Long Train Running: A Chicago Marathon Story | Chapter 4 — Why We Run
Jim Von Handorf ran marathons for the same reasons he climbed mountains: to escape and to conquer.
A career fireman in Nashua, New Hampshire, Jim was an outdoorsman to the fullest. He climbed mountains, bouldered, swam, bicycled and ran. His daughter, Amy explains that her dad could never really sit still. That he had a constant need to just go, go, go. He grew up in a small, Boston apartment with a lot of people. The bustling tightness of the city drove him to get out. It was always in his nature to escape. He was into Thoreau and Kerouac. He needed space. So he headed into the wild. His mountaineering expeditions he made with his buddies took him to peaks all over the country where he would test his mettle against the elements and his own limits.
He even showed esophageal cancer that he was not one to go down easy.
When Ali, Casey, and I were in college down in central Illinois, we lived in this great place just a block off campus. It was situated at the top of a hill overlooking the town smack dab in the middle of Greek Row, snuggled between the Beta and SAE houses—a modest, three-bedroom house with a front porch and back patio, and yard that made it ideal for barbecues and other themed or not themed parties.