Storm Breeder

Yesterday my Saturday long run went better than expected - 8.6 miles, all over Town, and many runners coming with me away from the usual three-mile route.  After lunch I decided to tackle more of that firewood I had cut a couple of weeks ago.

This oak has been especially difficult to split, but often when you cut it and leave the grain exposed in a little rain and snow for a few days, or approach it on a sub-freezing day, it will split more readily.  It is very satisfying to hit one of these big sections of log once, twice, three or four times, and suddenly notice a different, deeper, hollower sound to the blow, and watch the impregnable surface cleave suddenly into two halves, and then halves of halves, narrower and narrower.  Slowly each section falls into a little scattered pile of stove wood:  the fresh aroma of red oak, the chips scattered around, the THWACK of the go-devil, the fresh cold air as I stop from time to time to stretch and load the old wheelbarrow.  The stack of wood grows larger, little by little, just like the miles I log in my little running journal:

It's a good thing, too, because now the weather stations are all predicting another snowstorm - Winter Storm Pax - for next week.  Firewood on the patio, soup in the pantry, fuel oil in the tank and gas in the generator.  The satisfaction of being resourceful!

The IronStrength Workout

Today was my day to go to the gym and lift weights, something I have been trying to do twice a week since completing my marathon in December.  Winter is down-time for me and most other runners, so it is a good opportunity to hit the gym and strengthen some muscles; runners are notorious for having unbalanced muscular strength and I have found over the years that cross-training can keep injuries at bay.  And my last marathon was affected by some issues that could perhaps be remedied with some leg presses, curls, extensions, and toe-raises, all of which I have been doing for several weeks.

This month's issue of Runners World has an article about Dr. Jordan Metzl's IronStrength workout.  Metzl is an accomplished marathon runner and triathlete and the author of a book called The Athlete's Book of Home Remedies, which I happen to have bought a year or so ago and read with great interest; it includes a series of exercises designed to strengthen runners in particular - the glutes, hamstrings, and other weak spots runners all develop over years of running - most of them not requiring weights.  Here's the link, but it doesn't seem to be working today, probably because every reader who subscribes to Runners World is watching the video:

http://www.runnersworld.com/workouts/ironstrength-workout

The most important exercise in the workout, which I incorporated into my own workout today, he calls the plyometric jump squat (or, in the book, iso-explosive bodyweight jump squats.  This lovely lady demonstrates the exercise in the video, which Dr. Metzl says should be easy for runners to do:

I did a few of these on the aerobics floor where I could scrutinize my form in the big mirrors on the walls.  And needless to say it was a challenge for an old guy like me.  No, that is an understatement.  My legs burned so much going up the stairs from the weight room that I wondered why nobody had considered installing an elevator.

Will this make me a stronger runner, as the editors of Runners World who tried to workout for a few weeks claim?  Time will tell. 

Also, my long run tomorrow morning may be a bit of an ordeal to complete.

Zeno's Paradox

I seem to dimly remember, dredged up from the recesses of an undergraduate philosophy class, something called Zeno's Paradox.  I don't often apply classical philosophy in my everyday life so I had to resort to this definition in Wikepedia to refresh my memory:

Zeno's paradoxes are a set of philosophical problems generally thought to have been devised by Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (ca. 490–430 BC) to support Parmenides's doctrine that contrary to the evidence of one's senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion.

Now that is especially amusing because the reason Zeno popped into my head today was that I was running 400-meter intervals, in the same place as in recent weeks, near Harris Lake.  I was having a little trouble getting each one below 2:00, but on the second-to-last one I had just hit 1:58, which was very satisfying.  "I can do better than that," I told myself.  "Only a year or two I was running these at 1:45 and even 1:40.  I'm not getting older, I'm just not used to using my fast-twitch muscles."  (Yeah, right.)  So I started the last one, which ends adjacent to Harris Lake at the intersection with Leonard Road, filled with a renewed sense of purpose, and as I neared the little white line which marks each interval on the pavement, I noticed that a large and playful-looking brown dog had begun to run from the little park area near the lake directly toward me, and just before I reached the mark he was in front of me, forcing me to veer off-course.  I glanced at my watch - 1:57? - and said, "Dammit."  The apologetic owner had by then corralled his dog.  "I'm so sorry," he said.

"That's OK," I gasped, "Not his fault.  I was just trying to time myself to that little white mark there."

The dog's owner crouched down and clamped a leash onto his collar and scolded the dog.  "Now see what you've done, Zeno?"

I ran the final cool-down mile filled with remorse for having gotten angry at poor Zeno, who after all only wanted to play.  It was a lesson in not taking my running or my watch so seriously.

Or Zeno of Elea, either.  "Motion is nothing but an illusion?"   Thanks, but I'll go with the evidence of my senses.

Zeno of Elea

All Over the Place

It's nice to run with friends, but we normally run the same three-mile route in the afternoon.  Some might call it a rut.  Today I had to run a little earlier, starting about 1:30 p.m., so I was by myself.  My thoughts were miles away before I suddenly realized that I had gone nearly a half-mile and was at the familiar end of Fifth Street, turning right, the same route I ran every day.  Instantly I decided to change it up a little, and I turned left, not knowing exactly where I was going.

