For them, competition is secondary to bonding

Kevin Cowherd
The Baltimore Sun
August 30, 2001

Copyright (c) 2001 The Baltimore Sun Company
Record Number: 0108300158
Used by permission.

THIS IS A story about a father and son who have found a unique way of bonding, although with a minimum of heavy lifting, as we shall see.

It's about Keith Gallagher and his son, Keith Daniel Gallagher, who are training for a triathlon, specifically, the Dewey Beach Sprint Triathlon, scheduled for Sept. 15 in that Delaware coastal town. This triathlon involves a half-mile swim in the ocean, followed by a 16-mile bike ride, followed by - if they haven't taken you away on a stretcher - a 3 1/2 -mile run. It is, therefore, a scaled-down version of the more celebrated Ironman triathlon, where competitors swim 2 1/2 miles in the ocean, bike 100-plus miles and finish with a full marathon (26.6 miles), after which they spend the next six months coughing up most of their internal organs. But the attitude of the Gallaghers going into the Dewey Beach triathlon is not exactly Marine Corps, feel-the-burn, push-through-the-pain stuff.

In fact, if they were any more laid back, they'd each show up at the starting line with a recliner and a bag of Doritos. "We're not in it for the competition at all," says Keith Daniel. "We're just in it for something to do." "I'd love to finish dead last arm-in-arm with my son," adds his dad, smiling. Boy, it's sickening the way some people get so wrapped up in that whole winning-is-the-only-thing business, isn't it?

Keith Gallagher, 47, is a father of four and a professor of computer science at Loyola College for the past 12 years. He has shoulder-length silver hair and a beard and a diamond earring, and on the day I met him, he was dressed in a blue Hotel Alcatraz T-shirt and shorts and looked like someone on his way to Woodstock. Keith Daniel is 17 and entering his senior year at Catonsville High, a serious-looking, handsome kid who loves the theater and has had the lead in his school's musicals the past three years. The two have been training for this triathlon since June. But, clearly, ne ither one is killing himself here. When they first started, they'd bike or swim or run for 15 minutes at a clip. Now they're up to 30 minutes, which is not exactly boot camp at Parris Island.

Still, it's obvious that the quiet satisfaction of spending time together is what fuels them, not the prospect of outdoing each other in exhausting workouts. "He could smoke me in the pool, but he doesn't," says Keith Daniel. "I could outrun him, but I don't."

When I caught up with them the other day at their home near the Loyola campus, they were sitting on the couch, planning that day's training session. As usual, it degenerated into a typically intense squabble about split times, drafting strategies, nutritional supplements, etc. Yeah, right.

Keith: "What do you wanna do?"

Keith Daniel, yawning: "I don't care."

K: "You wanna swim?"

KD: "Sure."

K: "Unless you want to do something else?"

KD: "No, swimming's fi ne."

K: "You sure?"

At this point, of course, it was all I could do not to scream: Guys, guys, guys ... can't we stop the bickering? Can't one of you bend a little bit?

"We have no idea how to train," the older Keith said at one point.

"How does one train to be in a marathon?" Keith Daniel mused. "You just run, right?"

"This is lifetime stuff," the older Keith said of their training regimen. "If you're tired and feel like going home, no one's going to yell at you."

Keith Gallagher is a strong swimmer who hits the pool "five or six days a week." But the coming ocean swim in the triathlon will be a challenge, he says, if for no other reason than "there's no line at the bottom to tell if you`re going straight." He started swimming 13 years ago because, as he says, "I come from a long line of people who died young," mainly of heart disease. He also has some experience in the triathlon, having finished one in Australia a few years ago when he was there on a sabbatical.

As you might ima gine, though, Gallagher was not exactly driven to set a course record that day in Canberra. His swimming and biking times, he says, were OK. But throughout the running portion, he apparently maintained the same brisk pace as a man with a Chevy engine block strapped to his back. Of the 200 or so people in the field, he says, "I finished next-to-last, in front of some lady who was as wide as she was tall."

"I don't remember my time," he adds. Which is probably a good thing, since about the only people left when he finished were the clean-up crew.

In any event, the Dewey Beach triathlon is just the latest in a long line of things the Gallaghers have done together over the years. They have even bonded in - how many fathers and sons can say this? - ballet, having appeared together in three productions of The Nutcracker and one of Coppelia. They have also gone hang-gliding together, and scuba-dived off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Keith was Keith Daniel's baseball coach when the boy was younger, and to this day they play music together, Keith on the guitar and Keith Daniel on trumpet and vocals as they do covers of, among other songs, old Chicago tunes.

When I left them the other day, they were preparing to do laps in the pool at the new Loyola Fitness and Aquatic Center across from their home.

"You ready?" the elder Keith asked.

"Sure," said Keith Daniel.

"You wanna use flippers?"

"Sure."

Oh, yeah, you could definitely see that the pressure of their coming triathlon was starting to get to them.

Especially when, right before jumping into the pool, Keith Gallagher revealed the mantra that will form their core strategy at Dewey Beach: "If you go slow enough, you can finish."

Tell me that slogan won't end up on a T-shirt someday.