A few years ago, Whidbey Island resident Matt Simms and a running pal made a vow. The men promised to run every single day, and they were sincere enough to seal the pact with a handshake.
Since then, Simms has faithfully honored his pledge. Despite occasional aches and illnesses, foul and sometimes freezing weather, a demanding work schedule and all kinds of other inconveniences, nothing has kept him from a daily jog of at least 15 minutes.
Not even a little thing like getting sent to Iraq.
The 37-year-old Simms, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves, was activated in January and a month later arrived in Iraq, where he serves as an intelligence officer at a base near downtown Baghdad. He is scheduled to remain “in country,” as the military says, until January 2007.
His tour of duty has taken him to a place of long hours, continual strain and periodic danger. From one day to the next, little in his life resembles the world he left behind.
Little, that is, except his running.
“Back home, running was kind of a common reference point during the day, and now I use it the same way here,” said Simms, speaking by telephone from Baghdad last week. “No matter what has happened, no matter how any particular day has gone, I can look at my watch and know that a little later I’ll be going out on a 30-minute run. It makes it feel normal to get my running clothes on.”
The decision to run every day, he said, was done to provide structure and discipline to his regimen.
“For me, mentally, there’s always a hurdle to starting a run,” Simms said. “Getting out the door is difficult for me a lot of times. Even tonight, there’s going to be a point where I’m not going to feel like a run at all. And if I skip one day it can turn into three days, and then all of a sudden I haven’t run for a week.
“But if I have to run every day, then it’s not an issue. It’s a tool for me to train consistently where otherwise I might talk myself out of it. And I can always do 15 minutes.”
The most challenging time in his consecutive-day string came shortly after Simms arrived overseas. His unit went first to the desert in northern Kuwait for a final training phase, and the soldiers spent “the better part of a week out in the middle of absolutely nowhere,” he said. Simms had no running gear and no way to shower when he was done. Undeterred, he did half-mile laps around the temporary camp each night in boots and a T-shirt, getting in his 15 minutes and convincing his comrades “that I was absolutely insane.”
Since moving on into Iraq, Simms has been stationed at a base that was once one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. It is a large compound, walled and gated, and he can run for hours without retracing his steps.
Rarely, though, does he measure spare time in hours. He works seven days a week, usually in stretches of 18 or 19 hours, “so running is something you trade sleep for,” he said. Once he got a half-day off and celebrated with a vigorous 18-mile workout.
During his jaunts, there are sometimes “moments that make you realize it’s not Everett,” he said. It might be the sound of the Islamic call to prayer, coming through loudspeakers from the many mosques around Baghdad. Or, more menacingly, the occasional attacks by insurgents on the base where Simms is stationed.
Twice in three months, his running route was bombarded – the first time by rockets, the second by mortars – just hours after he had done his workout. Normally, though, the site “is quite calm and peaceful,” and in places he can look over the wall and see children playing soccer in nearby neighborhoods.
Simms, a onetime member of the U.S. Naval Academy cross country team, has finished about a dozen marathons, with a best time of just under 2 hours, 41 minutes at the 2002 Seattle Marathon. He has also done a few triathlons and seven ultra-marathons of either 50 kilometers (31 miles) or 50 miles.
His most recent marathon was an event called the Boston Marathon/Iraq, an event sanctioned by the Boston Athletic Association and held at a base outside the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. Despite a reduced training schedule – about 25 miles a week, down from a usual weekly quota of 50 miles stateside – and race-day temperatures of around 100 degrees, Simms won the event, outdistancing some 250 other competitors to win in 2:53:35.
Hardly a world-class time, of course, but not bad considering the conditions.
“In Runner’s World (magazine), you don’t find marathon training on a 25-mile (a week) plan,” Simms said. “I knew my training would run out at about mile 20 or 22, and that’s just about where it ran out.”
Still, Simms got a winner’s wreath of genuine Massachusetts Bay laurel. The Iraq race, he said, “is completely synchronized with the real Boston Marathon. They gave us the same exact paraphernalia, including T-shirts, bags and race numbers, and they had the same banner (at the start/finish line) that they use in Boston.”
As Simms looks ahead to January, when he will return home to his wife and two sons, he also anticipates training again on some of his favorite Everett-area routes. One is a set of trails between Langley and Freeland known locally as the Metcalf Woods. Another wooded path follows an old railroad bed from south Everett to the Mukilteo waterfront. The third is the steep St. Andrew’s hill in Mukilteo’s Harbour Pointe.
“In Iraq, they really don’t have any deep woods and they don’t have any long, steep hills,” Simms said. “Those are things I miss a great deal.”
In the meantime, he works out when he can, where he can, using a daily run to help break the drama and tension of a soldier’s life in Iraq.
“Fifteen minutes a day is my running credo,” he said. “And I’ve never missed at least a 15-minute run.”
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