Such a gray day on Saturday. It all blends together as big globs of clouds, but the history function at Weather Underground says it has been a week since I’ve seen the sun. I haven’t taken to putting hashmarks on the wall to keep track. Yet. But on the eighth day in a row of this I realized a few things. First, this is well-passed its sell date. Second, you need features in the foreground to make this backdrop pop:
I went to the movies Saturday, saw Logan, and did some other things, and watched the sky.
Sunday was a terrific improvement. The temperature snuck up into the mid-60s and the sun came out to play and it was otherwise, you know, a nice April day:
I went for a bike ride, a 43-miler that started to fall apart around mile 12 or so. There was a lot of up-and-down, and the up is always slower, even more so when you’re having a slow day in general. But the weather was nice and the views weren’t bad either:
And I looked up the first use of the words bicycle and velocipede in the impressive Hoosier State Chronicles — a digital newspaper program which is a terrific read. It isn’t complete, of course, but it is authoritative.
Aside from a few ads, here is the first mention, in The Hendricks County Union, on March 8, 1866:
The Hendricks County Union started out as the Danville Republicanin 1846 and took the Union name in 1864 when a returning Civil War colonel, Lawrence S. Shuler bought the rag. Shuler’s unit had fought in the Second Battle of Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and more. So newspapers probably seemed a breeze. He sold it the next year, though, and after a series of name and ownership changes and consolidations, the paper finally enjoyed a long run from 1890 until 1931 under one owner.
Then a World War I veteran bought what was called the Hendricks County Republican. Edward Weesner, who’d learned the business working on the Stars and Stripes, ran the shop until he died in 1974. His daughter, Betty Jean Weesner, had been working there for some time and took over. She was, says a Saturday Evening Post column, a Unitarian Democrat running a paper by then simply called The Republican. She graduated with a journalism degree from Indiana in 1951. She died this time last year. Her obituary says she never retired. The Republican was a two-person shop, a small-town weekly, and Weesner’s longtime assistant Barbara Robertson died a few weeks ago. It was also the oldest paper in the county, with roots back to the James K. Polk administration. You hope it comes back, but it would be a surprise if it did. This is one of the ways old newspapers die.
Meanwhile over in Vanderburg County, at the Evansville Journal, these two mention appear in the same column of miscellany on September 15, 1868:
Already, they were concerned with speed. Perhaps always they were.
The Evansville Journal started in 1834, The location of the original building, which was razed after a fire, seems to be a parking lot today. Apparently the paper had endured three fires over the decades. Finally, the Evansville Journal News building, would survive. It was one of those places built way out of town, until Main Street came to it. The two-story beaux-arts brick building with a limestone facade, circa 1910, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There’s a deli and ice cream joint in there now. The Journal was sold to the cross-town competition in the 1920s and lasted until about 1936 or so.
Here now is the Daily State Sentinel, with a local notice on September 30, 1868:
Twenty-five miles per hour! Much better than a carriage. Le Maire, of course, being French for “the mayor.” Mississippi Street was renamed Senate Avenue in 1895. Third Street, I am forced to assume, was also renamed. But I’m not sure when or to what. So I’m counting roads and if my guess is right the former site of Le Maire’s shop is not either a condo, a distillery, a parking lot or one of a series of apartment/business buildings. The provenance of the Daily State Sentinel dates back to 1840. The paper that became The Sentinel was originally The Indiana Democrat, and Spirit of the Constitution, this being firmly in the times when towns had more than one publication and representing a variety of political parties.
In fact, you probably remember hearing about the Copperheads during the American Civil War. The people that had this paper during that time — ownership was an almost-fluid thing in most newspapers back then — found themselves wrapped up in the Copperhead Trials. After more owners and changes to the masthead than you can count, the paper closed its doors for good in 1906, when it was known as the Indianapolis Sentinel. I haven’t yet discovered anything about monsieur Le Maire.
