Sometimes, We All Finish In Last Place

"Never give up, no matter what. Even if you get last place--finish."

 --long distance Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, P.O.W. survivor

It’s the very last place in the world I wanted to be.

In last place. I was the caboose. The guy who brings up the rear. The one left behind at the tail end of a race, as everyone else speeds ahead.

It happened last month on a warm Saturday morning. I was one of about 4,000 bicycle riders. We departed at 7 am from Babson College in Wellesley on a journey all the way to the Bourne Bridge, at the foot of Cape Cod.  I was so excited to start the day, to be part of the Pan Mass Challenge, the largest and most successful athletic fundraiser in the country.  It was my tenth year and ride.  I was an old pro: what could go wrong?

But then just three miles from the start, the long, narrow steel cable that controlled my shifter, that allowed me to seamlessly move up or down among 24 gears: it snapped in two. My bike was permanently stuck in one of the hardest gears.  No way I could ride 85 miles like that.  As I mashed the pedals up and down, pushed with all my might, riders began to pass me, first tens, then hundreds and I slipped further and further and further back.

The good news: I came upon a volunteer bike mechanic on the side of the road who said he could fix it.  The bad news: it took an hour and fifteen minutes, so by the time I got back on my navy blue 1997 Raleigh, I was solo, with almost no one else left on the route. That’s a really humbling place to be. 

There’s a cycling title for the last rider. I was the lantern rouge, the “red lantern”, like the light hung from the very back of a long freight train. 

Last place.

I felt like the 1962 New York Mets baseball team, who in their debut pennant race, lost an abysmal 120 games out of 160 played, finishing sixty games out of first place.  As I pedaled away and the hot sun rose high in the sky, I was mostly by myself, seeing other riders far in the distance, never able to fully catch up to them. I was tempted to plant myself on a personal pity-potty, go all “woe is me” but then I reconsidered.

Because in life, the truth is that someone always has to be last, at the back, at the rear of the line. You can’t have a winner without others losing. We can’t all be gold medal recipients. And to just compete, to try one’s best, to strive, to struggle, to leave it all on the field no matter what the outcome: that absolutely matters. Maybe more than winning.

Maybe being in first place isn’t everything. 

It reminds me of the story of a 46-year-old amateur runner named Red Hilton, from East Bridgewater, who last April competed in her very first Boston Marathon. She ran for a cause and through her courageous effort to complete that 26.2-mile race, she raised more than $6,000 for the Boston Medical Center. And she was in last place. She was the very last runner, out of more than 33,000, to cross the finish line on Boylston Street. She did so more than nine hours after leaving Hopkinton.

To me, that absolutely makes her a winner, a big winner, a brave winner, who stuck to it and finally made it all the way.  There to greet her, in the chill of a spring evening was her son, who embraced her with a big hug and was so doubt very proud of his Mom.

A wise teacher of religion long ago proclaimed that the first shall be last and the last shall be first; that anyone who wants to be first in the eyes of God, must go to the very back of the line, in humility and service to others. In a world that is forever lionizing first-place finishers—the very rich, the multiple award winners, the pompous self-promoters, the selfie-taking celebs convinced that they are “all that”—it’s important to remember the rest of the folks in line. The average, the low key, the humble, the servants, the poor, the quiet, all the folks who just show up and suit up and participate every day.      

At day’s end I finally rode into Bourne nine and a half hours after I left Wellesley. I wasn’t last.  After showering, I walked back out to the finish line and saw a handful of folks waiting and they told me there was one final rider about to arrive. He’d started 12 hours earlier. They lined up with big smiles, ready to applaud him when he finished.

The last shall be first. The first shall be last.  

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