Running Commentary

...when I'm 64...which I am this very day! Drove up to Santa Rosa this morning with four of my teammates to run the 18th Annual Phil Widener Empire Open, a PAUSATF cross-country race. (Below is a photo of the men's Masters start--couldn't take a picture of the women's Open start because I was too busy starting!) I had a wonderful time today. Driving my little Honda full of chattering women to Santa Rosa, racing with them (they sang Happy Birthday to me when I crossed the finish line), and having breakfast afterward at the Cafe Azul made my day. It reminded me of being in high school and tooling around in my parents' car with all my girlfriends, everybody talking at once, our happy energy fizzing and sparking until the whole car glowed. I came across a couple of lovely sentences yesterday when I was finishing up A Three Dog Life , by Abigail Thomas: "The past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young.... There's nothing I want to relive--c...

The local paper has a big story today about California's proposed $42.6 billion bullet train. Part of me is appalled at the notion of spending that kind of money when countless nonexpendible services are crying out with economic pain. But--part of me is pumping my fist in the air, saying, "Yeah. I wanna move fast!" We are human beings, and I believe that as such, we are hard-core nomads, wired for movement. To me, the most apparent evidence of this is that we run. But when I look around, I see that the innate instinct toward locomotion informs countless aspects of our civilization. Our cities--heck, our country, our very civilized world--are created around our compulsion to move our bodies (not to mention our goods and our very lives) from one place to another. I run under a train track. I live on a street, which by definition is a place for movin' right along. It's street connected to many other streets. And I take a bus home from work. Speaking of multibillion-...

I slack off at keeping this blog current, but that doesn't mean I stop running or that I stop taking pictures (both when running and when not). When I look at the pictures stacked up in my phone it strikes me that they are a visual bread-crumb trail that I can follow from where I am back through the days that are behind me. The photos are doors along my trail of past runs, doors I can knock on and have opened by my memories. (I have the feeling this mixed metaphor is about to flatten me like a runaway train. Yikes, another metaphor.) Anyway. Here's a brief visual trip back through some recent runs. One Saturday in late June my club 's Saturday training run took us to the Little Farm in Tilden Park . This was around the time of the Oscar Grant trial , which was feeding racial tensions across the state. I came upon these two peaceful bovines, the light-skinned one gently licking the dark-skinned one. No tension here. On another Saturday, the training run was on East Bay Muni...