Finally this bit, which was published in the Daily Wabash Express on March 13, 1869. It was in rebuttal to something that ran in an Indianapolis paper, and I believe this part was an excerpt of the first piece. Either way, we’re settling on terms and facts here, in 1869, and that’s just charming:
This paper also has roots to 1841, but it became the Daily in the 1850s. A few years after this, the ancestor of this paper would boast one of the first female editors in the state. Mary Hannah Krout is, in fact, credited as the first woman to edit a major daily in the state. She did that for about six years before going to Chicago, and then covered the revolution in Hawai’i and wrote from London and China, as well. She was a prominent suffragist and wrote eight or nine books, too. The paper would stick around until April 29, 1903.
We went for a bike ride on Saturday. We set out with a bike club friend, who offered us a route south of town or another one that he hadn’t yet written down. And then there were the choices of which hills and which direction you wanted to go. So we chose the southern route, because who has time to write down turn-by-turn directions? And we picked the counter-clockwise route, because there were rolling hills this way or one big hill that way. So we chose what we chose and then our bike club friend realized, oh, yes, there’s this hill, too.
That’s the thing about hills. You never realize them in their intensity or in count when you aren’t actually on them.
So on the last big hill our friend, Stephen, was just in front of me and he said “Oh, yes, this hill, too. This is the worst hill on this route.”
And I said that, at the top of the climb, he would get to explain that to The Yankee, who was just a bit behind me. And after four-and-a-half miles uphill from there … he said just that. Our bikes pointed uphill for about six or seven miles today, according to the map.
Still looked fresh on our way home, though:
Last night I spent the evening hanging out with The Black Cat:
It rained a lot yesterday. I read a lot. It was a good day.
Found this today. In 1897 there was a huge cycling convention in Chicago. The Indianapolis News included this art with their January 23rd story.
There were seven bicycle factories in Indianapolis at the time the story was written, a time when the reporter felt it important to list how many “electric lights” were going to be burning — 25,000. The story ranges all over, talking of upcoming six-day races, a national meeting in St. Louis and objections by the good people of Baltimore to an ordinance outlawing coasting. It also discusses the possibility of a continuous road between New York and Chicago within 10 years. So 1907. That didn’t happen, obviously. Back in Chicago, the biggest turnout of the week was to see the women’s race, a two-hour derby where the racers covered 41 miles on a track. And it mentions the quarter-mile world record. This was a standing start event and, at the time, it was held by a John S. Johnson, who set the record in Iowa in 1893 at 28 seconds.
No one really does this distance anymore. But, the Internet tells me that Francois Pervis set the most recent world record for the 1000-meter distance from a standing start.
Someone calculated his splits and estimated that his 400-meter time would be approximately 25.754 seconds. You figure if he’d set out to do 400 meters that’d change his race and he could perhaps go a bit faster, so maybe he gets down close to 25 flat, let’s say. But, to me, that makes Johnson’s time all the more impressive. He was 120 years behind on the technology — no true aero position or a skin suit or wind tunnel training — and his time is not far off. Shame there’s no video of that on YouTube.
adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Notes that end the winter, and start the spring 20 Mar 17
It is the first day of spring, when everything should be new and possible, or impossibly new. It has been cold and damp and gray, because we have no respect for meteorological certainties.
But things are blooming on the ground. Last week, in the snow, the carefully installed pansies and daffodils were bent over low by a wet snow. And while that stuff is gone, the dampness is hanging over and clinging to us. The chill is made downright cold because of the damp, and upgraded to demoralizing based on the gray skies, because the gradient suggests it will never ever change.
So, on this, the weekend that prefaces spring, we had a dismaying end to winter. As for the winter itself, mild. Not so bad. A few harsh and cold days here and there and just a few small snow showers to hide from. It was, as they say, a mild one. But it has persisted enough, and the new has not yet begun with the proper zeal required by my discriminating tastes. (Rain today. Pleasant tomorrow. It is a fickle start to the season.)
