Firecracker 5-K

We awoke in plenty of time to drive the short distance to downtown Brevard.  We had already learned during our brief stay at Deerwoode that it is usually foggy down here along the river where the summertime moisture comes to lie down on the river overnight and then slowly rises and burns away, and this morning that fog seemed to envelope all of Brevard.

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Runners were already gathering on Main Street, and I enjoyed being back in a familiar place, the start of yet another race, wandering through the growing crowds and warming up a little.  Martha warmed up for the usual mile, but I just walked back and forth and did some short pickups, trying to wake up my legs.  High overhead, a drone, advertized in an advance e-mail from the Race Director, was circling over the crowd, peering down through the fog.

We lined up at the start and a pretty young woman with a beautiful voice sang the national anthem as runners removed their hats respectfully or placed hands on hearts.

Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Then the Race Director counted down the time and we were off.  I had positioned myself toward the rear and I immediately found myself behind a wall of walkers.  Making my way around and through them, the 600 runners thinned out a little, and I called to some spectators along the way, "We're looking good, aren't we!?" as I often do to scattered laughter.  Just then, a man pushing a wide stroller came flying by, nearly nicking the side of my foot.  The road was rough much of the way due to construction and we were both watching where we were running, but it would have been disastrous to take a spill so early in the race.  Martha later told me that the same man and his reckless stroller nearly hit her, too.

I do love racing, and I have often described in this blog how much fun it is to jockey for position, chat with other runners, and call out to spectators.  A teen-aged boy kept flying up alongside me, and then abruptly stopping to walk; we played leapfrog like this for much of the first half of the race, and then he dropped behind me, unable to sustain the repeated effort of sprinting that hard, over and over again.

We had driven the course yesterday before we picked up our race packets, so I knew when we were reaching the bottom of a long hill on Tinsley Road.  "It's about time this course got interesting!" I said, and someone laughed and told me to shut up.  Up we climbed, through nice semi-rural countryside, climbing above one of the prettiest vegetable gardens I have seen, its rows neatly laid out and nary a weed in sight.

I glanced at my watch at the two-mile mark and was surprised at the time.  Since resuming running, I had timed myself running 3.1 miles on our usual route in Highlands and had been encouraged by watching my time drop in a straight-line progression from 47:24 (my third day back), to 43:37, to 41:33 on Monday.  My goal had been to break 40 minutes, and I was way ahead of that!  I pushed a little harder, climbed one last steep hill, turned the corner, and found myself coming down Main Street toward the finish line chute.  My finish time?  37:03.  Martha, who had already finished in 29:07 (her goal had been to finish under 30 minutes), was not expecting me so soon and said she regretted taking my photo.  But I later found both our photos on-line.  (Note the usual photo:  a runner ignoring the big finish-line clock overhead and hitting the stop button on his and her GPS watch.)

We walked around in that pleasant euphoria after a race, drinking water and checking out the finish-line food and SWAG ("Stuff We All Get") common to races, which today inexplicably included not only bananas and tangerines and water, but also large bags of slivered almonds and samples of dental floss.  Someone was nice enough take the obligatory photo after the race for our newsletter and our Facebook post.  ("Richard is running again?! Yay!" commented our friend Colleen when she saw it on Facebook.)

By the time we had returned to Deerwoode, showered and changed, and returned to downtown Brevard, it was only 10:00 a.m., and we enjoyed browsing through the booths of a crafts show set up on Main Street and a car show on Broad Street, which we both agreed Martha's Dad would have enjoyed immensely.  The car show was just beginning and a young woman - the same one as earlier, I think - sang the national anthem for the second time that day.

We had both been thinking about Barbeque for lunch, something we seldom eat except on such occasions and on such a holiday as this - what could be more American, after all? - and so we drove to a very good restaurant on the Pisgah Highway which we had never tried before called (in hillbilly spelling) "Hawg Wild."  And it was indeed hawg-wild good!

Our next stop was the Brevard Music Center where Martha had gotten advance tickets to a Patriotic Pops concert this afternoon featuring the national anthem (our third time) plus a medley of the music of all of the branches of the military, during which family and veterans were encouraged to stand at the appropriate times.  Remarkably, a veteran of World War II was present and stood to a round of applause.  We enjoyed watching families spread out picnics on the lawn as their children played.

The concert concluded with a rousing performance of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture featuring live and very loud cannons.

It is always a good thing to spend some time walking after a race, so when we returned to Deerwoode we explored some of the extensive acreage before dinner.  The French Broad River gurgles quietly nearby, deep and much narrower than we had expected; the stretch of river we normally see in what is called Sandy Bottom near the Arboretum is shallow, rocky, and as broad as its name would suggest.

There are some remarkable trees on the property, too, including an ancient poplar tree which marks the spot of the old post office for Transylvania County in the early 1800s, and this impressive 400-year-old white oak tree just across the pond from our cabin.

The pond is crowded with cattails as brown as Cuban cigars, and this is the source of our nightly serenade from the bullfrogs.

Martha spotted the first of several deer that we were able to watch from our covered porch, but none of the photos turned out very well at that distance; it leapt across the road and ran across the field, then took up a position in front of the observation tower to which we had hiked the previous day.

"Look!" I could imagine it saying to its partner.  "There, on the porch!  Humans!  I think the big clumsy-looking one is a man!"  

And Martha also spotted a huge white bird, perhaps a river heron, that climbed slowly into the sky from the larger pond on the other side of the garden.

We heard the sound of a tractor beyond the pond and discovered Bill working on a farm tractor in the barn there, still hard at it at 5:00 p.m. on the Fourth of July; he stopped the tractor and asked about our day.  We looked in several of the other cabins, and down below us we could see him heading out in the cool of the evening dragging a mowing attachment behind.

We continued on toward the opposite end of the property from our cabin and entered the Bamboo Forest, which we had read about in the little book kept in the cabin filled with comments from previous guests (many of whom had also enjoyed the fishing and had returned for special occasions and anniversaries).

I had never seen bamboo like this, perhaps 50 or 60 feet tall, as thick as my arm.  I could envision bamboo of this size being used for bamboo flooring.  “It’s like a cathedral in here,” Martha said.

As we exited the bamboo forest and continued around the perimeter of the property, with the river to our left visible from time to time, we could hear the sound of a tractor coming closer and closer.  It was Bill, mowing the grass path ahead of us.  He stopped and turned off the engine.  “Don’t you ever rest?” I asked him.  He must smiled and shook his head.  “Nope.”

But we rest.  It had been a long day, and we made our way back to the cabin, had dinner, and went to bed early, lulled to sleep by the sound of nightbirds and bullfrogs.