The year in review Part 4

Yesterday was a measure of progress in my running during the current year.  Remember, I started my return to running in May after a two-year layoff due to an achilles strain and then more seriously, retina degeneration in my right eye requiring four eye surgeries, two of them emergency operations ("We need to operate today.  Who can you call right now to come pick you up afterwards?").

Fortunately I saved the sight in that eye, although it's diminished.  Once my eye healed from the last procedure in April, I started running again on a drastically reduced schedule, three times a week, starting off with a half mile at a time.  Because I am (or was) a certified running coach, I know that practically all novice (or returning) running plans falter due to running too far and too fast at the outset, thus crashing and burning, so I carefully adhered to a ridiculously low mileage and slow pace blueprint the first few months, even though I couldn't even run two blocks the first day, having to stop and walk it in heaving and gasping, a pathetic performance.

Four months later, on August 27th, I felt the need to gauge my progress by running a measured mile in my neighborhood as fast as I was able to.  I was disappointed to break a ten-minute mile the wrong way with a time of 10:13, but it was an honest effort and indicated some sort of progress.

Yesterday, four months after the last timed-mile run, I repeated the test over the same course.  I was pleased to be under ten minutes this time with a 9:26, an improvement in 120 days of 37 seconds, or about 9 seconds faster per 440 yards (141.5 or 2:22 quarters--slow!),  even though I do no speed work and I have cut back my mileage considerably each week as a gesture to my age being closer to seventy than sixty now, but I was incredibly fagged at the end of the mile.  Still, it is a sign of progress, with room for continuing improvement.

It was hard but we got 'er done...

I was just getting into my first run on a cold windy day in two years, finally more or less having my ragged breathing under control after six months of doggedly running three times a week as I came back from injuries and a lot of pounds gained, as the cold wind blew into my face and the sun sank low in the west at 4:30 pm when it caught my eye in the roadway.  A little black object, the size of a slender pack of cigarettes, there on the blacktop four feet from the curb, a cellphone.  It looked like it was smashed up, discarded, a mere husk of itself, left behind for dead there in the street.

Nobody was in sight.  I stopped to pick it up.  Although it was all scratched up, it was alive all right, and the screen came to life as I handled it, a Samsung Galaxy.  I pushed at it, poked it, prodded it, wondering how I could get it back to its owner.  The problem was that it was all locked up tight, when I pushed the little phone icon, to maybe see its "recent calls" page so I could dial someone who had called it to start the process of finding out its owner so I could have someone contact the family it belonged to with the news that their beloved precious one had been found alive, undoubtedly to the great joy of the household.  I felt like it would be as if I was delivering good news to the family after a risky operation or maybe returning a lost child to his or her house after having the small child recite the proper address to me by rote.  In my year and a half of owning an I-phone, even though I tap maybe two percent of its actual power, I have come to understand how integral these infernal little machines have become to everyday ordinary life; this palm-sized pilot has more power than the NASA computers that sent a man to the moon and without it you can't find an address (read a map--what's that?) or reach out to someone through text (call them?--they'd never answer their phone anyway) or know when it's time to arise from bed (watch?--just pull out your cellphone and look at it).

The important little device produced a password page and after a few seconds shut down again and blacked out.  No way to make a call (or send a text) on this thing except for an "Emergency Call."  I briefly considered pushing that button and dialing 9-11 on it,  but I thought that would be a ridiculous use of community safeguarding--would you send a squad car here please, I've just found a small inert mass of plastic and metal in the gutter and it must get back to its owner right away.  Like returning the stray dog to its distraught owner or a lost little child to his or her hysterical parent.  Nope, that wouldn't do, besides the dispatcher would have no way of knowing who the owner was or would hardly care, (I'm sorry sir, I understand that you have found a thousand dollar bill in the street but that is not a police matter unless it was somehow associated with a crime); I'd have to find a new way to get this forlorn "It's my life" piece of scrap metal back to its desperate owner.

I thought maybe I should take it to the nearby UbreakIfix franchise store and ask them to break the phone's code and break into it--for free of course as a public service, or leave it with them, but I doubt Samsung issues a booklet entitled How To Hack Into An Android In Five Seconds and why would someone who lost a phone go to the nearest technology store to find it.

Maybe I should stand there in the street till dark holding it aloft until its frantic owner and his or her posse came by, backtracking their route home from school, to find the devious, silent device, calling it every five seconds to bring it alive with light and noise until they found it to great joy and celebration.  There it is!  Drinks are on me!