So, on Saturday, I stayed inside and worked on a puzzle:
I received three puzzles at Christmastime. And I said they would be terrific winter weekend projects. As I am officially over the season, and the season has yet to be over itself, I am puzzling in protest. This is Declaration of Independence. I did the borders first, and then the historically accurate doodles along the bottom — Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Franklin. Then I slowed down as I worked on the signatures, because I went back to this book. It was also a gift a few years ago, about the origins and fates of the 56 men who signed the broadside.
And, of course I had a helper:
So that was Saturday. And yesterday, we actually saw the sun. It was the second time in a week, and such an exceptional occurrence that I’m now counting the times it happens each week. And I go outside. So, yesterday afternoon, a bike ride:
First one of the year. Felt like it, too!
Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on Feeling the flurries 13 Mar 17
I’ve posted three or four photos this month which suggest that spring is on the way. Meteorologically, it is. But then today, this:
That is the same tree I shot in one of the early spring pictures. The second one, I believe. That feeling of seasonal goodwill has been delayed just a bit. Today, this:
But it doesn’t hurt the morale. The little bit of damp snow, I mean. It gives a nice juxtaposing on the landscaping:
Though, I’ll grant you this sort of thing would have looked better in December or January:
This isn’t something you just do on a whim. There are many things in life that you do on a whim, but a marathon, to me at least, is not one. No, this required a training plan, careful attention to laying it out and then the studious care to follow at least some of it, until you get tired of that and just kind of find yourself waiting for the thing to be here and then wonder how you’ll hold up, right up until the first 14 or so miles.
And that run-on sentence was pretty indicative of my training. We started in November, just as I was getting over a two-week head cold and the weather turned. We started precisely then, in fact. And I followed along with the big parts of the workouts as my schedule and ambition allowed. I made it up to the 18-mile run, anyway, and then had no energy the next week for the 20-miler and then got sick and then it was time to taper in advance of the big run, which was yesterday.
And so there it was, at 6:30 a.m. in California, on a morning that saw the forecasts call for more rain and cold the closer we got, getting off of a school bus just as the rain stopped.
The race director welcomed us, another individual offered an invocation of sorts and a local man worked his way through the national anthem. All of this time we intrepid runners stood shivering, trying to stay loose, or get loose. And I refused to think about the 26.2 miles in front of me by, instead, being happy I didn’t have to swim first. At least, I smiled to myself, I wasn’t going to drown out here.
We found ourselves here because The Yankee has a group of fitness friends and they occasionally take a ladies trip to some run or triathlon of some sort. And this time the boys got invited. So there were four women, all lovely people, and two guys. And only the one of us, me, running. I’m not saying I got tricked into this. Not at all. I am saying that when I volunteered to run a marathon with my wife — in solidarity, as you do — in October or November this seemed like a more chivalrous idea. And I assumed there’d be some guys from this group running, too. But that’s OK, some 3,000 other people were taking part, we’ve already divvied up the glory enough.
So we set off under the starting line inflatable at 7 a.m. It was in the low 30s. We were due to run a significant part of the Napa Valley, which is beautiful country and is surrounded on both sides by big hills and small mountains. And in some of those you could see the snow falling. The snow stayed up in the hills, at least. The snow did. But we’ll get to that.
Because we were running on a road and because part of the course was closed to motorists, but not all of it was, people couldn’t run with headphones. That’s not my habit, but many people use them, and the absence of their music or podcasts or ambient tree frog noise recordings could make for a long, boring morning. So people run with friends or, as I learned in the Napa Valley Marathon, they make friends along the way. There’s something of a “We’re all in this together vibe” in my part of the race, which is to say, near the back.
