Months ago, I wrote about why I run. With that thought in mind, I started training for the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati, hoping to finish a marathon in less than 4 hours for the first time and knock Ohio off my list.

I finally crossed the finish line. I remember scrambling to find the bag pick-up location so I could pull my cell phone out of my back pack and call my father.

“I did it,” I said. “I made it. 3:51.”

“That’s great!” he exclaimed. “Wow!”

I thought of him, and what he would be doing at that exact moment we were talking, and I pictured him in his garage, cutting this part, or sawing this piece, or doing any one of 10 million things he is able to do with his hands. I pictured him building a toy train for my godson Aidan in that garage, or re-flooring his boat in the driveway, or moving dirt from here to there with his Bobcat in the yard.

People say the sky is the limit. My father would disagree, saying that a little scaffolding, a few power tools and some drill bits alone would allow him to build a hand-crafted wooden spiral staircase past them.

Raised in the brutally cold and unforgiving backwoods of Grand Rapids, MN, my father is the classic man’s man. Growing up, he hunted, fished, played every single sport imaginable and built big things out of little things or nothing at all with his hands. It’s not that he was always working; he was always doing. There’s a reason his number of surgeries is in the double digits.

People speak of the eye of the storm. For my father, that eye is his children. He is an old school worker bee modeled after a tornado that rarely rests.

But he rested when my sister Stephanie got married. He rested when my brother Lucas hugged him goodbye and moved to AZ, and when I called him from OH, moments after my run, I pictured him stopping, taking off his work gloves and picking up the phone.

“I love you so much,” he would say, ending the call after we had finished talking about the race.

“I love you too dad,” I responded. When I heard the click of him hanging up the phone, I said “I love you too dad,” a second time, knowing that I was sending that emotion off into nothingness, into space, into infinity.

“Really?” I asked. His slew of operations, injuries and accidents over a very physical lifetime came to mind. Then there was his slight limp, and the slower pace with which he was now getting out of a chair, or off the couch.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I want to do one more race. Just one.”

I didn’t doubt that he wanted to, or could. I just didn’t know if his body would hold up.