Running for life

One of Hannah Ricketts' most poignant memories is learning how to read with her family friend, Dee Head, who often cared for her because her parents worked odd hours as paramedics.

When Head fell ill with cancer, 11-year-old Ricketts and Head read one last book together over the course of several hours. Head died shortly thereafter. As memories of her friend began to fade, Ricketts searched for a way to commemorate her.

Ricketts, a rising junior majoring in human nutrition, foods, and exercise, found what she was looking for in a Virginia Tech lab and on the roads of America.

Last summer, Ricketts took part in the Ulman Cancer Run for Young Adults, a 49-day cross-country journey. She ran on a relay team and honored Head by writing her name on her calf.

Ricketts particularly remembers feeling altitude sickness during the run on a day she had dedicated to Dee. But then she thought about her friend and the fact that she didn't have the option to quit. "Now I feel like I have that mental toughness to push through anything," she said.

At the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Ricketts works in Professor David Bevans' lab, where she researches drugs that could be used to target precursors to cancer. Ricketts performs calculations that generate detailed graphics of cell response to drugs targeting certain enzymes, a less expensive and faster method than testing each drug.

"This research is … a way for me to feel like I am giving back to Dee," said Ricketts.

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Moment

A return

In college, Thomas Gardner (right), running with teammates, learned how to blend his skills in writing and running.

Eighteen months, and little else, separated Thomas Gardner and his younger brother, John. They shared a bedroom, instant understandings, even a name: They were simply called "Tom-John."

Tom became Alumni Distinguished Professor of English Thomas Gardner, author of "Poverty Creek Journal," an acclaimed 2014 work of literary nonfiction.

Central to the book is running, which the 64-year-old has done consistently for some 50 years. When Gardner was an undergraduate English major and cross country runner at Bucknell University, he purposefully separated his running self and writing self, as if the two were incompatible. But then a respected English professor shocked Gardner by congratulating him on his race times. "That gave me permission to try to bring these two parts of myself together," Gardner said.

In the decades after landing a faculty position at Virginia Tech in 1982, Gardner determined that he was a better literary critic than poet. And about a dozen years ago, he began running five mornings a week on the trails along Pandapas Pond and Poverty Creek, in the Jefferson National Forest just northwest of Blacksburg. Beginning in January 2012, he returned home from each run and, still dripping sweat, recorded journal entries, intending to produce a book.

He later revisited the daily ruminations — dwelling on the awareness of movement or the elements of nature on a given day — and used the riffs to shift into poetry, tying his thoughts to the writing of Thoreau, Frost, Eliot, Whitman, and Dickinson. The scheme allowed his poetic sensibilities to return, which "completely surprised and thrilled" him. The book, he said, unites the ways — in his notions of body, teaching, poetry, and family — that he is "most myself, most awake, most aware, most alive."

From entry to entry, the hand-off from running to poetry is often invisible. For example, the Gardner brothers in more-recent years would run together on the beach during vacations.

"Two bodies, alive in the other, but apart. … Seeing him there, knowing that when we get back, he'll be gone." — Aug. 6, 2012

Two months into Gardner's daily journaling about running, John died in his sleep from a heart attack.

"Cold rain this morning, 45 degrees, crying hard by the time I hit the pond." — Feb. 29, 2012

"Now I'm alone, wordless, with the strangest sense of being set apart to mourn or notice." — April 11, 2012

Said Gardner, "Surely [his death] made me think I needed to keep doing [the book]. It was about him as much as anything."

Running and poetry are synchronized, reliant on such shared techniques as tempo and poise. On a familiar trail or in a memorized poem, each step carries layers of meaning, imagery, and memory. "I feel spatially how the poem works and how it goes from here to there because I do it running as well," Gardner said.

"Two days ago, a few steps from where I am now, I saw a deer with a broken leg scramble away, then pause and meet my eyes. No fear on either of our faces." — Nov. 29, 2012

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