A strong wind sent rain cascading across the track at Roberto Clemente Complex in Carolina, Puerto Rico. We shifted our seats higher into the stands seeking protection, but soon had to flee below. Lightning flashed, too close for comfort. Thunder rattled our eardrums. I began to wonder whether the decision to schedule the Fifteenth World Masters Athletics Championships for Puerto Rico at the beginning of the hurricane season was the wisest possible move.

But race officials shrugged off the storm as a temporary distraction. "We're projecting a 30-minute delay," one informed me when I checked in at the Call Room for my race, the 2000 meter steeplechase. And their estimate proved close. I had to run in the rain, but I was far from top competitive form and didn't care. I would have gotten wet in the water jump anyway. I did pass one competitor who slipped going into the water jump, but otherwise I was happy to paddle around in the rear just so I could say I ran my fourteenth World meet.

Do the arithmetic-fifteen World Masters Championships minus fourteen appearances-and you'll see that I've missed only one. If I had to list one disappointment in my running career, that would be it. Ironically, my lone miss was in Puerto Rico twenty years earlier. I had run the first four World Masters Championships in Canada, Sweden, Germany and New Zealand, but preparing for the fifth, I pulled a calf muscle limiting my ability to perform. A medallist in each of the previous Championships, I didn't feel like limping around in the back of the pack. Pride caused me to skip the show.

A decade later when organizers sought to determine which athletes had competed in each of the first ten Championships, my name appeared on the list. No, I felt obliged to tell them, I entered in 1983, but failed to show. In Japan when the athletes who had gone Ten-for-Ten were invited on stage to take a bow, I could only stand among those applauding.

Appearing Year One

There have been other races where I appeared for Year One, but failed to continue on a regular basis. The Chicago Marathon, now in its twenty-sixth year. The Blueberry Stomp in Plymouth, Indiana. The River Bank Run in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Probably several others. I first ran the Boston Marathon in 1959 and have run that race nineteen times, most recently at its 100th running in 1996. If I had started a few years earlier and been more consistent, conceivably I could now be near breaking John A. Kelley's record of sixty-one appearances in that race.

But that's hindsight, and perhaps it is fair that we can't predict our futures. Would I really have wanted to obsessively run Boston or any other race for decades just to get a single paragraph on the sixth page of the sports section of the Boston Globe, or any other newspaper? Dammit: yes, I would!

Departing Puerto Rico at the end of the Championships, I thought forward to the next World Masters Championships in Spain in 2005 and Italy in 2007. Perhaps if I keep showing up, at some point I will outlast all other pretenders and be able to say I have run in more World Masters Championships than anyone else. That may be a test of endurance to motivate me for some time to come.

Hal Higdon is a Senior Writer for Runner's World. This article originally appeared as a Bell Lap column for that magazine's online edition.