Given where and when I found this devil's tool, I thought, putting on my long-ago policeman's cap, that it likely belonged to a school child returning home after home from a school bus stop there at the intersection.  The unmarked  stop was, I knew from having lived in this neighborhood for three decades, right there at this T-intersection a block from my house.  Having found the Sammy twenty feet down the street running away from the longer through street, I reasoned that it was probable that the possible direction of where the house of the owner was down the shorter street.

The increasing range of possibilities of what I could do with this fist-sized, locked-up library of information were starting to occur to me with dizzying speed--leave a note on the street sign pole--canvass the immediate street by knocking on doors, come back every half hour to look for the search party, come back at 8 am on Monday to ask the assembled group of departing children and hovering helicopter parents at he bus stop if any of them had spent a sleepless weekend without their lifeline to civilization, and they could have it back if they could describe the talisman which currently resided in my pocket, take it to the police station downtown.

The thought intruded into my brain that as nice as it would be to get this thing back to its owner, I actually didn't want to spend an inordinate amount of my time on this--I have a life actually, even though I am old, live alone, am retired and only speak to the same three or four people every other day or so that I call regularly and speak to for a few minutes on my cellphone; my sister, my former running buddy who moved away to Arizona with his twenty-something wife, my former girlfriend who is still my best friend and occasionally, a former BFF from eighth grade who returned to my life a few years back through the magic of Facebook (he also lives alone and also has a totally estranged child through the diabolicalness of PAS and the crucifying cruelty of Western divorce) and a former colleague from my litigation days who joins me once a month for lunch.  These are people who actually answer their cellphones when it rings.  Oh, and also my house full of books waiting to be read and the Washington Post in the driveway very morning at 5 am.

Then a pernicious thought entered my my mind--leave it there!  I was afraid it would get run over by a car or ruined by a rainstorm if I did that, but anyone searching for it would likely backtrack their recent steps and they might find it that way.  But then again, it would be dark soon and the slumbering ambient being might not survive the night.  Why get involved!  Pull a Kitty Genovese on this no-good Good Samaritan urge.  No good deed goes unpunished!  Oh yes, I learned that in my quarter million dollar divorce.  And after all, parents don't look kindly upon old men approaching and speaking to unknown school-age children, and nobody these days in armed America wants a stranger knocking on their door!

Plus, now it was interfering with my run.  But to leave a tiny but fully loaded, expensive machine unattended by the side of the road in my neighborhood didn't seem right.  Still, maybe someone would think I was stealing it.  I thought about mens rea.  Even though, everyone knows a locked cellphone is useless without the password.  But if you were of a mind, and got it unlocked, it would be useful indeed, your very own throwaway phone--at least until the actual owner changed his or her chip or number or stopped paying the bill.

All sorts of thoughts crowd your head during a run if you don't distract yourself with piped in music via headphones, eh?  Leave it!

I started off again to finish my run, carrying the little box.  It felt comfortable in my hand, actually, as for years I ran with a camera in my hand to record sights I saw along the way, especially in downtown DC, protestors, monuments, dramatic skies, portraits snapped by cooperating tourists or selfies recording that particular run like a traveling journal.  First the cameras were small disposable film cameras which I shipped off to get developed every month (and actually got printed pictures back) and then in 2013 I graduated to a digital palm-sized sports camera (much cheaper--no development costs and instant gratification).  But then last year I finally got a smart phone, costing well-nigh a thousand dollars, and it's loaded with all sorts of personal information, addresses, phone numbers and two years worth of pictures so I don't take it on runs (it's too valuable to risk losing or damaging) so with the march of technology, life takes a step forward and a step backward, as I no longer run with either a camera or a phone (I had a rugged flip phone I carried in a fanny pack).

I encountered a boy walking a dog and asked him if he recognized the phone as his or a friend's.  No luck there.  I stopped by a car pulling out of a driveway in the 'hood and asked the lady driving it if she recognized the phone, perhaps belonging to a schoolchild on the street.  No luck there.  I asked an elderly couple walking down the street the same thing, then two boys playing soccer in a front yard the same thing.  No luck there, or there.  I gave up on this approach.

I actually canvassed the eight houses on the short block on which I found the phone, and at the three house at which someone answered the door, no one had any knowledge of the phone.  I started developing an uneasiness at walking up to front doors to knock, looking at the ferocious sign posted at one gate assuring me that I was on camera and there was no trespassing or loitering at or by those premises (I didn't enter that yard), wondering if there was a dog in the backyard in the gates I did transgress to walk up to the door to knock, and reflecting back one year to the house I knocked at in Fairfax county while canvassing for the democrats at which the drunken rube who answered told me to get off his property before he shot me and punched me in the shoulder to hasten my way.  Nope, that approach wasn't going to work anymore in modern America.

