Author Archives: Mark P

The year of running well

Posted on by

I was not athletic in high school. In fact, the only time I was ever sentenced to study hall was when I had completely skipped out on sports the previous quarter. I started running a little when I graduated, but not consistently. That was back when running shoes were canvas uppers with gum rubber soles that wore out in a couple of months.

I ran sporadically through college, but started more enthusiastically when I was hired as a reporter in Augusta, Ga. I laid out a course out three miles and then back. I started by running as far as I could and then walking a little. My practice was to run and walk, to keep going until the six miles was done, no matter how long it took.

Eventually I was able to run the whole six miles without stopping, but not very quickly. An eight-minute mile was my pace.

When I quit in 1976, I rode my motorcycle out to Lake Tahoe to visit Tom, my old college roommate. I stayed for a year and a half. That’s where I bought my first serious pair of running shoes, the famous Nike Waffle Trainers, when Tom and I went down to San Francisco.

Early in the summer of 1977 I saw an ad for the Silver State Marathon, to be run around Labor Day just north of Carson City around Washoe Lake. My regular run was six miles, which is not enough to train for a marathon, so I upped the mileage. By the end of the summer I had done a 20-mile run without dying, so I figured I could do the marathon.

Tom decided at the last minute to come with me. It took him a while to get ready, so I was a little late. They were just lining up for the start when we pulled into the park, so I jumped out of the car and run up to the back of the pack, just in time to cross the start line.

About halfway through the race I felt a rock in the heel of my shoe, so I stopped to take it out. I couldn’t find anything. I kept running, but still felt the rock. I stopped and took off my sock a couple of times, but couldn’t find anything. I finished the race with the stone in my shoe. It turned out that there was actually no stone. It was a blister about the size of a silver dollar forming deep under the skin on my heel.

I had hoped to finish the race in around four hours, and I did just slightly better than that. As we drove home — I let Tom drive because I was too exhausted — I thought, “That was fun. I’m never going to do that again.”

That winter I ran out of money and went back to work in Augusta. I kept running, and kept getting slightly better. I wasn’t interested in any more races, and I wasn’t really trying to increase my speed. I kept track of my times, but only out of a vague idea that I should.

I left the newspaper again after a year with no idea of what I wanted to do. I only knew it would not be newspaper reporting. I eventually decided to go to graduate school at Georgia Tech. I took the GRE and found a department that would take me. And then I started running again.

I increased my run to eight miles, and I kept getting better. By the time I had been running this course for a couple of years, I was faster than I had ever been. I was running well. The long grade on the return of my course was not a problem. In fact, I liked attacking the hill.

That’s when I decided that I was a runner.

I did not run to compete. I did not run for my health. I did not run to reach a destination. I ran because I loved it. I ran hard, but it came easily. I felt like I could run like that forever; just point me in the right direction.

I was a runner. I was not a jogger.

In early 1983 I started running some small 10 K races, and did reasonably well. I knew that at 33 I would never be as fast as I could have been if I had started running seriously at a much younger age, but still, I was running better than I ever expected. In December of 1983, I entered a 15K race at Berry College. The course started at the college campus, then on what they call the three-mile road out to the mountain campus, then up dirt roads around Lavender Mountain, not far from where we live now. I felt good for the entire race, right up to the last few hundred yards, when my legs started feeling heavy and I was struggling a little. But I finished the race in under an hour. I think the pace was a little under 6:20 per mile. I beat my training pace and I ran hard enough that by the end of the race I had nothing left. For me, it was a perfect race. 

I did not know at the time that it was the peak and essentially the end of my running career.  Not long after that race, I felt a twinge in my right knee on one of my runs. Twinges in my knee, or a slight pain in my ankle, or some other nagging pain were normal. I ran through them. They always got better. But not this time. It got worse, and it was constant. I went to one of my brother’s classmates who was still at Tech and who was a very good runner. He told me he had gone to a doctor at the Emory Clinic who had helped him recover from an injury. So I made an appointment

It was a disaster. The doctor told me not to run so much. It was literally like the old joke, where the patient says, “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” And then the doctor says, “Don’t do that!”

So, after one good year, I had to give up running.

I took up swimming. After about a year, I went out for a short run. I tried, but it was no use. I was no longer a runner. I had become a jogger.

I kept jogging, hoping to recover. When I moved to Huntsville, Al, I jogged. I kept trying into my 40’s, and my knee kept hurting. And then it was both knees.

Eventually it became clear to me that I couldn’t run any more. I was no longer even a jogger. I had became a walker.

So now I walk the dogs a couple miles a day and do a half an hour on an elliptical stepper.  My knees have been getting worse, all two of them, but it seemed I could keep up that regimen. At least until last Thursday.

I twisted my knee while walking the dogs. It wasn’t bad, only a twinge, and my knees have been twinging off and on for years. I was able to complete the walk by tightening the muscles around my knee on every step. I thought it would go away, but it didn’t.

This is what my knee looked like on Saturday, and it felt every bit as bad as it looked.

I have an appointment with my orthopedist’s PA for Monday. The swelling has gone down some, but it’s still there.

When I saw the doctor in January I asked him when we would know it was time for a knee replacement. He said, “The swelling will tell us.”

Fly times

Posted on by

Pretty much everyone in the world knows what a horse fly is. We certainly have them here. Horse flies, deer flies, and yellow flies. They all look somewhat different, but they are all the same pest. They don’t sting like a yellow jacket, and they don’t insert a proboscis like a mosquito. They use their sharp cutting mouth parts to draw blood, and then lap it up.

