Mountain man, running "relation"
trace, verb (3rd person present singular traces, present participle tracing, past traced, past participle traced); find somebody or something: to find out where somebody or something is or who or what somebody or something was. Encarta World English Dictionary.
Where I come from, "tracing" has a rather different meaning than that given in most dictionaries. In Hiberno-English, it denotes the practice of amateur genealogy, and the person who is a good "tracer", who can differentiate "close relations" from "distant relations", is much admired. Well, was much admired is more accurate because the notion of kinship is no longer what it was and the skill of being able to parse a family tree is regarded as old fashioned today.
All that's by way of admitting that I found it hard to say what my relationship to my mother's sister daughter is until I asked my mother, a tracer of note, and she quickly let me know that Patricia Callinan is my first cousin. That's tracing 101. Patricia's husband, Tommy Blackburn, is "not related" to me, as the tracer put it, not in the blood sense, anyway, but we are related in that we both love running and I've just learned that Tommy Blackburn is a remarkable runner indeed.
Last weekend, he was in Anchorage, Alaska, representing Ireland in the mountain running world championships. Now, mountain running is one of those sports I'd never heard of until a few days ago, but it's an impressive discipline. Last Sunday, the runners began the 11.5km course near the base of the Alyeska Tramway, climbed to 680m twice and then ran down to the base of Max's Mountain before returning over the Tramway.
The Italians are the world masters of mountain running and they've won the championships for the past 19 years — every year since the championships were inaugurated, in fact. Last weekend was no different. The 26-year-old Marco De Gasperi led his countrymen home in a blistering 50:29. And Tommy Blackburn? He finished in 63:07, which is a very respectable time when one considers that he is 11 years older than De Gasperi and he began mountain running only three years ago.
My mother, the tracer, pointed out that Tommy's granduncle, Jim Fahy, emigrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century and ending up in the US long jump team the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, where the talk of the Games was 23-year-old distance runner Paavo Nurmi of Finland, who won the 10,000m and 8,000-meter cross-country, took a third gold in the team cross-country and silver in the 5,000m.
"It's in the blood", says my mother and if that's true, we can expect to hear lots more about Patricia and Tommy's children: Thomas (10), Niamh (8) and Grainne (6).
Diarist of the day: Chistopher Isherwood, 28 September 1959"Last night I went to Elsa Lancaster's . Oh the horror of TV! It is so utterly, utterly inferior, yet just enough to keep you enslaved, entrapped, on the lower levels of consciousness — for a whole lifetime, if necessary. It is a bondage like that of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott."
