A Short One

The run and the post. Both miniature sized. After yesterday's 7-miler I went for only 4 this morning.

Sometimes it strikes me that as a so-called running blogger I need to include a few more hard facts about my running experience. Well, here's one: For a long time (years) I have aspired to have 20 miles be my consistent average weekly mileage. Seventeen? Okay. Twenty-three? Okay. Eleven? Not so okay. Twenty-eight? Probably too many.

So that's what I'm working on now--getting that weekly average close to 20. This morning I went back to my regular route, the Ohlone Greenway and environs, to increase my existing 17.5 to around 20. Did it!


And along the way took this photo of the wonderful Ohlone memorial bench that sits by the path, across from the BART tracks. In my perambulations around the Bay Area I see isolated indications such as this that tell me how once this region was inhabited by many native peoples. Time is what time is, and what has been done to the natives has been done, but I admit that sometimes I look at my lily-white skin and grieve for the losses inflicted by my kind in centuries past.

The undulating back of the bench is modeled after the shape of the East Bay hills. The coyote is a character out of Ohlone folklore, a subject well loved and often written about by my friend Lea Burroughs, a folklorist and former librarian who authored a valuable book about children and the arts and is currently finishing up a book on the history of the Bay Area as revealed through Indian folklore.

These things--history, friendship, mileage--are among the subjects my monkey mind plays with as I run. These things, that is, when I'm not thinking about all my aches and pains!

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