I took the magical unit home and set it on my dining room table, knowing that soon it would burst forth with life, with people seeking it, hunting it, looking for where this center of all life had gone to. And soon it was vibrating, bleeping and ringing as messages and texts and calls poured in, the calls every 5 minutes being from Roxy Mama with a Virginia number imposed upon the lighted up screen which, maddeningly, only lasted a second before the number disappeared, too quick for me to write down.  Texts I knew I couldn't answer or see because of the password problem (I briefly considered starting at 1-1-1-1 and trying to guess the password but I didn't to pass the magic number of tries and lock the owner out forever) but I thought maybe I could answer the phone when it rang, after all, for more than six decades, when a phone rings, any phone, I have just answered it.

But not this time.  It rang, displayed a green button which I assumed was Answer, and a smaller red button, which I assumed was Decline.  I poked at the green button but nothing happened, the phone kept ringing.  Poke, poke, stab, stab--ring, ring, ring, silence.  I spoke to the now dead phone, hoping someone was there.  "Hello?  Hello?  Hello!"  Nothing.  I handled both sides of this infernal Android, pushed, swiped and prodded its every surface but nothing.  The phone rang again and this time I poked the red button to no effect.  I used to have an android, which I hated, it was a cheap Chinese knock-off of a Samsung which AT&T sold to me as part of its cellular plan to me and I quickly discovered it was an indecipherable mass or maze of puzzling complexities that was a hundred percent more frustrating than usable, plus it somehow ate up my monthly data amount in mere days although I only went on the Internet on it once or twice.  I consigned it to my shelf for two more years and ent back to my dumb phone before I discovered, since I have a Mac computer, that I could actually navigate a little on my girlfriend's I-phone and I made the leap to the I-phone world, sort of.

Having discovered the evil Androids ways, the next time Roxy Mama rang I was prepared with paper and pencil, and I wrote down the number before it faded away after a mere second.  I tried calling that number on my cellphone but variously I got a written message on my screen that I wasn't set up for WiFi calling, a recorded "Not in Service" message, or nothing.  Once I got a voice mail box and left a message with my return number but nobody called me back.  I wondered if the number that flashed briefly on the screen when the phone rang was its number, but that would be stupid.  I was remembering how much I had hated my Android.

I tried to puzzle it out.  If my I-phone rang, I thought, anyone could answer the call without unlocking it by merely pushing the large red button on its lit screen.  Why would an Android be more difficult, to where you had to unlock it first?  I thought further that I had learned from my girlfriend, who is about my age (I have no children I can learned I-phone things from), that when you swipe your screen, sometimes things happen, things go away, they go to a deeper level, they this, they that, whatever.  The next time the phone rang, I would try something different.  It rang again, this time iy was Cruz Jr calling.  I judged the screen, and carefully swiped, to the right (lucky guess), the green button.  The phone went silent.  There was no speakerphone button I saw.  Was it dead again?  I put it to my ear.  "Hello?"

"Hello?" a voice answered back, very tiny.  Obviously I had turned the volume down very low when I was fooling with the side buttons trying to answer the phone calls earlier.  As a matter of fact, I had started worrying then that I might have been snapping pictures inside my house and considered briefly taping over the lease but I didn't want to alter the recovered phone in any way so I was scrupulously not pushing any extant buttons.

"Hello."

"Hello."    

Well, there was life here, and I definitely didn't want to lose this connection, so I took the bull by the horns.  "Hi, I am speaking on a phone I recovered in the street, do you know anything about it?"

"Oh, yes sir, it is my father's and we have been looking for it," came the polite reply.

"Well, I have it here in my house and I want to get it back to its owner."

"Where are you, sir?"

"Falls Church.  Where are you?"

"Woodbridge."

Woodbridge!  That's 40 miles away.  How could a schoolchild, my original premise, or his dad, have gotten 40 miles already since school let out and he was let out at the school bus stop up the street?

It turned out that the phone's owner is a construction worker at the major intersection construction going on two blocks from my house, causing great local disruption, and the workers all park in our neighborhood during the day because there's no parking anywhere else.  He lives in Woodbridge and had driven home after work only to discover that he had lost his phone when he was angrily confronted by his wife, Roxy Mama, who wanted to know why he hadn't answered any of her half-dozen calls wondering where he was.  She had been calling looking for him, not the phone.  I'm glad, actually, that I didn't figure out how to answer any of those calls so that I didn't have to explain to this apparent dynamo what I was doing with her husband's phone, which was in his safety vest and evidently dropped out onto the street when he tossed his vest into the back seat at the end of the day.

