My first memory of really running, running with a purpose, is from the early summer of 1968.

I was 8 years old and obsessed with Jim Ryun and the crew of runners chasing him that Olympic season in lemon-colored singlets with “OREGON” in green letters across their chests. Each morning I rode with my Dad, Richard Reid, to the dirt high school track in Stevenson, Wash., population 1,000, the logging and lumber mill town he and I grew up in on the banks of the Columbia River as it cuts through the Cascades, 45 minutes east of Portland.

My Dad, a teacher and counselor, was helping his brother Jim get in shape before he shipped off to Vietnam. So I would follow them around the track for two, three miles. The sprinkler system set up on the ragged football field usually left the inside lanes soaked even on the hottest days, and the soles of my Dad’s Adidas Italias left a distinct trail all around the track. I followed my father’s path through each lap but, try as I might, could never quite land squarely in his footsteps.

It would be something of the story of my life.

I have spent most of my adult life writing about the resiliency of athletes, traveling across five continents to chronicle triumphs over obstacles both on and off the field of play while too often forgetting that the two most courageous athletes I know have been sitting across the breakfast table from me all along.

My son Duncan, 18, a recent graduate of Palos Verdes High, simply refused to listen to all those who told him his chronic autoimmune disease would end his promising career as an endurance athlete almost before it began. Instead he listened to his heart, making the U.S. national team in the triathlon at 16 and last year running the nation’s fastest high school 10,000 meters.

In searching for role models, Duncan had to look no further than his grandfather. (Actually grandfathers. My father-in-law Frank Dodge’s battle with psoriatic arthritis was a 30-year profile in courage.)

My dad fought cancer for 13 years with remarkable grace and strength.

He continued to circle that same high school track through radiation, through chemo, even as cancer ate away at lungs once so full and rotted a spine that always seemed capable of bearing anything.

Both men, these two long distance runners, loom especially large as this Father’s Day approaches. Duncan is soon headed off to college. My Dad has run his last race. So loss is one of many emotions pulling on me on a weekend in which I’m awed – and shamed – by their courage, and celebrate triumphs that cannot simply be measured by a stopwatch. Mainly I feel blessed to have chased them through life.

• • •

While I inherited neither my father’s wisdom nor patience, I did share his love of running and the sport of track and field from an early age. I remember as a young boy going through the scrapbook he kept as a teenager full of clippings from Roger Bannister running the first sub-4-minute mile in 1954 and Bannister’s showdown with Australia’s John Landy in the British Empire Games mile in Vancouver later that summer. My first Olympic memory is watching most of my adult relatives scream at a black and white TV as former Oregon NCAA champion Bill Dellinger stormed into the lead of the 1964 Olympic Games 5,000-meter final, then faded only to re-emerge out of a pack down the mud-splattered homestretch to steal the bronze medal at the wire.

My dad was a voracious reader all his life and started each day with a bowl of cereal, a piece of toast and The Oregonian. A couple of years ago he called me quite concerned that the usually exhaustive coverage by his favorite track writer, the Oregonian’s longtime standout Ken Goe, hadn’t been in the paper for quite some time. Had something happened to Goe? Had he been laid off? Somewhat jealous of his concern, I reassured him that Ken was fine.

“Dad, it’s football season,” I reminded him.

Duncan’s first athletic passion was cycling and then triathlon, but eventually he came to share our obsession with running in circles. That bond formed while sitting next to my dad and mom at the 2008 Olympic Trials at Eugene’s storied Hayward Field and then joining a group of grade schoolers chasing Pat Tyson, the former Oregon standout and the sport’s best salesman, on an eight-mile run around the same hillside trails that built Dellinger, Prefontaine, Centrowitz and Rupp.

Running is an act of defiance for Duncan; a daily opportunity to defy the doctors, the doubters, to push a body that has so often betrayed him to limits he’s convinced he still hasn’t found. Since he was 14 he has had ulcerative colitis, an inflammation of the large intestine, an autoimmune disease with an unknown cause for which there is no cure. Symptoms include chronic diarrhea and loss of blood, which can lead to low iron as well as low levels of other vitamins and intense joint pain.

The disease was initially misdiagnosed, a mistake compounded by the fact that prescribed treatment only made the colitis much worse. By the time a bright, young, conscientious doctor named Doron Kahana properly diagnosed the illness, Duncan was 15, in the middle of his sophomore cross-country season and losing by more than a minute to runners he had beaten by just as much a year earlier.

Way under weight and with his blood and iron levels barely registering, there were several points that fall when Dr. Kahana suggested Duncan be hospitalized. Instead, with Kahana’s help and innovation, he rebounded to help lead Palos Verdes to third place at the State Championships. Five months later he was representing the U.S. at the North, Central and South American youth triathlon championships. My dad watched Duncan run at Hayward Field last June, the only prep in the U.S. Junior Championship’s 10,000. For someone with my dad’s background it was like watching a grandson take the field at Yankee Stadium.

