Fast Women: The man behind the Fast Women newsletter

Most of my recent photos of Parker have our cat and/or our kids in them, so here’s a photo from the 2008 Olympic Games. (Photo by Bob Ramsak, I think)

Finding a way forward without Parker

In case you missed last week’s newsletter, my husband, Parker Morse, passed away very unexpectedly a week ago. We still don’t know why it happened, and even though the reminders are constant, it hasn’t fully sunk in. Though I never publicly gave him any credit for it while he was alive—I don’t think he would have wanted that—he was central to any success this newsletter has had.

I thought it might be therapeutic to share a little more about him and the role he played in Fast Women. All of this is just one small part of who he was. We were together for 26 years and married for almost 17 of them. He was an incredible father and husband. Losing him in the way we did feels extremely unlucky, but we were so fortunate to have him in our lives at all.

I first crossed paths with Parker on the t-and-f@gac.edu listserv when I was in college. Email and the internet were new to me at the time, and the listserv was the way all the running nerds found each other. All the new members provided brief introductions, and we first connected over the fact that he went to college in my hometown (Amherst, Massachusetts), and I went to college near his (Phippsburg, Maine) and we competed in the same conference.

We must have been in touch in at least some form beyond that, because in June 1995, when we were both in Amherst, we met for the first time and went for a run together. (I wouldn’t have remembered the year, but our training logs are surprisingly good for fact checking. For the people who know Amherst, we ran in Amethyst Brook, and his log notes that as predicted, we got lost.) The run was fine, but I wouldn’t say we hit it off. As far as I remember, we were not in touch again for another four and a half years.

In early 2000, I was living in New York City working on New York Road Runners’ magazine and website. I remember reading in a Runner’s World editor’s letter that Parker had qualified for the Boston Marathon. Aside from my co-workers, I didn’t know other people my age working in the running industry, so I decided to reach out to him to congratulate him, thinking that he might be a good business connection to have.

He told me he was going to be in New York for the Millrose Games, so we arranged to do a run around Central Park and then go to the meet together. (And I remember we got most of the way to Madison Square Garden before I realized that I left my media credential back at NYRR’s headquarters.) This second encounter went a lot better, but I was under the impression that he was in a long-term relationship, so I didn’t realize until after the fact that it was our first date.

For a while, we alternated spending weekends in New York or Emmaus, Pennsylvania, where Runner’s World was based. It was during this time that I decided to start my own women’s running website, because I was fed up with how lopsided so much of the running coverage and conversation was. These were the days of dial-up internet, and there was so little online that it didn’t take much to make a contribution. I remember throwing around names with him in my apartment and him suggesting Fast Women. I couldn’t think of anything better, so I went with it.

Some time after that, NYRR bought Fast Women from me, we made a similar men’s site, and running those two sites became my job. Parker was Runner’s World’s first “webmaster” and we traveled to a lot of the same events. He would report on them and I considered myself to be more of a photographer at that point. (Again, the bar was low.)

Parker always got a kick out of this photo I took of him at the finish of the 2001 B.A.A. Half Marathon. That’s Bill Rodgers in the background and if I recall correctly, Parker only beat him because Rodgers started the race late.

I was not cut out to live in a major city long term, so in 2001, I moved back to Amherst, and later that year, Parker left Runner’s World and joined me. Even back then, he was concerned about the practicality of trying to make a living in the declining magazine industry. He had been a Russian major in college (speaking Russian not particularly well was something else we had in common), and he started taking prerequisites so he could get a master’s in computer science.

But even as he built a career outside of running, he stayed involved in the sport in a variety of ways. As I continued traveling to cover events for NYRR, he took on freelance assignments and joined me at a lot of them. He got a cool gig helping with the IAAF’s (now World Athletics’) coverage of its own championships. He traveled the world and covered two Olympics and six world championships before deciding to step away, because our lives became too complicated after we had kids.

We spent 12 years moving around for each other’s education and jobs, which was a challenging balance at times. When we moved to Medford, Massachusetts, so he could attend graduate school at Tufts, it became harder for me to work remotely for New York Road Runners, and I eventually stopped. When I decided to attempt to make a living as a college coach, he didn’t complain about uprooting our lives so I could work all hours and barely get paid.

We got married in 2009, but I don’t consider that to be a significant moment in our relationship timeline, because we had already been together for a long time. The big turning point came when we had kids. Because I am a twin and Parker’s father is a twin, I used to tell everyone I was going to have twins. But we were shocked when we found out I was right. (Especially since our children are identical, and fraternal twins are what runs in families.)

I wouldn’t have had kids with someone who wasn’t ready to be an equal partner in everything. But having twins kind of forced that—it was all hands on deck at all times. Neither of us previously had much experience with kids, so we weren’t naturals, but we figured it out. We started out parenting the way we thought we were supposed to parent. But when it became apparent that our kids needed us to take a different approach, we threw out nearly everything we thought we knew and figured out what worked.