The two gentlemen, Cruz Sr and Cruz Jr, drove to my house to retrieve the phone as they didn't want Papa to be without a phone over the weekend.  The owner tried to press an amount of cash into my hand for getting his lost phonebook to him but I shook him off and told him to buy gas with it instead to allay his 80-mile round trip to get his phone.  The two men were very courteous and obviously grateful.  I was glad the phone was going to make its way safely home.

All in a day's run.

Running some more

Cutting back my mileage seems to have done me some good.  This week I ran 2K (1.2 miles), a mile and a half and yesterday, two miles, my "long" run.  That was the best of all.  It was cold when I started and I wished had brought my running vest.  Instead I bumped up my pace for more warmth from exertion and I found that I enjoyed the faster pace and it didn't knock me back to where my ragged breathing made me wish I could contrive an excuse to end or shorten the run.

As a matter of fact, my breathing didn't increase much when I kicked it up a gear and I found I was running easily.  Heartened, I continued up Broad Street towards the one-mile turnaround in the Metro parking lot, and I noticed I wasn't noticing, as I have been so far in my return to running the last half year, the general uphill inclination of the first half of the route.

At the halfway point, I started back and fell in with a fellow walking way from the station all decked out in Nationals gear and I asked if he was returning from the parade downtown honoring the World Series champions Washington Nationals.  He was, and I walked a block with him as he described how festive the atmosphere was in DC during the festivity and we discussed the chances to repeat were for the team next year since their two biggest stars, the Series MVP and the NL and Series RBI leader, are free agents now.  Waving goodbye to him, I ran towards home, encountering two little girls and their dad on bikes riding ahead of me on the sidewalk and I manufactured the challenge of passing them which I did.

It was a good outing, two  miles run at an elevated pace, more or less, and it didn't wipe me out and my breathing felt finer, finally.  I feel like my running is finally starting to come around a little.

3 miles done

Today I got out running as soon as the dawn lightened enough to see the roadway, in the cool of the early morning before the sun came out and made everything hot again.  After my 90 bicep curls with my l'il ol' dumbbell (3 sets of 15 reps at 25 pounds, each arm before and after each run), my recently added routine of a few push-ups, and stretching, I burned off a neighborhood mile while I considered my two-mile segment because I was undecided about that part.  (Whew, glad that's done.)

 

I had done 4 miles with a long, tough hill two days before and I didn't want to do that hill again because my legs felt used up, but I know hills are good for runners and speed their progression to improved fitness and ability.  I had already chickened out on doing Saturday's tough hill by the route of my neighborhood mile, taking me away from that hill, but it led me towards a half-mile hill in town not far from my house which I had been staying away from after failing to fully surmount it weeks ago when my conditioning was even less than my current pathetic state.  (My weight training station.)

Alright, I thought, let's go.  It was a long slow plod up that hill (longer but not quite so steep as Saturday's hill) but I made it and turned around a mile out and had the benefit of going down the same long hill on my return.  (My push-up platform.)

I was happy to get my exercise for the day done by about 7:15 am, with the whole rest of the day stretching out ahead of me, just like in the old days.  Coming back is a slow process, but it seems to be coming.  (My gym.)

It was hard, but boring for readers

I waited all day for it, to run my third time for the week to finish out my weekly running.  Four miles to top out the week at nine miles.  I went out at 4 pm when the sky was overcast and the breeze was up, hoping that would enable me to put in a sterling run.

I went out WB on the W&OD Trail where there are tough hills after the first mile surmounting the overpass bridge over I-66 (both directions).  No bicyclist whizzing by me, wandering in my 4-foot WB lane, ever announced their presence as they silently passed me, I hate that, at 25 MPH you could kill me if in my fog of fatigued flushed running, I lurched leftward two feet.  Going out the breeze was up and the sun was behind clouds and I reached the two-mile turnaround point feeling like I was coming back.

On the return trip the sky cleared and the sun beat down mercilessly upon this particular stretch of the 40-mile asphalt ribbon that is the W&OD Trail snaking through Northern Virginia because Asian invasive vines have killed every tree along its first 20 miles. These non-indigenous plants will kill all the shade along the trail's entire length in the next 10 years, a backward return for the Columbian Exchange.  It makes running on the W&OD in the summertime a real slog.

