Raining like hell. Had a bad night after a long and unsatisfying conversation with a friend. At a loss as how to help them or myself. Only thing that will help after the big cup of dark roast is to lace up and light out. Have to go shoot some runners later, shoot as in photograph. So now is the time. But the rain is hard and cold and I have meeting to go to, as well as words coming. On the back of my tech shirt from Run in the Country it says in big white letters “There is no such thing as bad weather, only soft people.” Bill Bowerman of Oregon Track fame said that. And he should know…he coached some of the best to their best. Oh look, the rain has slackened and I ain’t no softie(sometimes). Time to go.

Whenever I stop running everyday for whatever reason I find it difficult to start up again. My bent is to make it into some grand scheme in need of complex strategies and tactics. My friend Bob told me something that made sense…Get your ass out and run!  In the end, that’s the deal. Ran today for an hour. Come tomorrow I will get up and do it again( Jackson Browne reference). I have the idea to think about base building, just running, for the next two months and let my body readjust to all the surgeries, both medical and age related…meaning getting older and slower means re-adjusting what one can do and how fast one can get to a certain point. Come the new year, if the running has happened, when the running happens, I will pick an event to aim for, maybe Napa, maybe Austin maybe New Zealand, and then in celebration I will eat ice cream and put an end to the darkness and chaos in my life that ice cream’s absence brings. (paraphrasing Don Kardong)

Gonna run later. These words,”famous last words” my father used to say quietly, accompanied by a small “not again” shake of his head, much to my constant irritation; up to and including this morning. Of course he wasn’t here but the words, oh my, those words. It was a morning after not much sleep, a kitchen calamity involving both the automatic coffee machine and the fuzzy headed coffee maker along with the added benefit of a shower of muesli from the not properly closed cereal bin. After a small clean up of spilled coffee(not really possible to spill coffee when is being made in a closed container that requires only that the water is in the tank, the coffee is ground and in the filter which is in the filter holder and the cover is closed..except that it is…it has something to do with not putting the carafe under the drip spout, which doesn’t drip until the carafe top compresses it and then, voila, coffee on the counter top) and a “good vacuuming” of the kitchen at 4:22 AM, it was time to run. Said he, me that is, gonna run in a few minutes, gonna check my email. Not much there so I thought to get on top of the photo editing that needed doing and so I did. Well I did get to the editing after I straightened up the bookshelf behind the desk. Then I got a phone message in my email from the cell phone I left upstairs when I came down to my office to edit. It reported to me ( no shaking head here except mine) that I had blown a 7:00 meeting which I was supposed to lead. Not running yet, as you can see. Went, made apologies, came back finished the editing, it’s now later and there is no running still. Gonna lift instead and run twice as long tomorrow. Except for the tomorrow part it is a good plan. Can’t make up “missed” miles you can only run the miles you run which means instead of a rest day this weekend there will be consecutive running days. And so it goes…