Where: Veteran's Park (21st & Boulder)
Note: The GMT offset above does not reflect daylight saving time adjustments.
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How Did We Get Here?
And more importantly, how do we get back – before it’s too late? Well, sorry to break it to you, but we are where we are and there’s no turning back.
Best to go ahead and run into the light, ignoring the whistle and the rumply ground. Yep, it pretty much happens to all of us. You wake up one day and suddenly find that you’re another day older, with responsibilities, with way too much to ever get done, and really not much way of telling if you’re gaining ground or possibly just not falling behind as much as you once were. So we run – a lot – sometimes too much, and sometimes not enough, but rarely just the right amount. Some parts are tired, some are sore, and others need more work – it’s a constant balance, knowing that if you ever give in to the Siren’s Call to rest, that you quickly slide all the way back to the bottom, with added poundage to help anchor you to your restful pose.
And so we also obediently set the clocks forward, and we set them back again when further instructed. We wait for our weekly secret missions, with apparently random originations and deviant and elusive direction challenging obstacle routes. We not only guess whether the water will be cold or hot, but whether it will even be turned on. Bathrooms open, sealed shut, or get creative, but still not a deterrent. Temperatures down, wind up, and moisture in every form and size, but none of which can overcome. We make feeble mutterings about “bonus miles”, but do them anyway. We endure random acts of being be-necklaced, and we pound out every dangling mile. The mileage targets go up so quickly, forever withholding that satisfactory feeling of “we made it, we can do this” before inching up again. But we stay at it, simultaneously blocking out and taking in the sometimes incoherent Runners Banter, discussing the world’s problems and solving none of them, all to help the time pass and the miles build. Jokes and jabs, serious and silly, they all converge together when blended with plugged in tunes and intermittent hearings and even less frequent comprehension. Casually run into one another in our otherwise “normal world”, and we would often be stammering to have a conversation. But back on terra traila, we look after one another and pick up the conversation from last week, or last month, or whenever, almost like time stopped between outings while waiting patiently for our return. We barely know one anther/anotherette, but we darn sure notice when a runner goes AWOL. When one of our own stumbles and falls, we share the pain and even feel somewhat responsible for choosing a path that was so vertically challenging.
Knowing that others are out there making the effort helps all of us get out there to make the effort, running for ourselves yes, but also running to help others around us.Which brings us to this week’s run, where the Intermediates (20 miles) get to strut their stuff to the Advanced (12 miles) for a change. Yes, it’s a big number, but we just gotta’ do it, and we know we can, ‘cause we’ve worked for this day, and we’re gonna’ do it – together. So remember to bring your fave long distance kicks, lace ‘em up just so, and join the rest of the Dom-N-8RZ trail mongers down at Veteran’s Park at 6:45 AM’ish on Saturday morning. If we’re lucky, we may get there just around day break. We get to go exploring new paths this week, and just might see some really, really old stuff.
Which will hopefully leave us wondering “How do we get there again – quickly?”
Larry
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