I surmounted the brisk hill coming back without reducing my slow shuffle to a walk, but then I partook in two 60 meter walking water breaks to quell my racing heart, and stopped for a minute to watch a taped-off crime scene just off the trail where the dozen Fairfax County police units I observed on my run, parked at vantage points along the way or cruising slowly through the area were obviously looking for someone in a vehicle.  I was exhausted coming back to my driveway after my "long run" of four miles, but felt that despite the glacial 13-minute per mile pace, I had proceeded apace in my comeback to running.  And I lost a pound overall.

...So good

I was bad yesterday, it was my every other day to run and I didn't.  I took the day off, after worrying about not running all day as the day slipped away.  I finally decided that I had done a Ti Chi class the evening before so that qualified as an exercise day and I could take the next day off.

I got up early today and hit the trail for 3.1 miles.  It felt great, though I'm still plagued by The Slows and the first mile takes an awfully long time to fall away.  But I fell in for a very brief interlude with the local high school's cross country team on a summertime training run, said hello to everyone I ran by and received a reply every single time, and even kept ahead of a faster runner who was 100 yards back when I hit the W&OD Trail for a quarter mile (he had reduced the gap to 10 yards by the time I turned off).

It sort of felt like old times, when running was enjoyable to me before my injuries and subsequent weight gain.  I sweated off three pounds on the run.  I had exercised and showered and was ready for the rest of the day by mid-morning, a great feeling I had practically every weekend morning when I worked and ran long on weekends.

Not that three miles is running long.  But I feel like I'm getting there, and I'll get there if I have patience and stick to the plan.

I'm coming back

What a year. A year ago I developed a hole in the vision in my right eye and I had emergency surgery the next day for a torn retina, the first of four surgeries in the past year that saved my sight in that eye. 

The worst was when the first surgery failed and the surgeon filled my eye with silicon the next week (surgery # 2) and for 5 months I went about with a foreign substance in a major organ (my eye) and don't think my body didn't know every minute of every day that there was something foreign in it that it couldn't expel. But surgery # 3 took the oil out, except for floating residual particles (that I call my asteroid belt) that lazily cross my vision in a flurry and I wonder if a lifetime of this will eventually drive me nuts. In other words, it seems as if often there are flies buzzing about on the periphery of my vision, except that they aren't there, unless it's that one in a thousand that actually is there. 

This caused me not to run till my eye was fully healed, which I determined to be a month after my fourth and last eye operation in April. Meanwhile I put on dozens of pounds in my lethargy. (Any workout can strain the eye, in my feeling. And my vision had (has) flaws in it from the damage, especially in depth perception.)  

In May I started coming back, running three times a week beginning with runs of 1/2 mile at a time that first week. I couldn't make the entire two laps around the track that first time out without having to walk. Last week I suffered a slight setback in my routine, but I have come back from that. More to come later.

Call the Zombie Patrol for a Pickup

Like a zombie lurching through a heat-stifled town, as if apocalyptic fires were burning everywhere adding to the heat, I plodded four miles this morning as the heat of the day built up rapidly.  The hottest June on record last month, and July is headed for another heat record.  With high temperature and excessive humidity, it's slated to feel like 110 degrees later today here in DC.

I went 3.2 miles early on Wednesday, another scorching day where it felt like 100 degrees when the heat built up.  I finished my run then totally drenched and feeling lightheaded and slightly sick, just like today, and I spent the rest of that day in my house recovering from the enervating effort.  I feel better today, so maybe I'm becoming acclimated to the sapping heat.

I feel good about my running right now.  I was out of running for the last two years while I recovered from an achilles strain and then was felled by a retina tear which required four surgeries to heal and nearly took my sight in that eye.  My last surgery was in early April and on May 1st I started running as I was fully healed.  Coming back was (is) slow and hard; my first day I targeted running a mere half a mile, slowly, and I had to walk the second half of that "run."

But I have been keeping at it, running three times a week, stretching my calfs and achilles before and after each run assiduously, which I never used to do, and slowly building up the mileage, first a half mile, then three quarters of a mile, then a mile, now I'm up to three-mile runs each time, albeit very slow and plodding, with today's long run for the week of four miles.  Whoot, I cracked double digits after two and a half months with ten miles for the week.  It's paltry progress but I'm keeping at it, taking it slow and steady, and I no longer feel like I'm going to die each run.

Coming Back?

I've had a lot of injuries in the last two years that kept me from running.  I strained my achilles tendon two springs ago and that forced me to the couch for nine months because I couldn't run through it, or run at all, and for two months two summers ago I was in The Boot, which helped my healing.

I came back to running last spring and was slowly kicking up my pace, mileage and conditioning when mid-summer I was felled by a detached retina which required four surgeries, two of them emergency operations and two more that were delayed for weeks or months because of various circumstances on the surgeons' part.  

