Foot Notes*

Posts Tagged ‘big dogs’

Name that dog!

We interrupt our normally scheduled commentary this week with a brief Public Service Announcement from Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys on how to properly adjust your mirrors in order to eliminate that dangerous blindspot.

When I first made this change several years ago, it took me a couple of days to get used to it, but it’s definitely worth the effort. 

It’s pretty cool the first time you watch a car pass you and see it move — one headlight at a time — from your rearview mirror to the side mirror.

EUREKA — NO MORE BLIND SPOT!

Weekend Runs

I’m probably only going to run once this weekend because of the heat, and it’ll probably be Hamilton on Sunday.

This could be really ugly when the sun comes out...

My insurance company sends me too much snail mail, and so does my mortgage company. Since I’ve got my payment going out automatically, I don’t need to see the monthly statements, or pay attention to the equity loan offers and refinancing deals.

I make several different piles when I go through my mail:

Bill — set aside to pay.
Statement — set aside to reconcile.
Junk — straight to trash.
Other junk — to be shredded
Other stuff — worry about later.

The envelope from the mortgage company was going into the last pile, but since it was a pretty slow mail day, I went ahead and opened it.

Holy Canoly, there was a check for $200 in it! Seems my escrow account has gotten larger than it needs to be (the bad news is this has happened because my taxes have no doubt gone down because the value of my townhouse has gone down), and they are going to be lowering my monthly payments, and they sent me the overage.

Woohoo. Found money!

Grateful for small favors

And I wasn’t under this when it fell from my neighbor’s roof:

Yeah..  I’m putting this in the “It was a good week” column.

I’ve spent my time this week running at the rec center, and walking indoors at Dulles Town Center, where I’ve been enjoying watching some Police K-9 teams training some dogs in the food court in the mornings. 

(At least I hope it is a training exercise! )

Weekend Runs:

The parking lot of Dulles Town Center has some mighty huge MOUNTAINS of snow piled here and there within the lot, but for the most part, the perimeter is clean.  I’ve run around the perimeter  in the past before the mall is open and it works reasonably well.  It’s about 1.4 miles in circumference, and it’s not completely flat.   I might head out there Sunday morning.

If anyone else is interested, let me know.

So I’m eating my lunch Sunday and listening to the re-broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion and Garrison Keillor starts the news from Lake Wobegon.  Nice timing on my part.

 He gets to talking about winter coming on and it getting cold, and then he starts ripping me off!  He says his dad wouldn’t let them touch the thermostat.  He says when they would complain that they were cold, his dad would just reply “Put on a sweater!”

 I start to wonder whether there was a much more sinister explanation to this than just “at least someone is reading my wart blog!”

 Could it be?

 Maybe we had the same dad?!  Naaaaa.  If my dad had been leading a double life, Garrison Keillor would be telling some different stories about his childhood in Lake Wobegon. 

Surely by now he would have told about getting high on the smell of mimeograph ink while he assembled specifications in the basement in exchange for a meager allowance. 

I know I’m bringing back fond memories to those club members old enough to remember getting freshly minted mimeographed handouts at school.  For the youngsters in the club – I’m sorry you missed that experience.  It was a good time.

 My dad was an architect – he designed buildings.  He drew all the plans himself on a large drafting table, with only the use of a mechanical pencil and some drafting tools.  And for each building he designed he wrote a set of specifications which told the contractors everything about how the building was to be built, right down to what kind of paint to use and the quality of the concrete to be poured for the foundation.  Specifications were pretty substantial documents (usually over 100 pages, as I recall) and he needed to produce maybe 30 copies of each set.

 How do you do that in a time without word processors, printers or copiers? 

 You pay a woman to type a master set (might even have been on a manual typewriter!) on a mimeograph stencil and then you make your kids run off the copies in the basement and assemble them.  Running off the copies and assembling them was a very labor-intensive process, and my dad sure took advantage of the cheap labor available to him.

If you really must know more about mimeograph machines….

  My dad wasn’t a big dog like Frank Lloyd Wright, but he worked very hard at what he did there are many very nicely designed buildings, like  The Pharmacy Building at the University of Wyoming, scattered around the state with his name on a plaque just inside the door.

 It occurs to me that by golly…  my dad was a WART!

Speaking of that very biggest of big dogs, Frank Lloyd Wright, I’m going on a little road trip this weekend to visit two nearby houses that he designed — Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob so I won’t be around for either weekend run.

