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. He named his own blog, Flashes of Panic, after a cryptic quote (“A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic”) from a Russian-born writer I hadn’t 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 a 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.