The first surgery hurt a lot (I don't believe I was sedated properly, if at all) but the second was the worst although I was out so I didn't feel a thing.  They filled my eye with oil to keep my eye pressure sufficient for  the retina to heal properly without deteriorating further. Reinas heal slowly, believe me.

But worse still was the feeling it engendered within me.  There was an organ in my body (my eye) that was foreign (filled with silicon) and my body wanted it out.  A few times a day I experienced white flares in my vision, good as it was in its permanently impaired state, that rose from lower left corner of my affected right eye like a nova and I would still all motion until it subsided and went away.  Exposure of my optic nerve as the oil in my eye sloshed around?  I don't know, I just got a vague answer from my ophthalmologist when I complained to him about it and he just told not to do it.  Well!

Worse still was that it felt like if I fell hard due to my shaky vision, say I pitched forward by tripping on broken  or uneven pavement, that my eye might split open.  Yep, that's what my foreign eye felt like, very strange, and I stayed on the couch till my third operation in December when they took the oil out (or at least most of it--I have these maddening residual small silicon globules floating around through my vision permanently like tiny astroid clouds from the oil they couldn't completely flush out when they operated).

Then I had cataract surgery on that eye last month, a cataract that developed suddenly and rapidly due to the eye trauma I experienced, as is normal with retina detachment repair, and I feel now that my eye, and my vision, is as good as it's going to get and my eye is healed.  

So on May 1, I went out for an intended slow half-mile run, after stretching assiduously.  I made a quarter mile before I had to walk a block, twice.

That first week I ran a second time and that time I pushed through my overwhelming urge to stop after a quarter mile and finished my half mile run, getting my second wind on the backside of the run.

This week I was going to run a half-mile three times.  I ran a slow half-mile on Monday and it went okay.  I even picked up the pace a little the last two blocks.

This morning I had to wait for an electrician to come deal with a problem at my house, so the morning was used up before my thoughts turned to adhering to my running schedule.  Here was the crisis, I wanted to have lunch instead and I didn't feel like getting into my running togs.  But I changed and went out into the street and started stretching my achilles.  The neighborhood steady runner ran by and stopped to talk and our discussion soon turned from politics to running.  I told him I was trying to return to running and my planned slow schedule.  He nodded approvingly and asked if I was returning from my run or about to set off.  I truthfully told him that I was "procrastinating."

He laughed and said I should make sure my pace wasn't too fast.  "You're going to run, right?" he said, looking dubiously at me.  "Yeah, yeah," I said as he set out on his run and I started stretching again.  I sure didn't feel like it.

But I walked over to the W&OD Trail and got underway at a slow shuffle.  My neighbor passed me going the other way on his eight mile run, having entered the trail a different way half a mile up.  Here I was just starting my half-mile run.  He said, "You're going too fast!" as he ran by.  "Slow down."  

I decided he wasn't mocking me but that he was right, and I slowed down to barely past a walk.  But I made the half mile run feeling good once I got underway and again, I picked up the pace at the end.  Best of all, I haven't injured myself or lazily gotten off schedule--yet.  A half-mile on Friday, repeat the schedule another week, and then I'll kick it up even further, I hope.  It seems pathetically slow (literally) but otherwise I might stop in discouragement if I put on too much mileage or pace right now.

A little run

I could hear the wind howling as I lay in the pre-dawn darkness of my bedroom under my covers, and felt my house shaking as the wind gusts buffeted it.  I had run two kilometers the day before in my attempt to return to running, and I almost succumbed to my inner urgings telling me to not run back-to-back days.

But I got out of my warm bed, put on my running togs and left the house as the sky started lightening with the dawn.  It was cold outside but I was warm enough at the start with three layers on so I knew that I was foolishly overdressed.  Still, I wasn't going far so I figured it wouldn't matter too much, except that I stupidly didn't bring gloves so my hands were frozen throughout the slow, loping mile and a half run.

The sky was streaked with colors as it often is at that time of the morning.  I occupied my mind, as I tried to ignore my labored breathing, with reflecting on signs that I passed along the way.  One roadside yard sign sarcastically told me to slow down, please, while another storefront sign mocked me with the name of the establishment, Jimmy John's, also the names of my two oldest children who have been long-estranged from me, and the sign on its door, Fresher Faster, seemed to be urging me to get a move on.

Then I finally arrived at my destination via my circuitous route, the McDonald's restaurant up the street on the corner just past the Stop sign, where I indeed stopped and went inside for my morning cup of java.  Running is a glorious sport.

