New Year's Day

A New Year!  New opportunities, new challenges, new achievements.  As a runner – and this blog is ostensibly about running, after all – one of the things I always do at the end of one year and the beginning of another is to review my running log and start a new one.  I have used the same little “Day Planner” for many years now to track my daily mileage, and I always give myself (and Martha) a new one for Christmas.  I keep a running total each week and total it up at the end of the year, and then I record it on a spreadsheet.  My highest annual mileage was in 2005 (1578 miles) and my lowest was this year (477).  I could create a graph of my running mileage showing the gradual decline in mileage, sort of like the Dow Jones Average in free-fall, but readers of this blog might think I was compulsive if I did that. 

I have learned to accept that an aging runner logs fewer miles and slower times.  I will  wryly say, “The older I get, the faster I was.”  I said that to another runner about my age after a race last year and he pointed out, “Yes, but you are exactly the runner that you are right now!”  And that is what I have been telling myself these days.  Also, I note with some amazement that, not counting the unknown number of miles I ran before I began keeping records in 1995 (a decade of “jogging” whenever I could find the time), I have run 32,450 miles so far in my life, about 7,500 miles more than the circumference of the earth.

Not having run more than two miles the previous week due to temperatures in the single digits and my unwillingness to brave such conditions, I was eager to finally get to Atlantic Beach and continue my second journey around the earth!  But we had decided to make one more stop on our way to our destination, and that was a night in Kitty Hawk at the northern Outer Banks, where we spent many vacations, mostly in April, and often in the little town of Duck.  We were looking forward with fond nostalgia to seeing the places we used to run there.  Not having been one of “them drunks” that Lynn was driving home last night, I awoke early, before anyone else at the Hampton Inn except a handful of staff at the front desk and in the breakfast bar.  “Not many people up and about, I see!” I said brightly to the desk clerk.  “No, I think most everyone will be sleeping in this morning,” the young man at the desk said.  I went outside for my morning Tai Chi, and saw that the thick fog of the previous night was breaking off and the sun was trying to shine, an auspicious beginning to a New Year.

There is always something to see along the way if a traveler is paying attention.  Martha spotted this sign at a rest area on US-64 just outside of Washington, NC, which I thought was just remarkable.

A little research on the internet later revealed that the “Prayer of the Woods” has been used in Portuguese forest preservations for more than 1,000 years, and can be found at state parks, national forests, and national parks around the world.  It is translated from an older work, originally written in Portuguese, and first carved in wood in the gardens surrounding the beautiful Castelo dd Sao Jorge in Lisbon. One source identified the author as Alberto de Veiga Simões, a diplomat for Portugal during the first and second world wars who played a key role in helping persecuted minorities escape from the Nazis while stationed in Berlin in the 1940s. The original poem was titled ‘Ao Viandante’ - which translates roughly as: “To the person who passes through this place.”  What a lovely story!  But nowhere could I discover how or by whom this sign was erected in a rest area in Washington, NC, or who Brantley Peacock was.

After a long drive, US-64 took us to Manteo, which is familiar territory for us.  We knew a runner, Dave Cockman, who ran all the way from Murphy to Manteo, a distance of 544 miles, on this road several years ago over a period of two weeks.  He came through Highlands and was accompanied by several of my running friends on his way to Cashiers.  We were staying at the Outer Banks at the time and I met him and ran the last half-mile or so with him and some of his friends as he finished up his journey at Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head.  We have seen Dave at several races since then and follow his ultra-running on Facebook.

We have also run many marathons and half marathons here.  The starting line for the OBX Marathon and the Flying Pirate Half Marathon is a mile-and-a-half from our hotel.  We will never forget the inaugural OBX Marathon in 2006, which we ran mostly in the rain.  Those where character-building races indeed!

We arrived at the Hilton Gardens in Kitty Hawk just in time for dinner.  We drove north on Highway 12 to Duck and checked out the familiar restaurants where we had eaten over the years and they were all closed except one, which had a full parking lot and looked very busy.  But when we returned we found to our surprise that a restaurant was open on this New Year’s Day within walking distance of our hotel, the Run Down Café, a Caribbean-Asian themed restaurant where we had eaten many years ago.

Outside our oceanfront room, the sun was setting over the ocean, and we breathed deeply of the ocean air for the first time in many months. 

Time has its own rules out here.
The hours come and go like the tide,
Rising and falling all day long,
Leaving moon jellies behind on the sand.