I wrote a column once about a guy who ran a marathon backwards. Scott McQueeney warmed up, stretched out, and backpedaled for 26.2 miles in the Portland Marathon.
The muscles in his legs cramped.
People jeered at him.
He even fell once.
A woman in the crowd locked onto him as he passed her, mid-race, and began heckling him. The spectator wanted to know why McQueeney was trying to showboat and be so macho during the race.
“I bet my daughter that she didn't have cancer,” McQueeney shouted as he passed. “And I lost.”
The woman cried.
It’s been a tough week. Friday feels like a finish line. I don’t know why, but I found myself thinking about McQueeney, whose life got interrupted in a way that still sticks with me.
Scott McQueeney struggled with substance addiction as a young man. By the time I dipped into his world in 2004, he and his wife, Vivian, had raised four children and owned a home in Oregon City. McQueeney got a second chance to get things right. He kicked drugs and alcohol. He got sober, went to 12-step meetings, found running, and started up with marathons.
Heard of the Badwater Ultramarathon?
It’s a beast. The foot race starts in Death Valley and ends at Mount Whitney. It’s 135 miles, with significant elevation changes, in soaring July temperatures. It’s been called the toughest run on the planet.
Temperatures eclipse 125 degrees.
The elevation gain is a bitch.
Since the inception of the race in 1987, fewer than 1,000 people have finished. McQueeney is one of them. He attacked it in 2000, ran through the finish line, and kept on going. No doubt, he pivoted his adrenaline addiction in a healthier direction. His family rallied around him. Running was a liferaft. It beat the mood swings and self-defeating, antisocial behavior.
Scott’s youngest child, a daughter named Shannon, is an important part of this story. She attended the 12-step meetings with her dad, sat by his side, and when she got terrible news as a 17-year-old high school student, he stepped up for her, too.
Shannon was diagnosed with Burkitt’s lymphoma — a rare, life-threatening cancer. She asked her father if she was going to die.
“Everyone dies,” he told her.
“He was so strong for me,” Shannon told me all those years ago. “He went to every test and every treatment.”
Before Shannon received her diagnosis, she found herself alone with her dad in the hospital, awaiting test results on two large cysts doctors had found in her body. As a father of three girls, I can’t shake the scene.
“Are you nervous?” her dad asked.
“Yes.”
“About the test?”
“Yes.”
“Are you afraid you have cancer?”
“Yes.”
Her father made her a bet. If she didn’t have cancer, Shannon would go home and do the dishes. If she did, “I will run a marathon backwards,” he promised her.
Scott McQueeney kept his word. His daughter battled cancer. He ran that marathon, backward, in her honor. It’s a reminder to the rest of us that when we see someone doing something that makes no sense at all, maybe it’s because we don’t have the best vantage point.
The final turn in McQueeney’s life broke my heart. He was running a 33-mile race in Oregon in 2004. He crossed the finish line and collapsed. McQueeney died at the foot of a maple tree on a trail in Corvallis.
He was 47.
“Sudden heart arrhythmia,” the medical examiner said.
When I met his wife and four children, they’d just returned from the wooded trail where Scott died. They’d retraced the final mile of his life. One by one, they made their way down the muddy path, stepping where he’d stepped, seeing what he saw in the final minutes.
An old wooden bridge.
One final right turn.
Then, the finish line. Race officials said Scott smiled as he crossed. Then, he fell to the ground. His wife, Vivian, told me: “He was 10 feet tall and bulletproof.”
Then, he was gone.
The McQueeney family stayed strong. I’ll never forget that. They pulled together and invited me into their home. They let me poke around Scott’s office as I prepared to write a column about him. There was a rock collection on a shelf, a jar filled with change on the desk, and running medals dangled off a coat rack in the corner. He was a web-page designer.
His son, Tyler, told me, “This was his space.”
I sat in his chair and opened a journal sitting on the desk.
“Quitting never entered my mind,” Scott wrote in one entry.
“Keep passing it on if you want to keep it,” he penned in another.
I parachute in and out of people’s lives for a living. It’s an absurd existence, being present for only a highlight or a lowlight, then being charged with filling in the gaps. I feel an incredible obligation when someone dies to get things just right. To capture their essence and honor their memory. There’s something beautiful about Scott McQueeney’s short life.
He lived deep.
He loved hard.
He refused to quit.
“Everyone dies,” he told his daughter, but what he really was trying to tell her was “Make certain you live.”
McQueeney was filled with energy, adventure, and eccentricity. He was an adrenaline junkie, for sure. But he had something to teach us, didn’t he? He was expressive, authentic, and beautifully imperfect. Most of all, he was alive and made those he cared about feel important. I left the McQueeney house that day feeling as though I knew Scott like a neighbor.
I wrote a column and moved on.
I’ve often wondered what became of 17-year-old Shannon, who was in remission when her dad died. I tracked her down this week. Turns out she’s married with two children of her own. She’s cancer-free.
Ryker is 5 and just started kindergarten.
McKayla, 13, is a black belt in taekwondo.
Shannon is a runner.
Anyone surprised by that?
Her husband, Jon, is a contractor who builds decks. He lost his mother around the same time Scott died. Jon told me on Friday, “We joke that maybe they set Shannon and me up from above.”
Scott McQueeney died young, but that’s not what I’ll remember most. He seized his second chance with both hands and left his children with so much of himself.
The guy ran a marathon backward?!?
Hearing why made a stranger cry?!?
I don’t know if you needed a human interest story today. I needed to tell one. A sniper on a rooftop. The umpteenth school shooting. The world feels like a complicated, divided place, at times.
In the end, the good stuff is still out there. Regular people pick themselves up and pull together, especially amid tragedy. Scott McQueeney made good on his bet with his daughter. He reminded her, “Keep going.”
She never stopped listening.
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John, Please don’t take this as an insult because I mean it as a compliment, but sometimes I think the world would be a better place had you spent your career writing exclusively about people instead of sports
You have an incredible gift when it comes to this stuff
Ah, man, there you go again. Friday morning and my wife wants me out caulking her new greenhouse. But I'm trying to get through a "human interest" piece and I can't see the screen. Good to know, after yet another insane week, that my heart can still be touched. Thanks.