A mile

It wasn't much of a run, only a solitary single mile in the 'hood.  I covered it in about 13 minutes, extraordinary slow even for my age, wherein I'll be full-retirement eligible for social security in a matter of weeks.  The notable thing to me was that it was a non-stop mile, the first non-stop mile that I had done in ten months, and I even broke a sweat during it in the unseasonably temperate 52 degree weather.

It might be a start to a return to what passes for fitness, at least I certainly hope so.  My plan is to do a mile three times a week for a couple of weeks and then start bumping up the mileage from there.  I well remember from my coaching days the dictum of only increasing mileage each week by ten percent, lest you court injury.

In a nod to my constant ankle woes these days, which threw me off of all running during the past year, I wore braces on both ankles and even stretched both achilles tendons before and after the jog.  I resisted succumbing to the constant warnings flitting through my mind even as I was huffing and puffing while I plodded along that I could feel twinges in both achilles and the ignored the mental commands to stop before I became a candidate for The Boot again.  The finish point of my lumber, my driveway on the short out-and-back jaunt, came into view a block away yet seemed to be receding instead of coming closer as I ran towards it.

But I made it to driveway finally, happy that I'd met my first (very modest) running goal this year, and I stopped gratefully and went inside the house, wheezing.  My run of about a mile and a half with my friend in the District a couple of days earlier was a good beginning but it was full of starts and stops, so this little outing was an immeasurably better start to my hopeful return to form, plus I was alone and thus more inclined to agree with my frantic, oxygen-deprived brain and slow to a walk somewhere during the second half of the barely elevated perambulation.  We'll see if this is truly the beginning of my return to good times.

Runs go like this sometimes

I've been nursing an achilles strain for ten months now, a lingering and stubborn injury which put me into a boot for much of the summer and led to my ensuing inertia and sloth which caused me to put on a prodigious amount of weight, but I'm trying to come back.  This week I went for a run, or run/walk, with my past and future running buddy at my former workplace, and we went a mile and a half before I literally crashed and burned and we walked it back in.  Runners leave no person behind, except maybe during a race and even then they'll wait for you at the finish line.

The run started off well enough, an easy and very slow lope for half a mile to the Titanic statue down on the latest new DC waterfront, stopping to smell the flowers just starting to emerge from their winter sleep along the way.  Necessary stops on my part to quell the frantic thoughts racing through my overcharged body that oh yes, on this block I was going to die.  Good company promoted good talk so we whiled away the first 12-minute mile confirming with each other how calamitous our lives had become during the past year while we watched and worried about the non-stop, frenetic assaults upon our revered democratic institutions (we're both lawyers and we notice such things) that the unthinking and unseeing right cares, knows or does naught about (except to excoriate the liberal left with dripping, consuming, venomous hatred).

Torn up streets being worked upon by crews caused us to veer down unfamiliar sidewalks and as I was glancing behind me at an idle group of young men we had just passed I tripped over a riven sidewalk panel projecting upwards a good 8 inches due to an underlaying root from an adjacent tree.  Fixing the streets?  How about fixing the sidewalks, this hazard didn't develop overnight.  I went down hard, tossing my water bottle aside in my sudden descent and slamming the action camera in my other hand into the mud of the nearby grassy strip as I landed, sprawling.  I have tripped mightily over things three times due to momentary distraction since I acquired and started carrying this small camera in my free hand 5 years ago, and as during the two times I fell before, I was fortunately unhurt other than bloody road rash on my palms, an elbow and a knee.  Obviously when I descend suddenly and fast while running, I tend to come down on one side or the other except for my outstretched, bracing hands.

So we walked it in from there after I poured water from my bottle onto my wounds to wash the mud and bits of cement grit from them.  Once I rubbed the mud off my Pentax, it operated fine, another testimonial to its claim to be "shock-proof."  (The small print in the owner's manual stated this claim was verified by the camera being dropped once from a height of four feet onto a sheet of plywood without being damaged, quite the exhaustive scientific test.  But I'll vouch for its ruggedness and longevity.)  And as if in payment for my pain, a couple of blocks later we came upon three bills lying in the street, a ten and two singles.  Nobody was about except for another group of idle young men a block away in the wrong direction so we collected the money off the street and, with no apparent owner in sight, resolved to give it away to a good cause.  Since I had spotted the abandoned or lost currency first and had suffered a fall, my running partner left up to me to choose its use.  I said I would donate it to the campaign of the chief democratic opponent (Alison Friedman) of the republican incumbent congresswoman representing Virginia congressional district ten, one over from my district, a political hack (Barbara Comstock) who votes with the faux president 97% of the time but is very exposed in her district which encompasses both the conservative farm country (and vineyards and horse country) far to the west of DC and also the liberal suburbs of McLean and parts of Fairfax county.  This was a satisfactory resolution to our acquiring a small sum of money, which clearly wasn't ours, by happenstance with no prospect of finding its owner, and I have already forwarded $12.43 to the democratic candidate, which represents one ten-thousandth of the amount of money the republican has taken in from the NRA.  My friend went back to work and I drove home, glad to have finally undertaken a baby step, with the help of my running friend, towards my return to running, the first real (sort of) run I've had since last April.

