The revenge of the choppy, workmanlike gait

Before I get to the point here, I should observe something those of you who also blog have probably noticed about yourselves, too: The less I write about running -- be it here or in my past life as an occasional paid contributor to a bunch of now-dead or moribund magazines and their websites -- the more I enjoy my own running. I don't know if there is really a cause-and-effect relationship in play here, and if there is it may be bidirectional, because it seems just as likely that, since I'm strictly a recreational runner now, during periods when I am enjoying my jogging more, I feel less inclined to write about it. I feel no special need to announce that my aerobic therapy appears to be working even better than usual.

Also, I'm still on my road trip; in fact, I can barely call it that anymore, because as of tomorrow, I will have been gone for over two months, and overall, I've kept up and at times even increased the pace of my work (such as it is) in those nine weeks. Rosie and I have run every day for at least 20 minutes, although I am starting to curtail her runs with the increasing heat in some places. That means our mutual streak is up to 201 days. This is getting close to what I managed between the end of November 2017 and July of 2018, which ended in a knee injury that hasn't completely healed. One big difference: I'm running less than half as much as a was then. It's still a bad idea to not take days off, but I don't really care because having a streak to protect gets me, and thus a grateful animal, out the door.

So far, I have stayed in:

A motel in Colorado for two nights
A motel in Kansas for one night
A house in Indiana for four nights
A shitty motel in Bloomington, In. for six nights
A less-shitty motel in Bloomington for two nights
A motel in Kentucky for one night
A motel in Roanoke for one night
A house in Virginia for 24 nights
A house in Philadelphia for six nights
A house in Concord, N.H. for ten nights
A motel in North East, Pa. for one night
A motel in Columbus, Ohio for two nights
A motel in Terre Haute, In. for one night

I am really dreading the drive, because I have come to hate driving, and much of the journey will unavoidably include a large swath of the United States that should be evacuated of the few decent life forms it contains and then turned into a a giant, bland patch of mostly uninhabitable dirt...wait. Someone has already wrapped up that dubious project.

I have a couple more stops to make, but I should be back in Boulder in time to watch the Bolder Boulder 10K on Monday. If so, I think I have curbed my masochistic streak, or at least strategically re-channeled it, in such a way as to prevent me from running the race for a third straight year. It's kind of tempting, since I did place third and second in my age "group" in 2017 and 2018 respectively. But my times -- and moreover, running with zero heart whatsoever -- were and are enough to actually make me angry to the point of wanting to do something extreme, like mutter "What a fucking pussy I am" loud enough to make the sleeping dog next to me crack an eye open a few millimeters in passing curiosity before falling back into dreamland with an inaudible but suitably noxious fart. And like most people who ran too many pointless miles in their 20s and 30s (and possessed the grace of a marionette with muscular dystrophy to begin with) I now look like someone effecting a slow-motion escape from a psychiatric nursing home whenever I "race," or try to run hard at all, so I will choose to humiliate myself in other ways from this point onward. I hope.

Anyway, while I was in New Hampshire at the home of my friends Troy and Teressa, I discovered that Troy, a high-school classmate and teammate for our senior year, was even more of a thorough scrapbooker and record-keeper than I knew at the time, and I knew he was a collector. (He has enough signed Beatles and Star Wars memorabilia to open a museum, and his baseball-card collection alone has an estimated worth of $15.8 trillion.) But I didn't know just how little he missed. He may have missed nothing at all from the Concord Monitor pertaining to the 1987-1988 cross-country, indoor-track and outdoor-track seasons, which for me were alternately excoriating and satisfying.

Partly as a result of being sick but mainly because of what became a lifelong habit of screwing the pooch when the chips are down, I ate huge mouthfuls of shit in the last few meets of that cross-country season, which didn't stop Concord from having the low score at the 1987 Meet of Champions. Right before that, though, I did manage to win the equivalent of our county championship, known then and now as the Capital Area Championships. In that race, I beat Chris Basha, a junior and a considerably better all-around runner who went on to set a state championship record in the 1600 meters that spring with a 4:15.5. (That mark has since been lowered to 4:07-something.) I could often take his measure in races 5K or longer, but even then I was usually overmatched when both of us were in top form.

I will literally take a page from Troy's book and literally let Tom Connolly, the estimable head of the Monitor sports department in those days and a runner himself, tell the story of the race.

Here's a yearbook photo taken about 4K into the race. The original looked better, I think.

My main comment here is this: When you break a guy with about 1,000 meters left in a race and beat him by 15 seconds, and a skilled reporter refers to your running style as a "choppy, workmanlike gait," you should realize that your future in the sport is limited. I didn't, and kept training and racing hard for close to 20 almost-unbroken years after this. But even if I had understood the cold reality of not being able to overcome a subpar allotment of whatever alleles determine one's ultimate ability, I would have plowed ahead anyway because why the fuck not. Might as well participate in something you can be relatively decent at when real athletes do other things rather than resign yourself to full-time pimple-popping with the rest of the mathletes. Oh yeah, that:

The 1987-1988 Concord High School Math Team

I have a bunch more photos and nostalgic blather I can share, both from back in the day and from my trip itself, and maybe I will, but I've posted most of them on Instagram and Facebook already, which means you've almost certainly already seen them. And on that note, having read this far, you should know, but not care, that I'm preparing to dismantle my Facebook pages for good thanks to increasing disenchantment with the privacy policies there. Don't let that shaking earth under your feet knock you on your ass.