Duncan is stuck with colitis for life and has had relapses. Each day includes ingesting 18 pills, none of them, unfortunately, performance enhancing. He has endured other obstacles. Last fall he suffered what could have been a season-ending stress fracture but willed himself to return in time to lead Palos Verdes back to State. Another stress fracture followed in March, stealing his senior track season from him. He remained undeterred, taking up coaching his team’s younger runners and circling the date of his first cross-country race for Oberlin College on the calendar.

My father also ran to test himself. He ran as he lived, following his moral compass along the Cascades’ back roads and trails, confident in the direction he was headed. My brother-in-law recently described him as a virtuous man and I believe he was at peace with fate because he could look back on his life without regret.

My dad ran track and cross-country at the University of Washington until suffering a knee injury in a car accident. From that summer of 1968 he ran nearly every day until the 1990s, when that knee finally needed replacing. After that he continued to walk four miles every day with my mother, rain or shine.

I always found it telling that his favorite race was Portland’s Cascade Run Off. The 9.3-mile race took a steep, winding climb for most of its first six miles into Portland’s West Hills before reaching a magnificent view of snow-capped Mt. Hood and then propelling runners downhill to trace the Willamette back to the heart of the city, a reminder that the best things in life often come only after the hardest of climbs.

I also found it ironic that a man who never took shortcuts dedicated his life to making the lives of others easier.

He was an educator, a mentor to students and other teachers for 30 years, and nothing gave him as much pleasure as bumping into a former student at the local grocery store or at a mall in Portland and catching up with what they were doing with their lives.

He followed many of those lives intently, the races they ran, and often spoke with pride about the success of his former students, whether it was graduating from college, working on the railroad as he did as a young man, opening a local business or restaurant, serving the community as a deputy sheriff or teacher or turning their lives around after battling addiction. My dad did many things well but I don’t think I’ve ever known or seen a better listener. He had an empathy and focus that allowed people to form an almost instant connection with him.

One moment in his final months stands out to me. Our family was leaving after a meeting at the cancer center last February when we ran into a young employee from the clinic my parents knew, although not well, in the hallway. My dad, sensing she was upset, asked her if she was OK.

For several minutes she unburdened herself for the first time about a recent family tragedy. As my parents comforted her, my dad gave no indication that only minutes earlier he had received confirmation that his treatments were no longer working. The meeting had been to essentially lay out a road map to his death.

• • •

Memorial Day weekend Duncan traveled with me to the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene. The next morning he sat at my parents’ breakfast table and rehashed the meet and the summer ahead with my dad. Was Centro going to be OK? Did Meb have one more big race in him? Is Nike really going to go through with this lawsuit against Boris Berian? Could Rupp really win the Olympic marathon?

Duncan and I left that afternoon remarking that his energy, his color, his appetite were back. I had returned from a run earlier in the day to find him in the yard pulling weeds. It was hard to believe he was a dying man, but he was.

My sister called last weekend to say my dad had taken a sudden turn for the worse. He had a great day Thursday but went to bed that night in deep pain and never really woke up again. I reached Stevenson around 1:30 Sunday morning. He was in bed surrounded by my mom, my three sisters and two of my brothers-in-law. His breathing was sporadic and labored, not unlike it is at that moment of truth that all races have. Then he rallied, the breaths deep and quick, like he was making a final surge on the final lap.

And then he peacefully faded away.

“He’s crossed the finish line,” my sister Shona said.

That afternoon our family, carrying my Dad’s favorite running shoes, circled the high school track one more time in his honor.

A victory lap for a life that lifted those of so many others.

• • •

The afternoon after the Prefontaine meet, Duncan and I stopped at Pre’s Trail, a wood-chip path that runs through the woods and open fields across the Willamette River from the Oregon campus.

A day earlier he had been in a boot cast with his latest stress fracture, but had been cleared to run and couldn’t wait to hop on one of his favorite trails. We started the run together but he bolted away immediately, pushing as always pedal to the metal, disappearing in a wooded area. After about a half-mile the trail passes Autzen Stadium, crossing a small foot bridge and then taking a hard left onto a long open stretch.

As I came off the bridge I was surprised that I could see Duncan ahead and that I actually seemed to be gaining on him. I hadn’t felt this good in years and increased my pace. I was really closing the gap.

Then just like that he surged again, never looking back, soon disappearing into another section of forest, a stronger, braver man, landing with each stride in his grandfather’s footsteps.

Contact the writer: sreid@ocregister.com