Parker and our kids do some tummy time.

About nine years ago, it became clear that we needed one parent who was able to drop everything and be available at a moment’s notice. Because of Parker’s commute at the time and our income differences, there was no question that was going to be me. I was doing a lot of freelance work for Runner’s World (kind of full circle, given our origins), and I stepped back from that. In 2019, when my schedule allowed me to take on a little more, I re-started Fast Women in a new form, after a roughly 13-year hiatus. On weekdays, I worked, but I remained the more available parent. And on weekends, when I put in the most time on this newsletter, Parker was in charge our children.

He was regularly one of the only dads supervising girl scouts outings, he became the leader of the 4H club for a stretch, and as our kids got a little older, he excelled at adopting their interests as his own, no matter how obscure they seemed. Three days before everything turned upside down, he took our kids to the Mystic Aquarium for some very specific reasons, even though we have another aquarium much closer to home. He learned all about vocaloid in preparation for Hatsune Miku’s North American tour. He watched the first eight episodes of The Amazing Digital Circus with our kids, and bought tickets to see the finale with them in June.

He could have an intelligent conversation about nearly anything. He loved being roasted by our children. He still read to one of them nearly every night, and the two of them would regularly make book references that I did not understand. In more recent years, we have been through a lot of tough stuff as a family, but the four of us were always on the same page. Much of the time, it felt like us against a world that wasn’t evolving as quickly as it should.

Even though running was the thing that brought Parker and me together, and we were both still involved in the sport in our own ways, it wasn’t something we talked about all that often (unless I needed to vent about something work-related). I would occasionally call him in to join me when something big was happening, though. Most recently, we watched together as Sebastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha broke 2:00 at the London Marathon (after briefly pausing history in the making because his oven timer went off).

Parker didn’t do a lot of work in the sport anymore, but the one commitment he held onto was his Boston Marathon volunteer job, which he had for longer than I can remember. From the basement of the Copley Square Hotel, he and others would receive information from the bike spotters on the course and relay it to the broadcast team. He put in some extra work in advance this year and was pleased with how smoothly things went on race day.

Before we had kids, whatever job I was doing, he was always willing to pitch in. During my eliterunning.com years (a site I started after I left NYRR), he learned to take pretty good running photos with my old camera. And when I was placed on bed rest during my pregnancy and the school I was working for refused to hire anyone else to help run practice, Parker would go over to campus to check on the team here and there.

After we had kids, he had no direct involvement with the work that I did, but his indirect contributions made it all possible. I appreciated that he tolerated being married to someone who has never known how to turn off work at the end of the day, and he always treated my career just as seriously as his own, despite the fact that his job was much more important for our financial stability.

I’ve had some (non-life-threatening) health struggles in recent years, and they required Parker to pitch in more on weekdays. When he did so, I’d make him promise it wasn’t going to get him in trouble at work. Though I wish he had had more down time in his life, in retrospect, I’m glad he did as much as he did, because it meant spending more quality time with our kids, who couldn’t have adored him more.

I created this newsletter so I could highlight other people’s accomplishments, so it makes me a little uncomfortable to put so much of myself into this one. But it’s hard to tell Parker’s story without also telling some of mine. Having seen how the internet has evolved over time, both of us had pulled way back from putting a lot of personal information out there, especially when it comes to our kids. But it helps me to put some of this in writing.

I have no idea what our lives are going to look like going forward. Doing what we did felt overwhelming at times with two parents. It is completely unimaginable to me how it’s going to work with just me. My own parents always seemed to have everything together all of the time, so it’s been a surprise to arrive at adulthood and realize that I still have no idea what I’m doing most of the time. And that’s especially the case now.

My two sisters, my mother, and Parker’s family have been incredible throughout all of this. And so many people have offered to help in some way. I am so fortunate on that front, but I also know that I’m going to need to build more of a support network. Between the pandemic, my inability to run in recent years, my health challenges, and other factors, my world has gotten really small. I’ve been fortunate to know many wonderful people throughout my life, and I interact with many lovely people online, but I don’t think I will offend anyone when I say that I have no friends that actually live in my town. (One of our kids said this week, “Wow, you and Dad used to know a lot of people!”)

Thank you to everyone who has reached out. I am so touched. In normal times, keeping up with all of my inboxes is overwhelming, but I usually at least attempt to respond to most things. Right now, it’s not possible, which is a nice problem to have. But thank you for your messages. I have seen them and I appreciate them.

I have no immediate plans for Fast Women to end, and I will let you know if that changes, but as you can probably tell, I have a lot to figure out.

I know this isn’t the most uplifting thing to read on a Monday morning, but I truly do hope you all have the best week possible.

Alison

P.S. For those asking, we have launched a GoFundMe in an attempt to help our children have a more secure future.