Groundhog Day

I vividly remember the last time I took a fall while running, if not the exact date then the circumstances.  I was training for a marathon, so it must have been 15 or 20 years ago, and I was just wrapping up a 20-mile long run, when my toe caught on something in the sidewalk just north of Town Hall and I came down hard.  (I later tried to determine what had tripped me but found only the usual cracks in a sidewalk and its minor changes in elevation.)  What did I do?  I was close to my car, so I went there to find and apply a band-aid to staunch the flow of blood from my knee, took off my glasses (one lens had been cracked and knocked out of the frame), and (of course) continued to finish my all-important long run. 

I later found that in addition to the glasses,  I had cracked a front tooth, requiring a bridge to repair it, and had so badly sprained a hand that Martha insisted on taking me to the Emergency Room to verify that it had not been broken.  The glasses were variable-tint that would turn dark in the sunlight, and I inadvertently replaced the lens with ordinary glass, so that in photos from that time I looked like a pirate.

So I conclude that I am destined to fall every 15 or 20 years, which in the scheme of things if not too bad.  And that’s what I did on Monday when I was finishing up a mere four-mile run, although one which had included two intervals and a series of hill repeats (in the only subdivision nearby that has hills).  It was on a sidewalk again, not ten yards from the entrance to our condo, and I was tired.  But like the last time, I got up and finished out the four miles, then later went back and tried to find the offending crack, to no avail.  This mishap was far less expensive than the previous one – an abrasion on one knee which did not deter me from running two days later and a sore butt.  I was grateful that it was not worse – I could have broken a hip, as my friend Fred did last fall while playing pickleball, or worse.

My training has been going well for a 5-K race – the Cocoa 5-K – coming  up on Saturday, and my main concern was how much of a setback it would be.  But today’s three-mile easy run went well, and I deliberately ran the first mile on the same sidewalk without any mishaps.  We have run this race before, and the first and last half-mile are on sidewalks, so we will have to be alert and nimble-footed, not always easy to do at the end of a race or in its crowded start (where I have witnessed many runners falling).  We are ambivalent about the race anyway, and may give it a miss if the rain forecast for Saturday morning amounts to much.  It is a small race which is part of the annual Carolina Chocolate Festival, featuring such events as a chocolate-pudding-eating contest and many, many different chocolate confections.  The race seems to be a kind of afterthought, and the official trade-marked logo on the shirt is always a cartoon chocolate bar with a bite taken out of one corner.

We would have to set the alarm for 5:00 a.m., too, which we have done many times for more important races.  “Why is it so early?” we wondered.  Then Martha realized that it was to get the race over with and the parking spaces emptied out before the ravenous chocolate-lovers begin showing up.

It is warming up nicely this week, yet the beach remains nearly deserted most of the time.  Martha walked to the pier and back yesterday and returned with a handful of sea stars – there was little competition from other shell-gatherers.

 

Today was Groundhog Day in America, and I watched the ceremonies surrounding the appearance of Phil in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania this morning.  Like the Chocolate Festival, Phil seems to play a less important part in the day’s festivities than the music and the food.  And those people in the crowd - could they be drinking so early?

There were top hats and proclamations, and everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely, even when it was announced that Phil had communicated that there will be six more weeks of winter.  They claim that his prediction is 40% accurate each year, so the odds are (slightly) that the warming temperatures this week and the increased sunlight each day will prove him wrong. And this morning, in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, it was foggy.