{"id":573889384,"date":"2017-01-30T22:42:28","date_gmt":"2017-01-31T04:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573889384"},"modified":"2017-02-01T16:09:28","modified_gmt":"2017-02-01T22:09:28","slug":"photos-from-the-weekend-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2017\/01\/30\/photos-from-the-weekend-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Photos from the weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I crossed this creek just after mile two, when there was the coming promise of my calf loosening up and the mistaken belief I could stay warm. It felt like 20\u00b0 when I started. Small ponds have a thin skin of ice on them. I ran 18 miles. I do not know what is happening. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/jan17\/jan34.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>It was right after this that I wrote this joke about the buzzards and hawks flying overhead It was a treatise on gallows humor, but I was only three miles into my run and that was a little too early for that sort of thing. Three is a warmup, I had 15 to go. Also, at the end, I got to track my miles. I&#8217;m doing a year-long challenge and the app says there are some 100,000 participants now. Look where I am: <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/jan17\/screencap.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Not bad for January. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d topped the penultimate hill right around 13.1 miles, which equaled the most I&#8217;d ever run. And I was close to home, but still had some ground to cover. So I went into a downhill stretch telling myself, over and over, to hold this pace. Hold this pace. <\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t much, but it was jogging. Until the downhill became too steep, when I had to walk a bit on weary, unsteady legs. But I felt good because each step was a new record and I knew, I insisted, I was going to jog UP the last hill &#8212; a hill long and steep enough I can&#8217;t sprint its entirety on my bike &#8212; and there was no way I was cheating myself out of that. I was determined. Besides, by the time I reached that last hill I&#8217;d be about three miles from done and you can do anything for three miles. <\/p>\n<p>So up that last hill I jogged, and I was then making bargains with myself, and building strategies to finish this thing. There were places to cut it short, but I was setting personal bests with each step and you don&#8217;t end that early. You can do anything for three miles. Which was an argument I began losing in mile 16. And then I couldn&#8217;t find my turn and it was cold and I&#8217;d been doing this, pretty badly mind you, but doing it, for hours. And then right at mile 17 I saw this and risked bending over for it. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/jan17\/jan35.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>This chunk of cheap molded plastic is the battleship from the board game of the same name and it was in the road at the church near the house. I could be inside in a quarter of a mile, and I wanted to be, because mile 15 was weary and slow and mile 16 might have been worse. But I had to run to 18. So I squeezed this plastic battleship in my double-gloved hand and said &#8220;I am running the last mile.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>And I did.<\/p>\n<p>I wasn&#8217;t even especially sore the next day.<\/p>\n<p>It snowed yesterday. We took Allie The Black Cat into the backyard:<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/jan17\/jan36.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>She walked around on the deck. She prowled around on the handrail and snooped under the grill cover and slinked around in the yard a bit. She did this several times:<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/jan17\/jan37.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I crossed this creek just after mile two, when there was the coming promise of my calf loosening up and the mistaken belief I could stay warm. It felt like 20\u00b0 when I started. Small ponds have a thin skin of ice on them. I ran 18 miles. I do not know what is happening. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573889384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday","category-photo","category-running"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573889384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573889384"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573889384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573889387,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573889384\/revisions\/573889387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573889384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573889384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573889384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}