Archives: Runs

I’m not pre­tend­ing that any deity gives me sports scores or tells me to start a cult but I do have process of putting ques­tions to the uni­verse and wait­ing for answers to appear in my head. Some would call it sub­con­scious infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing, oth­ers med­i­ta­tion, and still oth­ers prayer. Under var­i­ous names most peo­ple have some way of doing this by let­ting go of the ques­tions and some­how let­ting the answers come to them. I find it works bet­ter … Read the rest

I have a lit­tle bit of expe­ri­ence with run­ning with legs that haven’t run in a month. It’s almost all I’ve done in the last ten months. One of the pat­terns I’ve seen is that after get­ting psy­ched up to start run­ning again I’ve come back from that first run and had severe­ly sore calves the next day. My calves have been so sore and tight actu­al­ly that I’ve had dif­fi­cul­ty walk­ing two days after the run. I’ve con­sid­ered try­ing … Read the rest

There is some dis­agree­ment among run­ners whether it is good to have music on head­phones while run­ning. The purists say that it takes away from the total expe­ri­ence, every­one else just likes their music. I gen­er­al­ly fall into the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, but I run both with and with­out music. As a rule, I nev­er run a race with head­phones. Many races have course reg­u­la­tions pro­hibit­ing the use of head­phones, though those rules are rou­tine­ly ignored. Even if there were no … Read the rest

I can’t say with any cer­tain­ty that it was low tide when I ran past, but it sure smelled like low tide.

It’s a gor­geous day here in San Fran­cis­co. A bit on the breezy side but that’s not a prob­lem. Even at my lop­ing pace the body gen­er­ates enough heat that cool­ing air is refresh­ing, as a rule.

Today’s run alter­nat­ed between the feel­ing that I could keep going all day and the feel­ing that I had to stop right away. … Read the rest

Well, real­ly space­men by the bayshore, but it sounds bet­ter with allit­er­a­tion. And I real­ly did­n’t want to lead with «Astro­nauts by the estu­ary» for lots of rea­sons, not least of which is that it isn’t actu­al­ly alliteration.

Street art is (some­times) fas­ci­nat­ing here in San Fran­cis­co. From stick­er­ers to mural­ists to… flat met­al cutouts of astro­nauts. On my run today I went past these and could­n’t quite believe my eyes. It was­n’t just one of these—there were four … Read the rest

I was up for a short while before head­ing out for my coffee/morning walk, but it’s pret­ty close to first thing. Fol­low­ing doc­tor’s orders I had a very nice walk and fol­low­ing doc­tor’s sug­ges­tion I got reg­u­lar cof­fee rather than decaf. The point is to see if we can get my mind bet­ter focused. When I quit caf­feine a cou­ple years back I hon­est­ly noticed no dif­fer­ence in focus or my sleep cycle. No dif­fer­ence in my abil­i­ty to wake … Read the rest

I’ve been instruct­ed by one of my doc­tors to do a ten minute walk every day. It’s embar­rass­ing to have to be told to do this, but she was right for a lot of rea­sons. I get too hung up on hav­ing to run or hav­ing to do some sub­stan­tial dis­tance. Ten min­utes is bare­ly more than walk­ing out the door and turn­ing around to come back. Seri­ous­ly it’s a third of a mile out and a third of a … Read the rest

Start slow­ly and taper off. That’s the slo­gan of the Dol­phin South End Run­ners, the run­ning club to which I belong. It seems that if I’m always start­ing, I’m always slow. I know I should­n’t com­pare my times against the races I ran when I was six or sev­en years younger, but but it’s hard to look at a 13 min/mile pace and feel very good about it know­ing that once upon a time I could do a … Read the rest

One can look at life in one of two ways: as not hav­ing sec­ond chances or as some­thing with lim­it­less sec­ond chances. Both are use­ful in its own way; no sec­ond chances means that every moment and every choice is pre­cious and can­not be reliv­ed. Unlim­it­ed sec­ond chances, though, means its nev­er too late to jump back in the race, what­ev­er that race may be.

While I cer­tain­ly believe that each moment is elu­sive and can­not be recap­tured, I’m still a … Read the rest

Nine days since my last run. I know that run­ning this infre­quent­ly just makes the whole process more dif­fi­cult, but I have to take my oppor­tu­ni­ties when I can. While I’ve been kept pret­ty busy with a full sched­ule late­ly, I can’t say that I don’t have oppor­tu­ni­ties. In this case, «oppor­tu­ni­ties» trans­lates to «win­dows of motivation.»

This morn­ing I had more get-up-and-go than usu­al. I’ve done laun­dry, cleaned the cat­box, tak­en the trash out, and topped it off with … Read the rest