The Ingram-Roberts crew was in its race-watching place, just north of Peachtree Battle Avenue, but this Fourth of July brought an unusual face to the usual spot. Ferma Ingram, who’s 76 and a runner of nearly 40 Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Races, was standing with his wife Joan and his sister Blanche Roberts as the first runners flashed past Saturday.
Faithful readers will recall the Ingrams and Robertses from Peachtrees past. We met them in 2002, and we renewed acquaintances in 2011. They have their routine. They get up early. Ferma and assorted running relatives head to Phipps Plaza for the start. Joan and Blanche and the non-running relations hit Burger King for biscuits — Blanche lives a mile away on Peachtree Battle — and station themselves on the west side of Peachtree.
Joan once had a special sequined visor for the Peachtree, but it fell apart. (She switched to a white cap bearing the words, “Peachtree Road Race spectator.”) Her husband, by way of contrast, is famously indestructible. He’d run the race after open-heart surgery, after surviving a bout of cancer, after a kidney stone and in 2002 with a cracked rib. But this year he didn’t quite run the Peachtree.
He did, however, walk most of it.
On June 11, Ferma was doing what he described as “carpentry work” behind the Ingrams’ house in Sharpsburg. The ladder slipped. He fell, landing on a piece of lumber. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe, and there was a reason: His lung had collapsed, when can happen when you break four ribs, which he had.
Joan, who retired as Sharpsburg’s postmaster, was working that day as a volunteer at Piedmont Fayette Hospital. Told her husband was in the emergency room, she said she thought, “He was either out shooting a gun, he’d had another heart attack or he’d fallen off a ladder.” (Got that right.)
After joining Ferma in the ER, she told the doctor: “This will be the first Peachtree he’s missed in almost 40 years.”
Said Ferma: “Who says I’m missing it?”
Fourths of July are major deals for this family. After the race, the extended family convenes at the Ingram abode in Sharpsburg for, ahem, ribs. This year, 42 of Ferma’s relatives from Alabama were coming for the long weekend. (Indeed, they took up 10 rooms at the Dolce hotel in Peachtree City.) And what exactly was the “carpentry work” Ferma had been doing?
Said Blanche: “He was building a roof over the grill. That’s the part he doesn’t want us to know.”
The collapsed lung, from which fluid was drained, and those four broken ribs kept Ferma in the hospital 10 days. His physical therapist told him it was a bad idea to attend the Peachtree, to say nothing of partaking in the race itself. But Ferma had a plan.
He knew he couldn’t run 6.2 miles, but he thought he could walk 3.5. He took a practice stroll around their neighborhood — “an hour and 15 minutes,” he said — and pronounced it a success. Others were less enthused. His grandson Taylor, who’s a nurse, urged him to reconsider. But Ferma, himself a former postal worker and Army reservist, had his mind set.
Back in 2002, Joan said: “After his open-heart surgery, we had someone run with him to make sure he didn’t fall over.” This year Sharon Meadows, their daughter, was deputized as an escort. The revised plan for 2015: Ferma and Sharon would wait with the others at Peachtree Battle and, when the pace began to slow, ease into the stream of humanity.
At 7:52 a.m., Ferma and Sharon set off walking down Peachtree. “I wish you luck in getting the T-shirt,” Blanche said. “You can leave it to me in your will.” (Blanche can be sarcastic.)
Asked her thoughts about her husband endeavoring to walk 3.5 miles on a rainy Fourth 13 days after being released from the hospital, Joan said: “I don’t feel easy about it … But I can’t stop him.”
By noon, Ferma was home in Sharpsburg, T-shirt triumphantly in hand. Even in these most extenuating of circumstances, family tradition had held — with one exception.
Ordinarily, Ferma cooks for everybody on the Fourth of July. “My one concession,” Joan said. “I’m having the ribs catered.”
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