Make Time For Old Friends

A long run in the East Bay takes me back

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I gathered with old friends in the parking lot of the Skyline Gate trailhead in the Oakland hills last Saturday morning, next to redwoods dripping with condensation from the overcast sky. My running mentor and track buddy, nearing 80, stood by, as did more than a dozen other runner friends from my past. We gathered to run in remembrance of runner Keith Evans-Orville, who died a year ago at 54.

His wife, standing next to their two teenagers, encouraged each of us to take a moment this Wednesday, February 21, on the anniversary of Keith’s passing, to do that thing we’ve desired to do instead of putting it off. Book that trip. Go to that reunion. Make that change.

I booked the trip last weekend not only to honor Keith, but also because, who knows if or when I might see these people or run these trails again?

A pic of Keith on my hydration pack, and me talking to Len Goldman, a local coach I used to meet weekly to run track. He's 79 and still racing 5Ks/10Ks and still coaching. Photos by Christine Chapon

This trip’s muddy 28-mile memorial trail run in the Oakland and Berkeley hills became a daylong contemplation on time, place, meaning, and mortality, with relationships at the core.

Keith should not have died at my age. He was fit and healthy, as any longtime runner is. He raced numerous marathons and some 30 ultras. I became friends with him over 20 years ago and ran on a couple of relay teams with him. He was closest to one of my close friends, Jennifer O’Connor, since they both worked as staff attorneys on the California Supreme Court and ran together during lunch breaks. Keith also aided Jennifer’s annual course-marking team for the Western States 100. He was a brilliant guy with a knack for precisely calculating and predicting pace.

Keith, in front as #90, with Jennifer behind his shoulder and me in the Boston jacket from 2009.

He got covid at the end of 2022 and was sick but then recovered. He ran a half marathon in early February and noticed that his heart rate was unusually low, and this low heart rate limited his speed. Two weeks later, he was found in bed having died from sudden cardiac arrest or from something else that made his heart stop. An autopsy found no underlying disease and concluded “enlarged heart—undetermined” for cause of death. His passing feels random, confusing, and unfair on top of deeply sad.

The group took off to run a 10-mile loop in Redwood Regional Park, followed by a long out-and-back northward spur to Tilden Park. Breaking into a run on the West Ridge Trail and turning left onto the French Trail, I marveled at how every bend, every rock formation, every cluster of redwoods opened a door in my brain. I wouldn’t recall these details if I were back home in Colorado, but being here, I felt intimately familiar with these trails that I ran countless times when I lived here.

In Colorado’s high altitude, we don’t have coastal redwoods, eucalyptus, oak, bay laurel, or the bunches of fern that thrive under the canopy. I hadn’t realized how much I missed this landscape and its growth. It takes going away and returning with fresh eyes to find the extraordinary in what used to look and feel routine.

One of countless redwoods in Redwood Regional Park.

Moss-covered oak trees and clusters of bay laurel on a trail, everything wet with intermittent rain, with Steve Holman and Suzy Kisylia leading the way.

I pulled a bay leaf off a bush while running by, ripped it, and inhaled the pungent herb. Just as smelling a rose always takes me back to being a child with my mother tending her rose bushes, these bay laurel shrubs, combined with the fecund damp earth underfoot, always transport me back to these hills and to earlier adulthood, discovering a newfound strength and confidence through running in the woods.

I moved to Berkeley in 1993 to enter grad school and took up running on the first Monday of March in 1994, thanks to Jennifer and her husband, whom I had watched run their first marathon the day prior. I wanted to run like them. That first run literally changed my life by setting me on a course to become a runner. Gradually, I explored the network of East Bay Regional Parks, which provide a greenbelt of nature in the hills in between the urban centers of Berkeley and Oakland and the suburban sprawl around Walnut Creek.

I ran much of the day with Jennifer’s 24-year-old daughter, Zoe, whom I’ve known since she was born. I couldn’t stop marveling that I was her age when I took up running here, and wondering how these trails and trees will be when she’s my age in three decades. These regional parks and their nature seem pretty much exactly the same as they always did, which felt comforting.

