old!

I remember hopping up on a whim and sprinting out the door for a 2 t0 12 mile run with no warm-up trepidation(except for fear of ghost racer)  hopping over bushes fences and whatever obstacles. I could eat a large meal or drink a half gallon of water with no ill effects.

Now I shuffle out the door and wheeze along with aches and pains and aching lungs for 20 minutes or 1/2 a mile before I finally start to feel a little better and if I get sore it seems to take forever to recover. time for some HGH!

ouch

So I had a couple of great runs during which I could pretend to be getting fit. Then I got sore. Still sore I guess from outrunning my mild state of middle aged fitness I dropped the kids off with Mom after ten days and drove home feeling tired and lethargic. I forced myself to stop and try to find a pair of shoes that fit and came home early to sit and vegetate.
   at 7 I finally get up to go on a 2 mile jog so I can feel puritanically moral. the wind is 30 mph in my face and my feet and my knees hurt. inhaling dust and now my lungs hurt. I sure will be glad when I warm up in 20 minutes, of course by then I will be back home.
20 minutes later I still feel just as bad but I notice a new trail that I have not run before,"Wonder where that goes" " Hey look an old road I'll just follow that for a  few minutes then turn around.
Everything including my feet still hurts,but if I just go to the end of this road and turn left I will hit a new arroyo and I can head upstream then head home.
2 hours later with not one single comfortable step I am home; A good puritan! Then I crack open a beer.

ghosts

My old ghost runner visited the other day while I was out on a run. He/she invited me to race for the first time in  20 or more years. It is a scary proposition because somewhere deep down I  still believe that if I accept the challenge, losing means death. I had never previously been conscious of the right to refuse the challenge. That day I did refuse and lived to run another day.
  The next Friday I was a mile from home and thinking how a follow and kick racer would run this 4 mile arroyo and road race. I had it all planned out. I knew my opponent was faster than me but maybe not quite as tough, so I would follow until I was at least one yards before the point where any sane finish kick racer would start their kick. At that point I would pass and leave the opponent in surprise and build enough of a laed to hold them off after I ran out of atp. All theoretical of course as I was in an empty arroyo where no right minded roadracer would be caught risking their rep.
 I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard a ghostly voice.... "think you can do it?" I nodded happily at my imagined friend. "Of course... no problemo" . "Willing to bet your life on it?" My old frenemy was back again. I felt the old familiar tickle of fear and felt like walking, but it was too late!! The gauntlet had been thrown!

I followed my ghostly enemy down the arroyo through the fence and around the corner. Exactly as I had planned (in theory) I sprinted past my surreal opponent with 3/8s of a mile to go and left him frozen in surprise. By the time he recovered I had slipped around the bend and was on the short steep climb out of the arroyo where I took my scheduled slow down right before the down hill on the dirt road 440 yards to go. My breathed rasped in my throat and my legs began to go numb as I pushed on last effort to create an insurmountable lead. At the bottom of the hill I knew I had not done enough and I was done. The involuntary F**k with the realization that I was at lactic acid and hypoxic limits same as in the ninth grade in the 440 as I ran out of steam and the school for the deaf won districts by 2 points. Up the final hill with my ghost (death) closing in. I heard him thinking I finally got you but somehow the legs kept going and I touched the finish felt that feeling of complete exhaustion mixed with elation that comes with survival.

racing the ghost

When I was young and would do night runs cross country out in the Caja Del Rio just north of Santa Fe I would sometimes get this feeling of exhilaration mixed with fear and on the return trip I could feel the spirit of my previous runs on my shoulder. I knew that I had to beat him home or I would die. Those were some of the hardest and , I am sure fastest, runs of my life. I would touch the safety icon and know I had spent the last of my energy. The feeling of victory was just as strong as any official race I ever ran. Over the 2to3 years that this lasted I had maybe 20 of these experiences. I wonder what would have happened if I lost? Was it a true feeling. Did I lose and never find out? Who was the ghost?
  Funny thing, now in most video races you can race your own ghost,but you do not die if you lose. Jaime

technology?

1979 I was a freshman in high school, the big thing among the smart kids was computers, some sort of newfangled fancy calculator. Some company was selling kits with which you could build your own. All you had to do was learn a language. I believe it was basic, or was it fortran? Anyway after several mildly frustrating hours I lost interest and went back to a novel called "the river why" . So while Greg and John and Kevin and others were building HAL and playing chess I ignored computers and I may have hurt their feelings because to this day they are still rude to me.
  A friend of mine is almost jealous of SIRI(?) her husband always asks nicely and says thank you. SIRI's response?? Just doing my job Bill.

roads?

On my way from horseshoeing in Nambe to pick up kids at school. I have half an hour to spend before I need to get there.Maybe there is an arroyo around here that would be interesting. Nothing... nothing... oh well, I guess it won't kill me to park by the school and run on the road. Although the toxic fumes and New Mexico drivers make it a less than appealing prospect. Maybe by the flea market yup there it is a little hiddn arroyo that nobody ever even thinks about. change into swimming trunks and running shoes slide down a small cliff into a narrow steep and deep arroyo. The calming sound of distant traffic relaxes me and I see a little path around a fence. On the little path are deer tracks. big ones, medium ones and tiny ones. Do deer travel in families? Goldilocks and the 3 deer?
I am breaking the cardinal rule of unfit runners by starting out going down(which means I finish uphill) I run till I hit a little river that smells sewery then another 10 minutes then I turn to head back uphill. Goodbye deer family. As usual late to pick up the kids.

distractions

I started out yesterday thinking that I was going to write about running up an unknown arroyo by the Sandia mountains. As usual I was distracted by something. I do not remember what it was, anyway as I was running up this totally unknown(to me) arroyo I started feeling this sharp pain in my foot like a goathead(we call them Toros) sticker had gotten into my shoe. I am always conversing with myself and in this case I was arguing over the toughness doctrine and the discretion is the better part of valor doctrine. The basic premise of toughness is simple "never stop never give up never show weakness" It has always seemed to me to lack a little in the commonsense department. However,I had found it a very useful tool in surviving a very confusing and manipulated childhood so I am not averse to using it as an operational theory.  In this case I am listening to the body and considering practicing toughness and ignoring the sensation and balancing this against the cause and long term of whatever is causing the pain. Since I was not running for my life and had an interest in not taking days off from running and the pain sensation felt not familiar I decided to use my frontal lobes and stop to remove the offending object from my shoe. When I removed the shoe there was nothing but sand. Generally in this type of situation I would just put the shoe on, but as usual in cases where things do not add up they did add up and as our minds are wont to do mine kept insisting that there was more to this case of mild stabbing sensation in the shoe so I took the extra few seconds to check the sole of the shoe and found a cactus pod embedded in the sole. I could not believe that it could pierce an in of sole but it had. I do not understand how it was in such a position that one of the spines would be upright and not bend or fall over when I stepped on it but there it was ,,another reminder to me to listen to that little voice(s) in your hea