CBS News’ Jim Axelrod: What I learned about life from my dad

When my father ran, he looked like he was in bad need of the Tin Man’s oil can. He scrunched up his shoulders tightly, pinching the blades together just below the base of his neck and forcing his chin up at a slightly unnatural angle. From behind, this brought much more of his bald spot into view. His upper arms — from shoulders to elbows — stayed glued to his torso. At the bottom of his rib cage, each forearm stiffly jutted up and away from his body at a 45-degree angle.

Whenever I picture him running, it’s always from behind. Four feet behind, to be exact. As a kid, whenever I tried to go running with him, that was as close as he let me get to him.

My dad was a good man, often loving and warm. Although a terrific provider when it came to things like clothes, houses, vacations and college tuition, he was not always able to keep pace when it came to his family’s emotional needs. With four kids by the time he was 35, a shaky marriage and a demanding law practice, he was overwhelmed and overstretched. He needed space — a place just for him. He found it on long stretches of the road where he’d go for his restorative 10-milers.

I started running the summer before my sophomore year in high school. My reasons were much less complicated than his. On the rare occasions when he would reluctantly agree to let me head out with him, our competing agendas were laid plain in the first 100 yards. I was looking for some quality time together. He needed to maintain the security of his sanctuary.

Running was my father’s one dependable break from his many burdens. He couldn’t tolerate any trespassers, not even his kid. Maintaining the integrity of the four-foot gap was as crucial to his well-being as breaching it was to mine.

I was no match. He was simply in much better shape than I. When I sped up, so did he. When I slowed down, he adjusted his pace accordingly, determined to keep his distance ever so precisely. When I complained about it after the run — “Dad, why couldn’t we run together?” — he was caustic. “Not my fault if you can’t keep up,” he’d shoot back.

The four-foot gap stayed with me for many years, long after he died in 2000 from prostate cancer, though I wasn’t entirely aware of its influence. As I climbed the rungs of my own demanding career ladder, I was motivated by my own unconscious need to overtake the old man. He’d given me plenty of career advice as I was growing up — “arrive early, stay late, never say no” — but the four-foot gap may have been the most instrumental factor in my success. It was definitely the most instrumental in my failure.

I wasn’t competing with a man who had a beachfront vacation home, a Jaguar and a closet full of Armani as much as I was running in his footsteps. I wanted those things too. But I was going to do it even better. In the network news business, this meant running off to Afghanistan with half a day’s notice, spending weeks on the road following presidential candidates and curling up in the fetal position in the back of a stalled-out Humvee praying Iraqi artillery would miss its mark.

Much like my father, I ended up alienated, confused and unhappy. I looked up from the middle of the campaign trail in 2008 and found myself drinking too much, sleeping too little, 30 pounds overweight and plagued by a question: “How did I get here?”

One night in Houston, as Barack Obama took the stage behind me, I felt the buzz of my BlackBerry. It was my best friend, Dave. He’d been tooling around the Web and somehow come across my father’s records for the three times he’d run the New York marathon in the early 1980s. I scrolled down to his time for the marathon he ran at age 46, my next birthday.

My father had run an impressive 3:29:58, just under 8 minutes a mile for more than 26 miles. My dad was in great shape at 46. I was so fat I couldn’t run around the block. And yet my reflexive response was, “I bet I can beat that.”

I didn’t grasp it immediately, that a perpetual race against my father was exactly how I’d gotten here. But I did start to run, figuring this would be just what I needed. Not just a way to get back into shape but to erase the four-foot gap once and for all.

Not a chance.

Over the next 19 months I trained for my own New York marathon. It didn’t take me long to realize I wasn’t going to get anywhere near my dad’s time. He was simply a faster runner. But the frustration of never being able to beat the old man gave way to the valuable lesson that it was a waste of time to even try.

Like my father, I discovered the benefit of shedding the extra weight I’d picked up since college.

Like my father, I found a dependable way to add a measure of control to my life, and a gorgeously binary choice. When I dragged my behind out of bed in the morning and went for a run, I felt better. Every time. When I rolled over, I did not.

Like my father, I found serenity in my own piece of the road, a reliable way to control the chaos swirling around me and untangle the knots in between my ears.

But I ended up in a much different place than he had.

I was no longer carrying with me the resentment I’d been dragging along since my adolescence. Understanding filled its place. By the time I crossed the finish line in Central Park, I was no longer racing his ghost. Nearly a decade after his death, my father had taught me a crucial lesson. Any lasting sense of happiness is a matter of setting your own pace.

Jim Axelrod, a national correspondent for CBS News, is the author of “In the Long Run: A Father, a Son, and Unintentional Lessons in Happiness.”