Zoe asked me, how did we figure out mileage and pace back then, pre-GPS? Pace was a guess, and mileage we figured out by using the park district’s paper maps, which showed the distance for each trail segment, which we’d add up. Imagine that, paper maps!

As I ran the winding, enchanting French Trail, I flashed back on the first time I ran this trail in late June of 1998, as an anniversary date. We left our three-month-old daughter with a babysitter for the first time and went for a run on the French Trail (my idea). We got turned around and temporarily lost, my Nokia mobile phone couldn’t find a signal in the forest, and our pace was woefully slower than I (as a road runner then) had estimated. We returned to the babysitter about an hour later than planned, me crying and convinced I was a terrible mother. But our baby was fine, and I learned that (1) trail running takes much longer than regular road running and (2) parents make mistakes.

Returning to the parking lot after the first loop, fate reconnected me with one of the most important people in my life, whom I hadn’t reached out to before this trip because we had lost touch. Sometimes, we don’t reconnect with meaningful people because it’s too intense to remember days gone by and to feel an almost overwhelming nostalgia. We don’t want to disappoint the people we looked up to by how we turned out, or in any way be disappointed by them. It’s easier to let the past stay in the past.

But there he was, Coach Alphonzo Jackson, my first coach, always a good-luck charm when we’d spot each other mid-marathon.

At 78, he was there doing what he’s always done, coaching and mentoring high school students.

“Coach, it’s you!”

“Sarah, for real? Come here!”

We hugged and he said, “You know, I still have that award we won at the couple’s relay.” In that relay 20 years ago, we teamed up to each run a 5K around Oakland’s Lake Merritt, and our combined time won.

Alphonzo and me, 2004 and now.

Coach Al is the man who got me running track, who made me believe I could BQ and then “BQ like a man” (a sub-3:10 for the men’s Boston Marathon qualifying time). He’s the one who filled me with mantras he used to motivate his Team In Training recruits and the teens we trained as part of Students Run Oakland in the mid-2000s. For three years straight, he and I traveled to LA together to help high-schoolers from some of Oakland’s toughest neighborhoods finish the LA Marathon. I still repeat his sayings:

Mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.
Any day you can run is a good day.
Smooth as cocoa butter.
Even when you feel bad, try to look good.
No wimps!
Your health is your wealth.

Only about a minute into catching up on small talk, he put a hand on my shoulder, looked in my eyes and said, “Now listen, you need to know my plan. When I die, I’m going to be cremated, and I want half my ashes sprinkled here in Redwood, and half in Lake Merritt, and you should be there.”

“Well, Coach, of course I’d come back for that, but I hope to see you again before that.”

“But you never know, right? You never know.”

I said goodbye.

We ran northward toward Tilden in the rain, a smaller group going the extra distance, through greasy-slippery mud. Keith would approve, we thought out loud. I remembered how it felt to run my first 50-miler on this route in 2010, so discouraged because I clocked my head on a low-hanging branch and felt miserable. I almost dropped at the midway turn-around point in Tilden, but Tropical John Medinger was there and told me I might as well continue to the next aid station. Why not? Take it aid station to aid station. My time from that race, 8:31, is still my 50M PR.

Once we reached Inspiration Point—the place I ran repeatedly when my kids were babies, because it has a paved path prime for pushing a stroller—I said goodbye to my friends and made my way solo over the Berkeley ridge to return to my hotel. The last stretch followed the fire trail down Strawberry Canyon above the UC campus, where I first ran on dirt as a stressed-out grad student to feel some satisfaction and measure some progress when I felt so insecure about my plans for a journalism career. As always, it revealed a panoramic view of the bay, with the Campanile in the foreground and Mt. Tam and the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance.

The view from Strawberry Canyon of UC Berkeley, the Berkeley marina, and the Marin Headlands in the distance.

