How I've matured as a runner

About 13 1/2 years ago, I experienced the second of two serious injuries during my meaningful running "career," which ended in 2005. I hurt my hip on the steep downhill of a nasty race called he Bridge of Flowers 10K, and I was out of commission for about three weeks at a point when I had only a couple of months to try to qualify for the Olympic Trials for the first and last time ever.

When I was back in action, I did a few repeats of a loop in a cemetery in Roanoke, Virginia. These took me about 3:10, so I guessed that the loop was very close to a kilometer long. I then availed myself of a measuring wheel to verify this...

...and the loop wasn't 1,000 meters. It wasn't even especially close. I can recall the uniquely surreal feeling of trundling the wheel into last 50 or so meters of the loop and watching the number on the base of the handle click over to 868...869...somehow wondering with a sensation resembling panic if about 80 extra meters might magically add itself to the total. When I was through, I stood there for a moment, unmoving, listening to myself breathe in this beautiful and serene boneyard, and I really believe to this day that if the measuring wheel had belonged to me and not to a friend, I would have smashed it to pieces over a tombstone.

Years later -- quite recently, in fact -- I had a similar experience, except this time, I was using a Garmin device to verify a stretch of road I was pretty sure was X meters long. As in the summer of 2003, I was off by about 8-9 percent in the ugly direction. I wasn't as upset about this as I was about the other episode for two reasons: One, I hadn't done any sort of hard workout on this bit of road; and two, I'm old and slow as shit now and harbor few illusions to the contrary.

That said, I admit to having a brief but vivid fantasy of obtaining a huge, bazooka-like weapon with unlimited range and supernatural accuracy, pointing it at the heavens, and blowing every one of those fucking GPS satellites out of orbit, with the bonus of their fiery corpses hopefully landing in the middle of Disney World.

So, you can see how I've matured. Anyone with the intellectual prowess and temperament of a stereotypical caveman can just smash the hell out of something he doesn't like. It takes considerably more sophistication, however, to take the destruction fantasy to the level of aerospace engineering, ballistics, and related considerations.