A nice older man from down around Oakland ran with me from mile six or so until mile 14. We had a perfectly entertaining chat, and somehow I can now jog at a reasonable pace and keep up my end of a brief conversation. (The people that can do that mystify me, and that they can annoys me. But suddenly here I was, doing it, too.) He told me all about the marathons he’s run, one in Utah he hopes to do one day to qualify for Boston and he told me about his daughter’s road races. All the while he kept complaining about how this run was hurting him, so many hills and so early in the season and so on. Things he was certainly saying just for my benefit. I didn’t ask his name, or even think to look at his race number so I could look him up later. I just assumed it would come up. Then I took a little stop at the mile-14 aid station and never saw him again. And, in some part of my mind, in the quiet and lonely miles that followed, I reckoned I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this man I’d been running with was a ghost. Or, maybe, if I made it to the finish line I’d see some creaky old man in a wheelchair point a bony finger at me and wink, just a bit. And then I would realize that this man’s younger spirit was who I was running with. And that I was also in a 1980s television show.
You think up weird stuff when you’re out there sucking wind for too long by yourself, is what I’m saying.
Let’s talk about what fell from the sky. Sometime after I lost my not-at-all non-corporeal running buddy sleet descended from the clouds above. Now, I learned several years ago that walking around in sleet is an utterly demoralizing thing. Running in sleet, however, was kind of grimly humorous. See, one of the ladies in our group had been kind enough to pick up a few cheap sweatshirts for us to use early and discard without having to lose any expensive cold-weather running gear that we hadn’t packed for this trip anyway. It was a thoughtful gesture and my sweatshirt was so nice that I didn’t want to abandon it at an aid station. Besides, once I get warm I’m warm. So long as I keep moving and keep my heart rate up I’m fine. This even works in genuinely cold weather, as I learned in a training run earlier this year when my sweaty hair froze together on a seven-mile jog. But in this run I’d get warm, and then cold, and then warm again, and then cold again. And then the sleet came. We’ll come back to the meteorological happenings.
This race was offered as a good race for the beginning marathoner. You climbed, the literature said, only 99 feet over 26.2 miles and it had a net decent overall. That’s what the propaganda said. That’s what the lies said. Running, you learn pretty early on, is full of lies. The most basic, the worst one and the most frequently uttered lie is “Almost there!” But that’s a story for another day.
It was a fine run, and the scenery was lovely. I took a selfie, and then a guy happened along and offered to take one that wasn’t as good:
That’s an important spot because every step after that was going to be a new personal best. This was how I calculated the day: I knew I could work my way up to 18 miles. And at 18 I could use this glow of a new personal best for at least two miles. Well, after that, its just six more miles, a simple 10K. I can run a 10K with no trouble.
Can I do that after having already run three other 10Ks? That’s the question.
Well, the one thing the propaganda had right was that it is a lovely course, and not bad for beginners. You finally run out of the hills, for the most part, around mile seven. But the problem was the angle of the roads. You found yourself weaving all over both lanes just looking for some flat place to shuffle in the curved banking of the road. Dear California Department of Transportation and the Unified Union of Napa Valley Road Unionists, please give my poor, already-tired feet some place flat to land. That staggering from left to right (the first half of the course was on a closed course and these twisting roads lasted almost that long) was probably how I added the extra half-mile to my run. Because, no, 26.2 miles wasn’t enough for me.
The views though:
And that is after the road had flattened out, when the sun finally peeked out, I’d almost given out and the views were thinning out. So, if you must run a marathon, you could do worse than the Napa Valley Marathon.
I never caught back up with the ghostly friend I’d made. Mostly because the orange slices at the mile-14 aid station were just too good. You know how that goes, you’re approaching some stage of out-of-your-mind hunger and everything is amazing. I stood there scarfing down these slices of oranges a kid is cutting right in front of me and I’m saying things like “Is this orange on some special diet? I bet this orange is juicing! Is there EPO in this? You cut such a good orange! What do you mean this is just a navel orange? I, sir, have had navel oranges in my day and those things are dry, drab slabs of boring fruit flesh compared to what you have so thoughtfully offered me today. I commend you, and the parents who brought you here today, and my family shall sing songs to your produce wizardy generations hence!”
