I'm Back

I'm back. . .

Back from today's run. Sweetbriar loop up to 48th St. Couldn't get up this morning so I ran this evening. Was gonna do six but felt like tearing it up so at MLK I kept running to Sweetbriar and then up the Lansdowne Ave. hill. Hayes Carll on the iPod. 8 in 61:33.

I'm also back from Iowa. I went to college at a small school in a small town, both called Grinnell. I haven't been back since the mid 80s. Kids are in Texas with their cousins and I figured I'd take advantage of my freedom and go back for a long weekend. A good buddy of mine from back in the day googled me a while back and one thing led to another. He and a couple of friends had gotten together and booked L'il Ed and the Blues Imperials (who you might have seen recently on Conan O'Brian) to play a gig on Saturday in a parking lot outside a local bar. That was the ostensible reason for my going there, and the show alone was well worth the trip. More importantly, Chris and I reconnected like 20 years was just a blip. I also walked around the campus where I had once spent a happy four years, but the place was now too different to evoke torrents of nostalgia.

Grinnell is a great place to run. You go out longer than a mile in any direction out of town and you're either in rolling hills or cornfields, with roads that turn to gravel and then dirt. The routes are very geometric, creating loops that are polygons with perpendicular corners. I got in my first 20 miler of the year on Saturday (2:49:47), a 10.5 miler on Sunday (89 minutes), and took it out to the Grinnell track yesterday for 1600s - five of them (400m rec) in 5:33; 5:31; 5:31; 5:37 & 5:40 and a total of ten miles. Ideally these would have been sub 5:30s, but what you see was all I had.

Thanks to the folks who commented and sent emails in response to my last post. I think one of the reasons we stick with this bloody addiction is because of the community that it engenders, and y'all's support means alot.