RIP, PJM

This blog, My Track Record, came into existence almost exactly 20 years ago.

I owe its origins mostly to three people.

Alison Wade (of Fast Women fame) launched a small, friendly online community of running blogs (running-blogs.com) in 2004.

Scott Douglas was one of her early bloggers. It was his posts, above all others, that convinced me that a running blog didn’t need to be a dull slog through every step of the morning 10-miler and every ingredient of the subsequent breakfast.

After following Scott for a couple of months, I emailed Alison to ask if I too could be part of her blogging community, and, in her typically friendly manner, she said yes right away. I wrote my first post, and another one the next day (this was before I had kids), and things continued from there.

Eventually I realized that a third person had also enabled my entry into the blogosphere: Alison’s partner, Parker Morse, who steadfastly supported her in her many running-related projects.

I had known of Parker since about 1993. Initially he was just a punchline in my existence as a cross-country runner. I competed for the mighty Ephmen of Williams College, while he was the fastest runner on the godawful squad of our archrival, Amherst. That, combined with his preppy-sounding name and his habit of racing in a bandana, made him highly mockable in my juvenile mind.

Just a few years later, he became Runner’s World‘s first webmaster. In the early days of the world-wide web, that seemed like a dream job; now he was probably one of the coolest runners on the planet! I still didn’t actually know him, though.

Finally, in 2006-2007, as he left the occasional blog comment and answered the occasional technical question about Movable Type (the WordPress alternative on which running-blogs.com ran), I got to interact with him a bit. He seemed like a smart, amiable running nerd, and I got the sense that his skills and interests went well beyond the world of running; his own blog, Flashes of Panic, took its name from a cryptic quote (“A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic”) by a Russian-born writer I had never heard of. But his Internet presence was not loud enough to give me a strong impression. He signed his messages with a programmer’s brevity — pjm — and in Alison’s posts she simply called him P.

For me, Parker’s life finally came into full view this week when Alison wrote a long post about him. Tragically, the impetus for that post was his sudden death from an unexpected cardiac event at age 52. My age.

Alison’s post, as well as others such as one from former Runner’s World colleague Mark Remy, confirmed what I had long suspected: Parker was a great guy. Despite my idiotic undergraduate speculations, beneath that bandana was a kind, warm, brilliant character.

Rest in peace, Parker J. Morse.