35 minutes on parts of the course down around miles 13-15 as well as near Howard Dean's humble, grass-roots mansion. There's a fog over the area and it reminds me of 19th Century London. The Ripper and the Lopper are out there somewhere, so I turned back at 17 minutes. But I did run past the corner where the Skirack henchmen, like those guys from the 2nd level of Double Dragon, will be waiting for me with their headbands and their big ass tire irons. ----------------------------- There's nothing like entering the Kingdom of Vermont from Route 149. You cross through run-down sections of New York, where billboards tell people that smoking crack while pregnant will kill two people and where emaciated young men with large beards spend their upstate New York heroin highs sitting on rocking chairs on old dilapidated porches. They stare at Suburban upon Suburban of New Jerseyites on three-day weekend get-aways passing quickly through these sad, rotting towns. You cross the border into Vermont and everything changes. The welcome center serves free Green Mountain coffee (blueberry flavor too!); the volunteers there, clad in socks n' Birkenstocks, smile from behind thick glasses offering anything to you and Carl Kasell's baritone voice booms at you from the bathroom speakers proclaiming that Bush sucks, the war's a damn mess, and the world's going to hell in handbasket. Occasionally on VT-22A you get to see the last dairy farmer in North America and his two sons, but they are harder and harder to spot because their collapsing barn is now at an acute angle and is being masked by the new age sculpture studio that was errected by the transplanted New Jersey artist with the small Volvo and the large inheritance. --------------------------------------------------- I'm getting ready to support next year's Healthy Kidney 10k--big time--by embarking on that same, miserable journey across the wilds of New Jersey and up the Hudson. Accordingly, I fully expect to pull the plug on the blog for the next few days. Thanks to those of you who left well-wishes and advice. The weather looks to be improving somewhat. The winds are down to 5mph, but the temps have gone up with the humidity in check. This is manageable if it holds and might cause me to re-evaluate my race strategy once again.