Take That Beach 6/17/10

I've always loved the thought of running on a beach. The tide laps at your feet. The ocean breeze lightly blows your hair away from your eyes. Music from "Chariots of Fire" plays as you bound effortlessly along in slow motion. As I found out in Crescent City, California on our recent trip, though, t'aint always so.

First, the lapping tide. Mostly it lapped over the eviscerated shells of crabs that had been picked over by various sea birds. Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud of them. All that remained were the sharpest, least edible crab parts. Dodging them added at least a half-mile to my run.

Second: the cold. Granted, we were in far northernest Cali, not San Diego, so what did I expect, right? Even though the sun was on full display, it was no more than fifty degrees, and the wind- Holy Chicken of the Sea, Batman!, it was an icy Mamma Jamma. Not only did it blow the hair out of my eyes, it blew the hairs out of my eyelids. I flossed sandsicles out of my teeth for days. And, if movie music had been playing, I wouldn't have been able to hear it, since my ear drums were beaten by Mother Nature the way the rest of me was beaten by Ron Smith in eighth grade.

On the other hand, I should say that running into that wind did create a sort of slow motion effect. Kind of like a mime going over the top on that "Man Walking into The Wind" routine.

So, I was nearly hacked to bleeding bits by dead crustaceans, blasted by freezing sand, and slowed to a pace that banana slugs would laugh at. I wasn't just going to sit in the motel and watch the waves roll up on the shore. Not running would have been out of the question in such a situation. We don't have beaches in Kansas, and who knows when I'll get back out to the coast.

Alright, cue the music- da-da-da-da-daah. Da-da-da-da-daah...

Thanks for reading.

Pop Goes Ploop

What would you do if you threw the chocolate blob at the end of your Tootsie Pop, stick attached, into a trash barrel, which was not a barrel filled with trash, but rather a barrel into which race volunteers dipped cups that would wind up in the hands of runners in the ninth mile of the Eugene, Oregon, Marathon and Half-Marathon. What would you do, if instead of hearing the "ssshhh-plink" of a Tootsie stick/blob sliding down a plastic liner and hitting a beer can, you hear "ploop," as your garbage breaks the surface of the water, and floats to the bottom of the now less-than-completely-fresh, life-giving substance your fellow racers will gratefully guzzle?

Would you instantly thrust your hand into the Hazmat Barrel, thinking that the Five Second Rule applies to acqueous violations as well, forgetting that you just wiped your nose with that same hand, the hand that was only fifteen minutes ago in a place where the sun don't shine, inside a thin coccoon of toilet paper, inside a Honey Pot (as they call them here), where you had to stop, because the crepes at Shari's had too many strawberries, and that impromptu crapador just happened to be out of hand sanitizer-SHIT! Shit, no! Don't put your hand-shaped germ-universe into all that water!

You should just turn quickly, and get away from the scene. Do not look back at the Aid Station Captain, who, hearing the "ploop," is watching the stick/blob settle to the bottom of a forty-gallon barrel of Cascade Mountain Spring Water helicoptered in by the Oregon Air National Guard at 3a.m. from the West Face of Mt. Hood, because, if you do, you will not be able to turn away in time to avoid locking eyes with him when he acts on that feeling we all have when someone is staring at us, and then he would know it was you who had ruined his Aid Station. You may mutter, "Sorry, Dude" under your breath, but take care, Pavarotti, that the sotto is very, very voce, for otherwise you would essentially be confessing to mass-poisoning of a public water source, which, in Oregon, is punishable by a minimum of fifty years in a sea-lion colony.

Just run away, Renee. Hustle your malfeasing little butt deep into the starting corral, and let your fear and shame transform themselves into an adrenaline rush that will propel you to one hell of a half-marathon time. And when all the Eugene TV stations put you on camera afterwards and ask how you did it, you can tell them it was all thanks to the thirteen cups of chocolate-flavored water you had at Aid Station Number Nine.

Thanks for reading.

Like A Bad Penny 5/24/10

Sorry, hiatus lovers, but the blog is back- not new, not improved, and at least as pointless as ever. With a million-zillion times the hyperbole, yachtloads of made-up words, and all the movie line references (none before 1990) that you've come to expect/loathe.

The primary reason for the suspension of paragraphical hostilities was our long-delayed honeymoon. The "Honeymoon Period," the time after a marriage when mutual smittenness makes all shortcomings invisible, had been stretched out for almost two years, and behaviors that had once seemed endearing were becoming all-too visible. Amy had noticed that not only did I piss in the shower, I pissed ON the shower. (A habit developed during my freshman year of college that I never shed.) She was driving me crazy, too. Every time I pissed on the shower, she would throw a hammer at me. With frustration, and concussions, mounting, we plotted our trip.

We had to get out of town, and we had to go somewhere beautiful. Thus were Lenexa, Uvalde, Texas, and Riverside all quickly eliminated. We didn't have skiffloads of dinero, so, Jamaica, Hawaii, and Leawood were crossed off the list. And our destination couldn't be jammed by tour buses filled with nonagenarian food sample grubbers, which eliminated Branson. Only one region remained: The Pacific Northwest, where talking on your cell phone while driving is illegal, but, thanks to right to die laws, you have the right to off yourself at anytime and not face prosecution. Where the air is fresh, except for the medicinal marijuana haze, and everyone rides a bike- probably because they're unemployed and have had their cars repossessed.