Seems to me like the Saturday run from the high school:

http://loudounroadrunners.org/maps/Thomas_Mill.pdf

lends itself best for warts.

What color is the sky in your world?

On Friday, for the social at the Dry Mill Winery, I was running a bit late, and then the traffic on Rt. 7 was the pits, so I didn’t make it to the winery until about 4:20.  I figured that would fit in with the general tendency of the club not to really get things going until about 15 minutes after the hour, so I wasn’t that worried about it.   When I walked into the tasting room and didn’t see anyone from the club however, I figured either I had screwed up on my date/time, or that the club was meeting in a private room somewhere at the winery.  When I asked the owner where the Loudoun Roadrunners were and he looked at me like I was from the moon, I began to lean more towards the first option.  Then, after a few minutes, he got out his calendar and said, “Yep…  Loudoun Roadrunners,  4:00.” 

I decided to just make the best of it and I ordered myself a glass of wine.  A musician was about to get started playing some acoustic background music, so it looked like worst case scenario was still going to be a pleasant experience.  I settled in to accept what was.

After maybe 10 minutes, Tom Simonds showed up.  OK then…  I wasn’t the only one.  It was probably another 20 minutes before anyone else arrived.

It turned out to be a really great opportunity to visit with Tom and ask him questions about the Arkansas 100 mile race from a couple of weeks ago.

What kept him running for 8 hours in the rain?  Why didn’t he get hypothermia?

Now that he had completed a 100 mile run, was he going to scratch it off his TO DO list, or did he want to do it again?

How long did it take to recover from that experience?

If the farthest you’ve ever run before is about 60 miles, how can you just tack on another 40?

Tom had some very good answers for these (and many more) questions that I had, but I still feel like this is a world I know very little about.  I really enjoyed spending time getting to know Tom better, and learning more about what makes a big dog tick.  

I run because I think it is a more efficient form of exercise (more work in less time) than walking.  For me..  that’s pretty much it.  When I think about the possibility of me ever running a marathon, I know absolutely that if I wanted to run a marathon there is no doubt I could train for and achieve that goal.

The thing is — I don’t want to run a marathon.  And I’m OK with that.

I joined the club because I wanted to make some new friends, and run somewhere besides the same 4-mile stretch of the W & OD trail that I run by myself during the week. 

It’s working for me.

Checking the 7-day forecast as it exists today, and it looks like Sunday is going to be the better day this weekend, and since I tend to run with the club on Sunday, I’ll aim at the Lovettsville Community Center:

http://loudounroadrunners.org/maps/Lovettesville.pdf

I doubt I’ll go for the whole short loop — I’ll probably turn around somewhere between 2 and 3 miles out.  And I’m OK with that.

a "low-keyed fixture"

On January 28, 1979, Charles Kuralt spoke the words “Here begins something new” and opened the very first edition of CBS Sunday Morning.  The show will never be described as “fast-paced” or “hard-hitting.” In fact, the description that shows up on my DVR is “an elegantly low-keyed Sunday morning fixture.”

Since I generally run with the club on Sunday mornings, it seems an appropriate metaphor for another segment of the club — a group that looks at the run schedule and is sometimes intimidated by the length of the listed run.  Six or seven miles looks like a VERY long distance from our vantage point.

We don’t all have the same goals.  We haven’t all trained for the same length of time.  Some of us have a few more years (or pounds) under our belts.

But it would be nice to one day run with the big dogs without collapsing in a heap at the 2 mile marker. Or to have a big dog run with us and not feel like we are holding them back.

I’ll work off the weekend club runs and plan shorter ones which work the best to fit in with this training schedule:  Cool Running :: The Couch-to-5K Running Plan.

When we have completed that, we will move on to work towards 10K.

We can communicate here so everyone will know where we are in the training plan, and who’s going to be at the club run.

Week One is easy-peasy…  alternating 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking  for 20 minutes.

We can do that!

The Sunday club run is Tuscarora Creek Park and it’s PERFECT to start the plan.  We’ll take the run backwards and just go out and back on the W & OD Trail.

Remember that the weekend runs are back to 8:00 am now, so we shouldn’t have any problems with oversleeping/darkness.

Directions to the run:

http://loudounroadrunners.org/maps/Tuscarora.pdf

Who’s with me?