Category Archives: General

The year of running well

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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.”

Lilies of the mountain

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Our lilies have come up and are in bloom. They seem bigger, healthier and more numerous this year. Here’s Leah, doing her Vanna White impression.

The tallest are over five feet.

We have a nice variety of colors.

Some of our other bulbs have bloomed and faded. The lilies and the other bulbs have multiplied. We’re going to have to thin them this fall and plant in some other places in the yard. Maybe where all the vinca that I planted last year showed that they were actually annuals in this climate.

Fog over the river

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Saturday morning was overcast after an early morning light rain. Off in the distance we could see where the large Georgia Power Plant Bowen stacks stand. Bowen is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in North America.

Coal-fired power plants are almost always located on rivers because they use the river water for cooling. The Etowah River flows past the plant and then on through Rome, where it meets the Oostanaula River to form the Coosa River. If you look carefully at this photo, you can see where the river flows.

The river has another river right above it, formed by advection fog. Advection fog is usually formed by warm, humid air flowing over something that is cooler, causing some of the water vapor to condense into fog. The fog is the faint, thin, lighter line slightly under the mid-point of the image. The river is 20 to 25 miles from our house.

Many years ago when my family moved into our new house, our living room looked over fields and low hills towards the same river as it neared town. The river was probably less than two miles from our house. We often saw fog over the river then. In the more than 40 years since, the short pines in the back yard grew up and now tower over the house, completely blocking the view.

What color is this

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I have been making leashes for the dogs out of a long piece of rope I got at one of our local building supply companies. The dogs started out with store-bought leashes, but Zoe bites at hers, and she chewed it so much that I finally threw it away. I can make a lot of leashes from a fairly cheap length of rope instead of having to buy a new leash every month or so.

I made a short leash for Sam and about a five-foot leash for Zoe. Then I made a longer addition for Zoe’s so I could let her run in the front yard with Sam. The total length for Zoe’s is about 12 to 14 feet, which is long enough that she can get up to a good speed by the time she stretches the leash to its full length. And she did that Monday afternoon. She was going so fast I had to release the leash or have my arm dislocated. She kept going full speed into the woods and disappeared with Sam following.

This was the fifth time they have run away. The first time they did it they came home after dark and sat around in the garage until I happened to look. The next time Sam was gone a full day and Zoe was gone four days. The third time a neighbor caught Zoe and called us. The fourth time, which was only about a week ago, a couple living at the bottom of the mountain caught them and called. This was the fifth time. This time I posted on Facebook. They disappeared at about 2:15 or so. Eventually they were spotted a couple of miles away, and then more than four miles away, but by the time I got to the places where they were sighted, they were gone.

They finally came home at about 10:30. Sam had rolled in something nasty and smelly, so I had to bathe him before I could let him in the house. Zoe was wet and a little smelly, but I didn’t want to undertake as big a job as washing her would be that late in the evening. She got her bath today, Tuesday.

The thing I found most interesting (not the thing I found most infuriating) in this case was the eyewitness accounts of the people who responded to my post on Facebook. One man who saw them in his yard said the big one was dragging an orange leash. A woman who saw them later in the day said the big one was trailing a bright red line. This is the rope I use for their leashes.

And this is the stub of Zoe’s leash, the only part she brought back home. It looks kind of like a fishing lure.

What color would you call this? I call it blue because to my eye it’s mostly blue. The red/orange is eye-catching, maybe even more so in bright sunlight, but I was surprised when they talked about a red or orange leash.

The top photo shows the knot I use to make the hand loop. It’s called a bowline loop. Boy Scouts and sailors probably know this one, but it was new to me. I found it when searching for knot-tying instructions. Since this is a nautical knot, you might expect “bow” to be pronounced like the bow of a ship, but in the case of this knot, it’s actually pronounced like bow in “bow and arrow.” It has the advantage of not slipping, so the loop doesn’t close up on your hand when the dog pulls on it. The knot I used to attach the clip is called a clip knot, which seems appropriate.

I could probably tie another bowline loop without looking at the instructions, which means it’s a pretty simple knot. I would have to look up the clip knot, although it’s also a simple knot.

We’re still here

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I was going to write a long rant about UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller’s feelings on how he, a good physicist, who is good at statistics, too, recommends using a treatment for the coronavirus that hasn’t been tested and approved, but I decided I didn’t feel up to it. I’ll just quote some of what he said: “Anthony Fauci certainly knows an enormous amount about biomedicine that I don’t know. But I worry that he doesn’t understand statistics as well as I do.”

That’s Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

There is a stereotype of physicists as arrogant, know-it-alls who think physics is the only real science, and that they can not only do their science better than you can, but they can do your science better than you can. If you are a chemist, a physicist can solve your problems better than you can. If you are a climatologist, physicists can do your work better than you can. If you are the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a physicist can do your job better than you can.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about whether Muller fits the stereotype.

But, we are still here. We are sheltering in place, going out only to Walmart for groceries, prescriptions and pet stuff. Both the city and county have issued shelter-in-place orders until about a week into April. The governor has ordered that public schools remain closed throughout the state until about the end of April.

The first time we went to the grocery store after it became clear that the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 
(SARS-CoV-2), formerly known as the novel coronavirus, was going to be bad, to find empty shelves. There was no toilet paper, as others had reported. There were no paper towels. The cereal shelves had been stripped almost bare. About the only soup left was cream of broccoli with chunky asparagus, or something like that. There was no orange juice. There were no refrigerated cookies. The frozen dinners were sparse on the shelves. We expected something like that, given what was being reported on the news.

What has made me confused is that the shelves are still bare. People are still buying and hoarding toilet paper. And paper towels. Soup. Cereal. Frozen dinners. Can anyone help me figure this out? I would have imagined, in a more rational world, that hoarders would have stocked up early on and then holed up to ride out the apocalypse. Why are they still coming back to the grocery store, about the best place left open to get the virus, to hoard even more?

Oh well. These are the same people who voted for Trump, so maybe I was expecting too much.

But we have what we need. I think we can manage to find enough food and maybe even toilet paper. I think we should probably get take-out from some of the restaurants we used to visit, just to support them. But I think we really should stop going to Walmart, or any other grocery store. I went for a few things today, and was thinking about all the people (there were a lot of people) coming and going and touching things, and there was no way to sanitize my hands. I like to think I’m invulnerable, but then, I used to think I would never be old, and here I am.

On the working front, there is still apparently a possibility that I will have a short-term, part-time job when the virus-related restrictions end. I am being investigated. People are looking for a government laptop for my use. However, I’m not sure how I could even pick the laptop up, since the facilities where I would work are open only to essential personnel, and I am most definitely not essential. My immediate boss recently returned from a work trip to Hawaii (how nice), and was immediately sent home for a 14-day quarantine. It seems that the government will quarantine anyone who has recently traveled outside the lower-48 states.

In the meantime, there seems to be something for me to do around the house pretty much all the time.