Taneytown

Netscape crashed and now I need to rewrite this entry. I guess that happens to everyone but it still sucks when it does happen. I tell other people that the consolation is that the piece you are rewriting usually comes out better than it was the first time around.

Anyway, Kevin J, Erin and I ran the 34th St. version of the Acme Loop this morning, 9.2 miles in 81:28. There was a dense fog this morning, leading to the odd situation where darkness faded to light but the visibility didn't get any better. Kevin was nearly blind as his glasses were all fogged up, and I offered my expert guiding services but he politely declined. Conversation ranged from Britney Spears to the Journal of the American Chemical Society. We also saw a pile of four car doors and a battery, which looked like someone had stripped a car of everything except those items.

I packed my stuff today to do a second workout on the treadmill, but have now changed my mind. My legs were feeling very beat up this morning, which was unusual because I took yesterday off. I was too damn tired yesterday to get up at 5:30 am and put in a workout in afterI arrived in Orlando late Wednesday night and weaseled in a 3-mile treadmill workout (21:21) before bed. I ordinarily would have got up and slogged through the workout (and the rest of the day), but I had to spend 5-hours in front of a roomful of people facilitating a workshop on cost studies. I'm always comforted on those occasions when I put my work ahead of my running.

So anyway, the day off did not seem to help my legs much. I now feel I'm on the edge of the maximum mileage that my body is able to physically sustain. I will either push back that threshold or break down and get injured (Achilles tendon would be the leading candidate if this happens). Oddly, that is where I want to be right now, pushing limits.

So on to more fun stuff. While I haven't mapped it out yet, I suspect that my mileage has now led me to blow through Taneytown MD.

I made this little detour south to "see" the town Steve Earle sings about in his hard rocking account of a lynching deriving from a case of mistaken identity. Taneytown is also the title of a short story in his book, Doghouse Roses. Earle says that the account is fictional, and that he chose Taneytown as the setting for the account to underscore that the conditions which spawned lynchings did not occur only in the deep South.

Plumbing the internet for information, the town has a population of about 5,100 and is about 98% white. There is no account of lynchings occuring in Taneytown (although as I mentioned last weekend there were race riots in the 70s in nearby York), but the blog "Unremitting Failure" reports that such an event could readily happen in Taneytown. Instead, UF reports in a subsequent post that Taneytown's main claim to fame seems to be as the place where Fred Gwynne, of The Munsters fame died (UF links to this site, where you can see a copy of FG's death certificate). Unremitting Failure cracked me up numerous times, and that only from scrolling down the site and looking at the pictures.

The other interesting, more significant piece I found about Taneytown is that it is the site where Meade bivouacked when he received command of the Army of the Potomac from Hooker just before the battle at Gettysburg. Meade constructed a line of defense along a ridge here that was known as the Pipe Creek Line, and but for a few turns of events the Battle of Gettysburg could have been the Battle of Taneytown. Civil War history is something I wished I spent more time on, and I admire the work of the guy I linked to in his detailed description (complete with a tour of the actual line) that brings to life this arcane piece of the Civil War. You don't do something like that unless you are passionate about it.

I'll keep going with the Civil War theme and head west, 50 miles or so, to Antietam.