The World War One run

Last week a friend and I did a noontime run on the Mall in commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of America's entrance into WWI on April 6, 1917.  We started by chatting up another friend of mine outside my former workplace, who related to us the interesting story that he had a great-grandfather who won an Iron Cross as a German soldier in the Great War, and whose country showed its appreciation for his sacrifices by killing him and his family at a concentration camp during the next war due to his religion.  (Black Jack)

We ran by the Capitol where President Woodrow Wilson asked for and received from Congress a declaration of war against Germany, mere months after he won re-election largely on the slogan, He Kept Us Out of The War.  We stopped in at the Navy Memorial where I pulled up from its database the entry of my grandfather, a sailor in the Great War.  (An engine of the Great War)

We ran through Pershing Park downtown and stopped at General Pershing's statue there, depicting him at the Western Front as leader of the American Expeditionary Force.  Then we ran to the Ellipse, where we viewed the memorial honoring the 2d Division's service in the war, its men participating in the 3d Battle of the Aisne, Belleau Wood, the Chateau-Thierry campaign, St. Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the Aisne-Marne offensive and the occupation of the Rhine.  (The Indianhead Division)

Running past the World War II Memorial, we gave it a nod as that worldwide cataclysm was a direct result of the harsh peace imposed at the Treaty of Versailles which ended the War To End All Wars, with its unsustainable war reparations and its festering War Guilt clause imposed by the victors upon the vanquished.  Finally we ended our four-mile jaunt at the World War I Memorial on the Mall, honoring the District residents who served in World War One.  (Over There)

Running out October

After scaling back to 77.2 miles in September while running 22 days following my surgery in August, which bothered me a lot in September, I ramped it up in October and ran 24 times for a total of 128.5 miles.  Following a 30-mile week at the beginning of the month I took a whole week off to let my surgery fully heal and then only did 18 miles, and 16 miles, during the two middle weeks of the month when I came back.  (My early morning runs in rural North Carolina enabled me to record some beautiful sunrises.)

That seemed to do the trick, laying off for a week and cutting back my mileage when I came back, because the numbness and perennial ache "down there" finally started to fade somewhat and I didn't feel like I was straining my abdomen whenever I ran up steep hills, forcing me to walk those hills.  Who knew the surgery would take two months, not two weeks, to more or less almost fully heal.  (On runs I always try to stop and catch up with people I know when I encounter them.)

I finished out the month on a strong note with a week of 31 miles and 32 more miles the last four days of the month.  My pace picked up too, finally, and I started doing some reps with the barbells before and after each run.  (Running in North Carolina where I was working for Hillary, to obviously no effect.)

So now I am working towards getting back into the same shape as I was in when I was in a happy place with my running the day I went under the knife in August for outpatient surgery to repair two hernias.  However did I put on ten pounds in the meantime that I'm having a hard time shedding?  (I love fall running.)

This Week's Long Run

Seven miles was my plan for a long run this week.  Actually it's for next week because I already finished my five days of running for this week, and I ran 23 miles even though the running week doesn't finish till Saturday.  My long run for this week, or now, last week, was 5.6 miles, which I did twice.

So today, in 68 degree weather, I set out in the afternoon to do seven miles.  Which I did, by burning up a neighborhood mile first, then doing a large loop around the greater neighborhood and adding a mile on the W&OD Trail at the end.  The impetus to get going was shaky, as I was listening to my body talk to my brain the first mile, telling me my joints hurt, my breathing was ragged, and a mile would be a good output; it would count for entry in my weekly tally.

I kept going though and got all seven miles done.   I run alone these days because every single running partner I ever had has dropped away most due to moving away, a few to injury and a couple to inertia.  Since my surgery in the summer I've struggled with my weight and have bemoaned my dropped-away friendships but that's life, it's always moving forward towards inevitable and unavoidable change.

So now I'm carrying a ten-pound barbell every time I run these days.  However, that beats carrying the sixty-pound anvil I was carrying on runs when I was trying to come back from injury in 2011.  Running more (or harder) is only half of the equation though, next I'll have to address the other half of the equation by eating less (or better).