I can’t imagine how the guy I was running with managed to get away from me.
But, around mile 20, just about the time I took the scenic picture above, right as I was bored thinking about how every step was now a new personal best, I caught up with Cristina:
I passed her, she passed me, I passed her again and, for a moment I thought it was going to be like that to the end, which would have been no fun at all. But Cristina, you see, was really suffering. Her knee was hurting — I looked at her times after the race and she had been hustling — and she was really limping it back in.
I happened to be carrying some Ibuprofen for just such an occasion and offered some to her. She asked what dosage they were and I knew I had a friend. So I decided to run with her a bit, because you could see the pain on her face and I thought maybe I could distract her for a while. Soon after, we passed her husband and a few friends who were cheering her on. She waved at them and said, “He gave me Ibuprofen!” She was running on grit.
Which meant I was invested. So I spent two or three miles trying to say every inane and long-winded thing I could think of to keep her mind off of her leg. Cristina told me she was a nurse and that she thought she might have torn her meniscus midway through the day. She had just had a child and her husband works in the oil industry and she really wanted me to drop her and press on. But I refused. I gently goaded her on, not that she needed it much, because she was determined to not get on the support van, no matter how badly her knee hurt, and her knee hurt. She wanted me to run on without her, but I’d walk a few paces with her instead and then start jogging again, so she would, too. “You’re from Texas,” I said, “and I’m from the South, so you’ll appreciate this, but we’re going to the line together and you’re finishing first.”
She’d run and then she’d have to walk and she would ask me to go on, but I wasn’t interested. We passed a few people and she’d walk and then she’d look at her watch and she’d shuffle and run some more.
And then, at the 25-mile sign, she got a surge of energy and the pain went away and she ran, she just about flew, and that was awesome. And then it started hailing on us.
Hail. Really quite big hail. Of a size that, you’d see it falling around you and think, “That’s going to sting in a minute when it hits me.” And then you think, “You know, back home, when it hails this time of year you shouldn’t be outside.” And then you’d think, “That’s an awful lot of hail on the road. This is going to become a slippery hazard in a minute.” And by then you’re bracing for some big chunks of ice to hit you and hurt. And one hit the bill of my cap, but I didn’t feel any more pieces hit me in the last mile. And it hailed a great deal.
Cristina finished strong and gave me a hug and I said something about how she did a great job getting through it. I wish I remembered precisely what I said, because you want that to be meaningful, but I was also wondering whether I could continue to stand up. I’ll have to look her up later and ask about her knee.
Meanwhile, also running, the coolest person in the marathon:
We’d run together for the first few miles and then we got separated in a big clutch of people. I expected to outpace her by a small amount anyway, so I continued on. She said she didn’t lose sight of me until around the 10th mile, which must have meant a great bunch of splits for her. I was running below my training averages for the first 20 miles, at least. Anyway, I’d just gathered my wits about me in time to see her finish, which was easily the best part of my day.
I think she said at one point “I never want to do that again.” If that holds up that’s fine, she pretty well crushed the thing her first time out.
So, naturally, we’ll soon begin training for a full triathlon which is anchored by, yep, a full marathon.
That’s the course we ran. Oh, one of her training friends broke the four-hour mark, which is a sign of impressive accomplishment in the marathon. Another said she realized it wasn’t a day to press and proceeded to have a lovely run which, to me at least, is the point. And the other was looking for a Boston Marathon qualifying time. She hurt her foot a bit, so she missed out on that. (This time.) But get this, she hurt her foot, stayed in a medical tent for 20 minutes and still set a new personal record. That is, hands down, even more impressive to me, than hitting a qualifying time. So everyone, you see, was successful. And now everyone is sore and pleased with themselves.
I had a cheeseburger for lunch yesterday and a salad for dinner. I ran a marathon that morning.
