I did. I was a policy wonk, former Hill staffer and bureaucrat. And in sports, we both had the chance to talk about the local pro teams and when it came to our kids, we allowed ourselves a place to brag unabashedly and unselfconsciously about our kids, happy to listen as we were both invested in seeing each other’s family grow and thrive.

Above all, we had a great flow, made possible by each of us being willing to listen as much as we spoke. In and around Washington, this can be a rarity. Sharing the airtime also meant sharing the silences, at times the result of merely needing to gather oxygen to breathe through the (very) occasional sprint.

Having relocated to New England, I continue to honor our relationship whenever I visit with an invitation to walk the neighborhood or to repair to a nearby diner. “Giddyup!” comes Mark’s reply.

Do you have a ritual that you continue even across distance, or a long-running routine with a friend? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

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Filling My Cup

Traveling in Dublin for the first time, I expected to find myself in a pub, drinking Guinness and listening to live Irish music. What I didn’t expect was getting misty-eyed when the group’s leader introduced a song saying “You know how it is with old friends, even when you haven’t seen them for years, and you are able to pick right back up, like no time has passed at all. Here’s a song about that.”

Chorus of Never Too Far from My Mind by Nicholas McCarthy

You were never too far from my thoughts all the time.
I traveled this wide world while you stayed behind,
And though the miles in between us were many and wide,
You were never too far from my mind.

When you know you know.