I thought to myself, I never felt these aches in my knee and lower back when I ran here before. I looked down at my muddy shins and shoes and felt love and gratitude for my body that keeps going, aches and all.

I still want to be like Alphonzo and Len when I grow up, as a runner and mentor for younger runners. I can keep going in my late 70s like them. But you never know, right? You never know.

Rest in peace, Keith.

The prologue and epilogue to that run

A lesson I learned from this trip: reach out to friends, even if you’ve drifted and you feel awkward due to the passage of time. Swallow your shyness—that feeling of “we’re not that close anymore, and they’re probably too busy”—and make an overture. What’s the worse that can happen, that they’re too busy or uninterested in getting together? At least you tried.

I decided not to rent a car and not Uber; instead, I asked friends for rides to and from the airport, and to and from my hotel. They were happy to oblige. The time in the car gave us time to talk.

My best friend from college picked me up Thursday from SFO, and I took her out to dinner. Then, on Friday morning, one of my closest friends, whom I used to run with weekly, picked me up from my hotel and took us to the center of Piedmont so we could run our old loop.

Driving along, I peppered Claudia with questions about mutual friends and neighbors, asking what so-and-so is doing now. When we drove past a house around the corner from my old house, I asked about the woman who lives there, Michelle, whose kids went to school with my kids. Claudia looked at me, shocked. “You didn’t know?”

She broke the news: Michelle died. She was walking on the sidewalk in front of Ikea on a sunny day, and a drunk driver veered off the frontage road and slammed into her, then drove away. She was hospitalized and on life support, in and out of a coma, for months until dying. The randomness and injustice of a hit-and-run fully hit me as I thought about her kids and our 4th of July gatherings at her house.

As Claudia and I ran our favorite three-mile loop, I felt dazzled by the beauty and timelessness of the century-old homes and their gardens, so grateful I raised my kids here. I wanted to express a giant thank you for that chapter of adulthood and for friends who supported me through challenging, uncertain times.

Afterward, I visited the mom of my son’s childhood best friend, and then my next-door neighbor, who was like a big sister to me.

My old house on the left, which we owned from 2000-2019, and my neighbor’s.

Catching up on their lives and their kids’ lives, I was reminded that: shit happens. Life usually doesn’t work out as planned. Divorce, career changes, and health crises challenge us to adapt. The future is only guaranteed to be unpredictable, which is partly why I relished seeing the neighborhood and regional parks little changed, and why I valued reconnecting with people in my past life.

I took a final opportunity Sunday morning to see two Bay Area people who are special to me. My 2016 Western States crew—Clare Abram and Errol “the Rocket” Jones—joined me for breakfast.

Crew reunion with Clare and Rocket.

Rocket soon had Clare and me in stitches laughing as he mimicked a grumpy Ann Trason telling him to pass or back off as he ran with her in the Vermont 100 in the late ’90s and apparently got under her competitive skin. He said he’s feeling like his old (younger) self as a runner and ready to conquer The Bear 100 this fall. He loaded up Clare with wisdom for when she runs the Wasatch 100. I reminded him of how he told me in 2015 at the start of Wasatch, “Sarah, honey, listen: It’ll be fun, until it’s not, and then it’ll be fun again!”

Running friendships are like that: You pick up where you left off, and the conversation just rolls like the miles.

I almost didn’t travel last weekend. It felt expensive, inconvenient, and indulgent. Imagine all I would have missed if I didn’t book that trip.

Thank you, Jennifer, for organizing Keith’s memorial run and for getting me into running 30 years ago!

Further reading and watching:

• A few years ago, I wrote an in-depth guide to trail running in Oakland for iRunFar; check it out here for guidance on East Bay runs and races.

• Watch this excellent five-minute documentary film produced by REI about Errol “The Rocket” Jones and the Bay Area Ridge Trail. His words, combined with the footage, will move you. I make a brief appearance midway in the short film as we run the trail above Berkeley.

• This recent post on heart health mentions Keith and talks about potentially life-saving steps you can take.

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