What a  great feeling that is for a runner! - not to know exactly where one is going.  I ended up running up to Highway 64, past the ball field, down Cullasaja Drive to the Mirror Lake Bridge, a route I had not taken in months, not actually planning out the route, just letting whim, light and shade, and terrain lead me onward.  Ducks were taking off from the lake, the sun was warm, and there were streaks of high white cirrus clouds overhead.  I circled back, climbed  Foreman Road hill, and then back up Chestnut to Sixth, around to the Peggy Crosby Center, down Spring Street, up Main Street.  My GPS watch told me the total distance - 6.16 miles - and I when I got home I jubilantly wrote in my running log:  "All Over the Place!"

The View from the Summit

Yesterday's run was indeed  remarkable for February.  Once again I found myself in shorts and T-shirt, running by the frozen Harris Lake (no longer safe for ice-skating, but still covered with a milky skim of ice).  And it was good to run up venerable Big Bearpen Mountain again after the unrelenting flat roads of Amelia Island.  I had e-mailed my friend Fred, who lives on the very summit, and told him how I had been missing my favorite running route and asking him whether the roads were still icy on the summit.  He told me that it would be better not to admit that I actually enjoyed running up Bearpen.

On the summit, there were muddy ruts where only a short time ago there had been ice.  The vista is always a little different, but this time I could make out the lakes of South Carolina, glimmering out along the horizon.  Or was it just a mirage?  My eyesight has been deteriorating a bit more than usual, aggravated by cataracts and compounded by an incident that had happened two or three weeks ago when (I believe) I had been keeping a very hot fire going in the fireplace insert.  I realized one morning that there was something wrong with my transition lenses:  a fine spiderweb cracking developed all along the surface, which I determined from reading some on-line forums was probably caused by the heat of the open fireplace.  My potter friend confirmed that one of his friends had suffered the same problem with his transitions, caused he thought by a hot kiln.  So on the way down the mountain, light strobing through the trees, I actually took off my glasses and could see better without them.

Effective February 1, my Medicare coverage became effective, which is both comforting and frightening.  So today I spent some time with my opthalmologist, Dr. Secosan in Brevard, who has been treating my eyes for 25 years and performed the glaucoma surgery (called a trabeculectomy) on  them nearly 20 years ago.  I decided to have cataract surgery in one eye.  Is this what everybody does when they go on Medicare,  I wondered?  Go to Florida and have cataract surgery?

Home Again

As much as we enjoy going places, it is always nice to come home again to a place like Highlands.  We were greeted by unusually warm weather, as if Florida had hitched a ride with us; temperatures were way up in the 50s.  What a joy it was to go to our church Sunday morning, to go to the Civic Center and work out on the great new equipment, and to go on a six-mile run with friends we have not seen for several days.  Home again.

And to be wearing shorts and a thin T-shirt on top of it all!  Today the sun is out and the sky is blue and it is 55 degrees on the back porch.  But I am not so easily deceived.  As much as we would like to believe it, that groundhog saw his shadow on Sunday.  So I spent some time today working on that pile of logs and trying to get some more firewood stacked up before the next storm.

I will not rest easily until that pile is a lot higher.

Respite in Florida

It has been an unusually cold winter in Highlands, as this blog has pointed out, and last week we decided it was time for a respite.  So we decided to escape for a few days to Fernandina Beach, Florida, on Amelia Island.  We had never been there before so it was fun exploring the historic district, eating fresh seafood, and enjoying some more temperate running.  While we were gone, the latest winter storm, Leon, extended its cold and icy grip far into the south, snarling traffic in Atlanta to the extent that I-285 became a parking lot.  We saw horror stories on Facebook of friends forced to spend the night in a Home Depot, and there were several local fender-benders.  We were fortunate to have missed the snow and ice by one day - our house during our absence looked like this (photo taken by our neighbor Dori):

Dori reported that they were enjoying sledding on our road, which would have made transportation a little difficult and would have brought my running program to a stand-still (or its opposite, a fall-down).  Still, I have to confess that we were a little envious missing the Clear Creek Winter Wonderland and putting the sled into operation again.

Fernandina Beach was chiller than expected (and the locals said it was unusually cold, even for January), but I had not realized how much I had become acclimated to the colder temperatures this winter.  My first morning found me doing a three-miler along the beach road in 36-degree temperatures, and it felt absolutely balmy!  My warmest day was Friday - temperatures well into the 50s - through a lovely, long and curving road to Fort Clinch, on the northern end of the island:

The three-mile road was intersected by cycling and hiking trails, and in addition to the snowy egrets I had seen the previous day I saw this great egret (not my photo, but exactly like this) during my run.

But during the summer months I would have been a little nervous departing from the main road.  This sign was prominently displayed all along the road and along the nearby Egans Creek Greenway:

No worries.  I'd sooner encounter a Highlands bear than a gator of any size.  And what about those Burmese pythons that are overrunning the state, I asked our desk clerk?  I'm not from around here.

"Oh, I killed one of those in my back yard last week."