It was to be an eight-day trip, with five of those spent in Oregon, one in California, and one in Washington. (The last day was spent at the Denver airport, funk you very much, Frontier Airlines, but our lawyer says I can't comment, until our plea agreement for verbal harassment of a Sky Marshall charges is accepted.)

The goal was to see the wonders of nature, like, mountains, wide beaches, waterfalls, mountain lakes, ocean sunsets, huge trees, and tidal pools, and, through those wonders, develop a sense of our insignificance in the universe, and through that sense of insignificance, realize just how alone and vulnerable we were, and through that realization of aloneness and vulnerability, cling to each other for dear life, literally, and so that inappropriate pissing would seem like triflingly smelly inconvenience. And to take a lot of cool pictures. And to come back with a ketchload of shotglasses etched with the silhouette of Mt. Hood.

How did it go? How did we do? What did we see? All will be revealed, except the details of the condition of the bathrooms in the more remote State Parks. (Hey, at least they were open. Funk you, very much, Arizona.) If it helps ease the suspense any, I'll just let you know that Amy and I are still married, and the Redwood Super Butt Fungus is responding to antibiotics.

Thanks for humoring me.

All Grown Up at Forty-Seven 4/27/10

Today, I did not run. I felt tired, and had the sniffles, which I took to be a precursor to another cold. Since I've already had a year's worth of colds, and we have a lot going on in the next week, I decided to take the day off from running.

Wow! That was totally...like...adult behavior, Man. Sort of like...mature...and stuff, you know? Now, if I could...like...do, you know...the same thing with my money...I might be able to, you know...like...buy a new, um...bottle of shampoo, or something.

Thanks for reading.

Wasted Time 4/26/10

If I had kept track of the amount of time I have spent waiting for my Garmin Forerunner 205 to be located by the satellites necessary to track my speed and distance during the two years I have owned it, I would probably have accumulated the hours required to run ten marathons.

I have stood, nearly every morning during those two years, watching the red line that means "acquisition," move steadily across the watchface, until it reaches the end, only, for some reason to retreat toward the beginning. I curse and stomp my feet, look up at the sky to see where those f****** satellites are, then move forward, or back, a step until I make that red line move again toward completion of its path, which means I can finally start my run. Sometimes that works, most times it does not. I hold my watch above my head. I hold it out to the side. I curse. I stomp my feet. I move to the left. I move to the right. I consider not paying the portion of my federal taxes that goes to keeping Global Positioning Satellites in orbit.

I freeze, or sweat, depending on the season. I get soaked, or I watch the sun trace its path across the sky from east to west as morning turns to afternoon. The damned red line just won't commit. Why does it hesitate at the moment of consummation, in a sort of "acquisitionus interruptus?"

Do I live in an isolated Appalachian valley, or on a guano-caked South Pacific island? Of course not. Our expansive apartment complex lies in the very middle of North America, in, if not a densely populated area, at least one whose population is dense. Are the satellite positioners messing with me? Can they see me down here, cursing and stamping, and have just decided to jerk my chain for a while to see what other tricks they can make me do? Is it Revenge of The Nerds, Part VI?

The hell with it. Today I left the bleeping wonderwatch on the bedside table. I knew the route I was running was six miles, no need to measure that again. So as soon as my feet hit the asphalt, I was moving. I flipped off the Eye in the Sky, and scuffled up the hill, thinking, as a great space explorer might have said, "One step backward for technology- one giant step forward for mankind running."

Thanks for reading.

Keltraf the Konqueror 4/25/10

I did six-miles of hill fartlek today. What that means is that whenever I came to an uphill section along my route, I would pick up the pace, until I got to the top, then I would jog easily until the next uphill. It's a good way to practice the kinds of pace changes you find in races, and a relatively easy way to add some "quality" to my miles. It's a type of speed work that has a long history.

Fartlek, as I've mentioned before, is a Swedish word that means "speed play." It can be traced back several centuries, to the Vikings. The Vikings were long-distance sailors, and pillagers of great renown, not great distance runners to be sure. Their success was derived from making other people run- from the Vikings.

When the Viking ships would approach a defenseless village, say on the coast of Ireland, or Scotland, or Duluth, they would watch in great amusement as the locals would take off running away from the shore, and toward the hills. Their targets were not great runners, either. They had spent most of their time bent over, doing farm labor for 25 hours a day, every day. They didn't have time to run for fitness. So they were not in good enough shape to do the kind of running they would have to do to get away from the Vikings. They would have to stop after a few yards to catch their breath, then turn around and realize that the Norsemen had landed, and ever more frightened, turn and sprint again.

The cycle would repeat itself many times, with the townsfolk growing more weary with each burst, and the sacking Swedes advancing steadily, laughing so hard that their horny helmets fell off. Eventually the serfs would faint from exhaustion, the Vikings would catch them, and after their laugh-induced belly aches subsided, kill the luckless lumps of flesh about fourteen different ways, take everything they could stuff on their boats, and sell the rest on ebay.

Then they would sail for home, telling great tales of the battles they had fought with unconscious Duluthmen, and singing Viking ballads of villages burned to the ground. Those always made them homesick and sad. But only briefly. For then one of them would always cheer them up by asking them if they remembered how those Scottish saps would run and stop, run and stop, until they just gave out. And the Vikings would belly-laugh all over again. You see, it was speed play for the Vikings, and speed work for the villagers.

Thanks for reading.

A Haiku After The Rain 4/24/10

The pear-tree blossoms-
Their beauty no match for storms-
Float down asphalt streams.