Cruising

I cruised 8 miles Saturday morning while my club ran a track workout (I am self-prohibited from doing these for the time being).

Should I really feel this good? It was in the mid to high 40's at the start and I just motored along pushing the HRM up in the 140's. My legs are starting to respond to the prohibition of intervals and anything else too hard. They are feeling pretty good. I still have a few tweaks but who doesn't at this point of the game? I mean I am 61. Knuckle-baller Joe Niekro died yesterday at age 61. Who am I kidding?

From now on it's LSD and sub-tempo for the bulk of my training. I will do a test AT run when I think things are right.

I have nothing to lose seeing how far I can go. The other path certainly hasn't worked.

I am thinking of making this blog less of a running diary and more of a personal diary. Can my few very few readers stand that? Just writing about running is getting monotonous. I look at other blogs and I realize that incomparison to them I am just not that nice of a person. There is a darkness to me that derfines what I am and why certain peiople are drawn to me. I will never be a "kiss the girls and hug them" sort of guy. Joeness is an attempt to mask this and see if I can be something else. I told Dimitri I need a break or a down week from Joeness every now and then because I have to recover. It is just too far away from the core of what makes me what I am.

Of course a Xanax makes me pretty mellow to everyone but myself. I keep them around just in case i need to be nice. otherwise, I am what I am. At best I have a flexible morality. I am not as bothered by things that others consider immoral. I believe in people's right to freedom and not interfering with that right but I also believe that if I have to influence or spin things to get a necessary outcome, I will do this.

Running is pure in a way. The fastest wins. Simple. But if you are the fastest you had better enjoy it while it is there because age and time will rob you of this and so there had better be a another reason for your happiness. I still enjoy running (blah..blah...blah) but so many of my friends try to define my running by my being faster than someone else. That never was the definition of running as far as I was concerned. It has always been just being able to run that has defined the experience. At the beginning of running I always knew two things. One is that I would get much faster (and I did) and also that eventually I would get slower again (and I am doing that too). So today as I tooled around the West Valley Campus at an 8 minute mile pace it felt the same as when I used to run at a 6:30 pace. I felt fast and smooth and strong. But it didn't make me want to race. I just enjoyed the process.

At breakfast, after the run today, the talk was of heart disease and high school runners (coached by several of my buddies). Not much about us. Our running seems to no longer be the focal point.

Running is something we do. The fast running is done by others or we talk about dying. Not directly but indirectly. It's starting. Pretty soon all we'll be talking about is dying. I am just not there yet. The last time I looked I was still alive and ticking and running.