We started a community-driven 5k series this evening. This required running a 5K. Just right out of the gate, first night of the series, they expect you to run.
Well I’ve got news for them. This was my fifth run of the entire calendar year (and one of those other four was with a suitcase and backpack in tow) and it looked like it. Critically, it felt like it.
The good news is that there are three or four more events in the series during which I can redeem myself and shave a good, solid, 15 seconds off the incredible slow time I offered tonight. But, hey, at least it hurt a lot!
The problem — as ever with running — is that I don’t enjoy it to the degree that I want to do it enough to get back to aging-guy-average. But that’s what it will take to challenge the guy who’s 20 years my junior and making it look easy. This problem isn’t going to solve itself, I suppose.
These sorts of problems often don’t.
It occurs to me that the easiest way to solve that problem is to simply steal that guy’s sneakers.
Here’s another look at the blooms on the lovely purple-leaf sand cherry (prunus x cistena). Enjoy them before they are going.
We really should be engineering a bush or tree that flowers throughout the growing season. Do we have those already? A lab should make them if not. I would have them installed as borders surrounding the property, so that they could be admired from every vantage point.
More signs of life. This is going to go from a pile of sticks to a hydrangea in about the same amount of time it took for me to run 5 kilometers.
Those things really are remarkable. Hard rains and heat and then more hard rains got to them last year. But they just keep growing merrily along. This year we may even prune them on time.
This is our last video from California.
I’m just kidding, there’s still at least a week of nice stuff to work through. But this is the last of the big views.
This is the Bixby Bridge, built in 1932, and the northernmost part of our trip.
Before this bridge was built, Big Sur residents were particularly isolated in the winter. The Old Coast Road a dozen miles away was often closed. This bridge, the longest concrete arch span in the state and, at the time, the highest single-span in the world, came in under budget.
How did they build this bridge in the 1930s? Aliens. But how did those 1930s aliens do it?
Construction took 15 months, beating the two-lane highway, itself an 18-year project, by a half decade. More than 300,000 board feet of Douglas fir timber was used to support the arch during construction. It took two months to construct the falsework alone.
They excavated 4,700 cubic yards of earth and rock and more than 300 tons of reinforcing steel were shipped in by train and narrow one-lane roads. They chose cement because it looked better and was more durable in the elements. That decision required 45,000 sacks of cement, zipped across the river canyon on cable and slings.
The arch ribs are five feet thick at the deck and nine feet thick where they join the towers at their base. The arches are four and one-half feet wide.
In our next videos, we’ll see some more aquatic creatures. It’ll be beautiful, great fun. Come back tomorrow to check it out.
And if anybody complains about their running sneakers disappearing, I have a perfectly sound alibi.