So, for me, that means I will kill one any time I see it, if I possibly can. The dogs don’t care much for them either. Zoe seems particularly upset when they fly around. Sam not so much. Zoe twirls around, jumps up and snaps at them. I have seen a dog actually kill a horsefly that way, but so far Zoe has not had any luck.

I don’t snap at them, but I do try to smack them if they land on my bare skin. I have hit them a couple of times lately, but they are tough. I didn’t manage to kill them, or even stun them. I had hoped to do just that so Zoe could finish it off. I may have mentioned before when my old Doberman Bella heard one she ran as fast as she could for home. Once I hit a horsefly on her back and it fell to the pavement. She bit it with her front teeth. I wanted Zoe to have that chance.

They are more than just a pest. They can cause livestock to lose weight, and they can transmit diseases from one animal to another. One source said that in 1976 losses due to biting flies was estimated at $40 million.

That’s sufficient reason to want to control them, but there is apparently no good way to do that.

One suggestion was to wear a blue cylinder coated with sticky material on top of a cap. It attracts the flies and they stick to the trap. They say that can be effective at reducing populations in limited areas. I doubt that I’m going to do that.

Looking out for me

Posted on by

Zoe escaped from me a few days ago as I was taking the dogs out for their morning walk. She saw/heard/smelled something, or thought she did, and bolted down across the yard and into the woods, with me calling. She apparently cannot run and hear at the same time.

I check the Fouche Gap/Texas Valley Facebook group when something like this happens, and during the time they were gone, there was one sighting down in Texas Valley. Later the same person saw both dogs near her yard, so I drove down to look. No luck. Then, even later, the same person posted that she saw them running back up the mountain, tongues dragging the ground. Zoe’s leash was also dragging the ground.

Zoe seems to be Zeke’s spiritual successor. I could never take Zeke out off leash. Every time he saw an open door, and sometimes even an open window, he jumped for it. Zoe is not that bad. I can take her outside to the truck and not worry about her running off. If she disappears around the corner of the house, she comes back when I call her. But when something happens, she takes off.

The main difference in their wandering is that Zeke always stayed around the top of the mountain, and Zoe does not. She runs down into Texas Valley, sometimes miles away. I don’t know why, but it might have something to do with the fact that for years I took Zeke for walks around the top of the mountain, sometimes into the woods, up and down the side of the mountain, but Zoe has always been walked on Fouche Gap Road. I have never taken her into the woods at the top.

But who knows what’s going on in her mind, assuming she has one.

Just before the dogs showed up at the back door, our neighbor Deb called Leah to make sure I was OK. She knew that I always accompany the dogs, so when she saw them running without me, she was worried that something had happened to me. The next day when I took the dogs down Fouche Gap Road, an older man stopped to tell me he had been worried, too, when he saw the dogs without me. He said he started looking carefully along the road to make sure I wasn’t lying disabled somewhere.

I have been walking the dogs on Fouche Gap Road for several years at around the same time of day. I always wave at passing motorists, and they always wave back. So we kind of know each other. It’s kind of funny, but also reassuring. People were paying attention.

Slow turtles ahead

Posted on by

We were on our way home from the vet’s office Tuesday (and that’s a story that you would thank me for not telling), when we saw this in the road.

A turtle, apparently not all that interested in actually crossing the road. I turned around and went back. It was all tucked inside its shell and not coming out. As I got closer to take this photo I realized just how big this thing was. I grabbed it about mid-shell. It peeked out but that was all.

Here’s a shot with my hand to give an idea of the scale.

I put the turtle in the weeds away from the edge of the road and we continued on. About a mile further down the road we saw another turtle. This one was considerably smaller, and not right in the middle of the road. By the time I turned around to go back, and then turned around again to get on the same side of the road, it was speeding in a turtle sort of way into the grass, so I didn’t have a chance to take a photo. And I didn’t have to rescue it either.

We haven’t seen any turtles on the road lately. Maybe the rain brought them out.

Fear of flies

Posted on by

Zoe didn’t want to complete her walk Friday morning. She didn’t pull on her leash as she normally does. Instead, she kept close and circled around me. We had gone less than a quarter of the way to our regular turnaround when she turned around and wanted to go back home. A couple of times recently she has started out on one of her short, restroom walks and suddenly turned and started pulling back towards the house. It seems she has had an encounter with a horsefly.

My second doberman, Bella, was afraid of horseflies. She was fairly old when I got her. Her hips were bad, and she had apparently never done much walking in her previous life. That was back when I was doing some running. I didn’t want to take her with me, because she couldn’t run the whole distance. I would have to stop and walk with her back to the house.

When I tried to go for a run by myself, I left her on the deck, where she would howl and cry until I relented and let her come with me. Inevitably, I had to walk her back home. The one time I saw her run, and fast, was when a horsefly came buzzing around her. She wanted nothing to do with that. Apparently a horsefly bite is worse than arthritis in the hips. She knew exactly what she was running from. One time I managed to smack a horsefly that had lit on her back. When it fell to the pavement, Bella leaned down to it, bared her front incisors, and bit the damned thing to death.

I don’t blame Bella or Zoe for running from a horsefly. I have been bitten a few times, and it’s not a pleasant experience. I assume Zoe has been bitten at some time because she recognizes the buzzing sound as something to fear. Her original home was Oklahoma, which probably has horseflies. Maybe even more than their fair share.