Running Hemispheres

Effective today, I'm no longer blogging about all my runs. I will instead be posting my mileage and workouts here. Why? 1. Too much time, not enough reward. 2. It's getting old. The entire blogosphere is getting old; it's like when you get a new bike for Xmas and one day you wake up and don't want to ride it anymore. I'm putting this thing in the shed for now. 3. I'd rather do other things with my time. This whole thing is one huge time hole and I'm starting to feel like an unpaid clown out to entertain bored people at work. I will write when the mood strikes me about whatever--especially major events like marathons or big races. I'll try to keep my mouth under some semblance of control and will keep my Dean/Penguin rants to a minimum since there's really nothing left to write about those people and their ilk anymore. Anything else to report? I aborted my workout last night. I ran 3 x 1 mile on the Betzwood wanting to do 8 x 1 . Things were moving along nicely. I ran a 5:20 uphill and only had a 156 HR pufnstuf at 10 seconds into the recovery; I mean life was sweetness. 3:00 rest and a 5:15 2nd mile with little effort on a 150 HR at 10 seconds--fabulous, wunderbar! At mile 3, my hamstring seized up like it's never seized up before. 5:23 for that with a 150 HR. I was in bad shape grabbing at my leg. I threw my mind at the problem. I became zen and I begged the spirit of Siddhartha at the craps table to descend upon me and throw my pain into a lockbox sunken deep in the Marina trench where the bubbly tectonic lava turns into steam. I even made a burnt offering to zeus right there on the Betzwood. The offering was my smelly 2-504 Airborne Infantry PT shirt with the paint stains and the race bib safety pin holes. But it was all for naught--I was let down by every spirit and deity worshiped since the beginning of time. I was on my own--as we always are left, like free-will puppets with a puppet master who's left the building. I hurt my hamstring in a bad way, you see. I limped back to my car, carrying my ancient ST Racer flats by their laces; they dangled like those limp puppets I was just telling you about. I'm icing it and disabling comments on this post because I don't want a fecal strata of "that sucks!" or "you suck!" from this "inflammatory" post. What about the sniper? Some kids have been shooting bikers and runners with pellet guns on the Betzwood Trail these past couple days. A cop was out there tonight under the overpass watching for them. Good golly if someone shoots me, I will low-crawl my ass to the next bush. I will employ every tactic I learned about snipers in all my manly chest-thumping Army schooling (the biggest thing is to wait them out...they will come out some time because every human has to piss, shit, and eat sometime--even the Jap ((major PC violation! $10.00 Orwell-predicted fine payable to your local state senator's office)) snipers during the Battle for Guadalcanal who tied themselves to trees ...every human is weak, this isn't one of Siddhartha's samanas out in the woods being ascetic for Buddha's sake, it's inevitably a zit-faced piece of shit with instant needs and no attention span whatsoever). If I get shot by these cretins, I will wait all day....into the night and find them. They are certainly kids; they will move. They belong to generation XYZABC; they are invariably, 2006 latchkey kids abandoned by greed-chasing parents off on their futile hunt for more things and a seven figure 401k, and so they have an attention span of one XBOX 360 life in Call of Duty. I will find them. I will hear them move and then I will haul ass--63 second 400 through-the-woods-ass--and grab them by the balls as I drag them to the cops at a leisurely float-200 pace. Of course it will be by the balls, the American boy balls, because only gun-worshiping, latchkey/male American juveniles do this shit. It's never girls and these type of things don't happen on the Swiss Wanderwegs. Did you forget something? Yes. Two nights ago, about 3am, I woke up to the sound of breaking glass. I stumbled around every room--Tippet following me 10-feet behind acting as my loyal and trusting guard dog--and didn't see anything broken. I laughed, thinking as I drifted off into a 3 am coma, that the Indian couple neighbors who yell and scream at each other every night in crazy, indecipherable Hindustani must have had one hell of a row. I mean, zeus, these people are at each other's throats 24/7. If I see the cantankerous man of that misogynistic household anywhere near a shovel and a patch of grass or a woodchipper, I'm calling the cops--lickety split. Well, it turns out, this thing--which was nowhere near the edge of the bookshelf that it was balanced on--decided to stand up on its own and crash to the floor in a million shards. I'm not making this up for theatrical effect. You who read this blog know I'm not into bauble at all and so I squirrel it all onto the top of my bookshelves in their back corners, out of sight and supposedly to prevent them from moving on their own to the floor. I may very well have a poltergeist what with my angst and my acerbic, misanthropic vitriol and all, or I may be sitting on some Pennsylvanian fault line: They do have fault lines in this area. And your watch? Symbolically, my watch, which has been with me since I was 225 pounds and ran a 3:45 marathon broke on me yesterday. In case you want to know the time, it is EEEEEE but the Es are backwards. The day doesn't progress, it's forever stuck to backwards E. It makes time management easy because I just tell people to schedule the meeting at backwards EEEEEE. Before this post started, you were speaking about absolutes? Yes, absolutes in this modern, day and age aren't worth a cup of coffee. People these days can't fathom the finality of 'forever.' Look at Roger Clemens? I am not 'signing off.' I'm not pulling the plug on this; I just want to write that I would like to do other things with my time instead of performing free Bozo acts across a few corporate monitors. Auf Wiedersehen!