How Can Anyone Forget?


     

Of course I remember. How can anyone forget? The odd thing about that day was that I hadn't run. Well, maybe it isn't that odd. I had only been a runner for almost exactly a year to the date. While I ran every single day in the USMC, my first recreational run was when I came back home in September of 2000. My first road race wasn't until April of 2002. It was an 8k in Centra Park and it wasn't quite Spring as the temperature was 35 degrees. But this race or any other racing hadn't yet happened and I was simply someone who ran every once in a while. 

    As a teenager in high school there was an annual tradition where the Brooklyn Tech Football Team would run from the school in Downtown Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Lower Manhattan. As football players this felt like pure drudgery. Maybe I'm only speaking for myself but in a start/stop, power sport it is a good bet to say it sucked for the majority of us. I sort of remember the bridge because we were fifty football players jogging across the most iconic bridge in New York City. Most I remember counting the seconds until we would stop to ensure that everyone was still with us.

    The one vivid memory I have was the turnaround point where we sort of ran in place and waited for the whole team to arrive. While I tried to catch my breath I then looked up. Frankly I don't recall if I decided to look up or I was instructed to look up but I looked up. It was massive and linear with beautiful arches inspired by Islamic architecture. While the arches came to a point, that point turned into 1300 feet of amazing lines seemingly without an end. I was certainly somewhere in the middle of the football team running from the school across the bridge, and around Lower Manhattan but I am relatively certain that I was one of the last to the foot of the Twin Towers that day awe-struck in its majesty.

    I ran a few more times in Lower Manhattan on lunch time galavants around Wall Street and a few races and eerily similar to strikingly strong, and beautiful structure that stood proudly for thirty years, was the massive hole in the ground before building another single tower. My original journey to the Towers with Tech Football was in or around 1992 or 1993. This was plus or minus six months to the original World Trade Center bombing. While this bombing was tragic the buildings still stood. They would stand for another eight years and nearly seven months. 

How can anyone forget??

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