running


27
Nov 17

Back at it today

We made it back home yesterday. No one was more pleased than her:

She’s such a great traveler. We don’t let her in the driver’s seat, but she splits her time napping in the back and cuddling whoever the passenger is at the time. She’ll look out the windows, the big trucks either intrigue her or freak her out, but she’s very calm about the whole thing. When we slow down, she perks up a bit. Maybe we’re there. But if you think about a long drive, there’s a lot of disappointment in that as the defining characteristic.

We hang the left and then the right into the neighborhood, though, we hit a roundabout and you start doing that crawling neighborhood speed and she knows something is up. She’s up in the windows checking everything out. You’d think she thinks she recognizes it, but she only knows these views by the way of the windshield. She’s an inside cat.

But then you hit the garage door, turn into the drive and then she knows and this patient passenger turns into a dashboard diva.

It sorta works against her. She wants out of the car — through the windshield if need be — but climbing up there hampers her exit from the Magic Moving Box.

We ran a turkey trot this weekend:

The Yankee won her age group. I won my age group.

This was the course, which I ran in the wrong shoes, because I realized about two hours into the drive, that I’d forgotten my running sneakers. So I ran it in my walking sneakers.

They are walking sneakers for a reason: they were lousy running sneakers.

On our drive back we found some cotton fields that hadn’t been harvested yet. We, of course, had to stop for pictures:

I wonder why it was still in the fields. People that passed by probably wondered the same about us, though.


25
Oct 17

“Have you seen any . . . Martians?”

I produced a podcast today. Actually I just ran the board for it, but some people use those words interchangeably. They shouldn’t — and I’m on a mission to civilize! — but they do. I simply sat behind an Axia console and made sure the levels were consistent and the computer was recording. I did this because the students who normally do it couldn’t join the production today, so I sat with the dean and his two guests from another part of the university:

And they talked about Orson Welles — Indiana University possesses what is believed to be the most extensive collection of Welles performances — and, specifically, the War of the Worlds. You can hear the show here:

And you can find the whole collection here.

After work there was just time enough for a cold evening run:

I’ve found it takes about three-quarters of a mile to run off the initial chill. I’ve found that there’s a particular dip in the path behind the house where the cold air coming off the creek pushes up out of the trees and drops the temperature by about five degrees. And I’ve found that I can run in shorts and a t-shirt, but I’m going to be using gloves a lot.


23
Oct 17

And how was your weekend?

We went to a soccer game on Saturday night. It was the last game of the regular season for the Hoosiers, who are looking to make a postseason run to their ninth national championship. And on this last night Indiana and the Spartans played shutout soccer for 90 minutes.

And then they played 10 minutes of a tense overtime.

And then they played nine more minutes of a second overtime. In the final moment, IU looked to capitalize on another set piece with the freshman Mason Toye lined up a direct kick:

I knew he was going to put the game-winner in and run right to my camera. It’s a skill.

We went for a run on Saturday, this was The Yankee’s first run since her Ironman. (She’s ahead of a mere mortal’s schedule.) It was short, but it was fast. She’s passing me and blurry!

So I mentioned fall is here. Just in case it disappears in 15 mintues, here are a few photographs:

You can never really capture autumn:

It never keeps us from trying. It’s a vain attempt to forestall winter, a desperate ego, that wants more sunshine and warmth.

Or is that just me?

Today, it was raining, and this evening was a perfect time for a 2.65 mile neighborhood run.‬ I’m documenting this because it won’t be long, now, before I’ll be missing days like this:


11
Aug 17

I could have used some water out by the river

I did that thing today where you look out of the window of your ninth-floor hotel room and see a nice little park below and think That’s where I’ll jog today. So it was a good thing when I packed my running shoes the night before last, really.

So I put on said shoes and the appropriate clothing and went out to the park. I figured I would do a few laps until I got in my three miles. It’d be a bit repetitious, but I’m in a park in a city I’ve only just arrived in and how badly can you get lost or otherwise out of sorts?

First I ran to the right. I quickly found I ran out of sidewalk space. OK, that’s one boundary. So I turned around, retraced a few steps and set off across the length of the park. The sidewalk in this park didn’t cover one route. There were turns and forks and the like. I managed to take all of the correct turns and, soon, I was down by the river, whereby I remembered my geography. I’m in Omaha, which is in eastern Nebraska. Which means this must be the Missouri River and that, over there, is Iowa.

Down on the river’s edge I met another jogger who told me how to get to the pedestrian bridge and then I ran to Iowa. This is the view on the bridge, over the Missouri. Nebraska is on your right, Iowa on the left:

By now I figure that I have to run at least a little ways into Iowa to make this count, so I did a mile. Here’s some evidence of that:

And at this point I figure, things feel pretty good, I’ll just keep running in the midday sun and make this a 10K. That’s 6.2 miles to you and me. I did that right about here, where the thought occurred to me that, this part of Iowa and Nebraska, looks like a lot of places I’ve seen:

So I’m on this really nice, but ultimately very quite trail, when I see, in the distance and around the bend, the top of a bridge that might be worth checking out. So I figured me and my sweaty shadow would just keep jogging:

I am in Council Bluffs, Iowa at this point. And the rules are, there are no rules:

Finally I round the bend and see the bridge. This is the Illinois Central Missouri railroad bridge. The original Omaha bridge was built in 1893, but what we see today dates to 1908:

And this is a double swing bridge. Each of the rotating spans are 521 feet long. I’m standing on the railroad tracks in Iowa looking back into Nebraska here. The Iowa side of the bridge remains open these days for river navigation. That’s why it is sideways:

The river through here was dredged in the 1940s, and a fire in the 1970s meant the eastern side, the Iowa side, couldn’t operate under its own power. They opened and closed the bridge with a bulldozer and cable after that. Here are some of the gears that would move the Iowa portion:

The bridge was shut down in 1980, but the tracks could be pressed back into service if necessary. Here is a panorama of the Iowa side of the bridge. Click to open the full-sized version in another window.

And this, standing in Iowa and looking west, is the Nebraska side of the bridge and shoreline:

And then, of course, I had to run back to Nebraska. Here’s my view from near the center of that pedestrian bridge I crossed over, this time looking upstream. Nebraska is on your left and Iowa is on your right:

And, finally, the last piece of evidence of my two-state run, the actual map:

I’ve run across a state line before, but that was in a triathlon and by design, not on a 10K impulse. I do not know what is happening.


31
Jul 17

Hello leg muscles

I went for my first bike ride in a while on Saturday. It was hard in the way that the usual becomes hard after too much time off. I’d been fighting off a mild respiratory or sinus thing for a bit and then a separate throat thing and we were in a hot spell and I didn’t have to ride, so I didn’t. But, I thought Saturday, maybe I should have anyway.

And then yesterday afternoon I returned to the untied sneaker exercises:

It had been three or four weeks since my last ride and a great deal longer since my last run. And that wasn’t easy, either. It wasn’t hard so much as slow and full of the usual aches and pains you forget about in the early part of a run. But the weather was nice and the scenery was lovely:

If you run slow, you see it longer, that’s what I always say:

I say that a lot, because I’m slow. And my run was slow, but today, my walk might have been just a touch slower, too.