Club 502 OR ( It’s All) A Numbers Game OR My 500 Mile Summer

Tags

math, numbers, Running, summer, wandering minds

I never seem to be able to settle on a title for theses posts. I suppose since I’m covering a lot of ground that one specific title wouldn’t do.

Alternatively, I could limit the post to one subject but in my mind with things all running together at a blurrying pace I have trouble keeping my thoughts from mashing up at the end of the street like a three car pile up.

Club 502 sounds like one of those places where one would knock on a barely visible door in the seedy part of town, a peephole would open and you would say ” Joe sent me” and those magic words would gain you admittance. The password could also be Swordfish – See the Marx Brothers for that payoff.

My first waking thought this morning was seeing the number 12 spelled out before my eyes as in “Twelve.” I have no reasonable explanation for why. Apostles, Epistles?

Numbers on my mind and in extrapolating, which might or might not be the right word to use here, the numbers came to me in a flash it’s all a numbers game anyway isn’t it?

The answer to all of the following questions is numbers.

How old are you? How tall, how much do you weigh, what is your heart rate, your blood pressure, how many hours did you sleep last night, how many brothers or sisters, how many children?

What year is your car, how old is it, how many cylinders, what’s your mileage, how big is the gas tank, what do you pay for insurance?

And so on and so forth and so what? Surrounded by numbers, enveloped by math only we used to call it arithmetic.

The unified theory of the unified and unknowable universe is a set of numbers. Get them in the right order and bingo ( again numbers) you win something on a cosmic game show. Maybe ” The Price is Galactically Right.

Running the numbers down the rabbit hole. Running the numbers and we finally get to where we’re going as postulated above somewhere between the multiple titles and here.

I started a run streak on Memorial Day of this year because I could I suppose and what else was there to do except to not get sick and to not infect anyone else. So far, so good. Tragically I am unable to share my luck.

So I ran and I ran and I ran and after 50 days of running I took a day off and then went back at it. The odd fact in all of my running which continued to yesterday was the number 502 as in that’s the total mileage on my running feet since that day in late May 2020.

That number is well beyond my wildest running dreams or expectations or anything in my running memory or history.

I don’t know how this happened and as winter starts to slowly creep down the lane I wonder how much mileage I’ll continue to accrue. I’m not a big fan of running in cooler temps or when the numbers Celsius or Fahrenheit start to drop.

The nice thing for me, the bonus in all of these words and sentences and phrases and non-sequiturs is I can let my mind wander or RUN if you will.

You start at the starting line aka the top of the blank page and you end up at the finish line which is right HERE.

Once Upon a Time in New Hampshire

Tags

bread, coffee, Guitars, New Hampshire, summer

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of spending a few days in New Hampshire with friends both guitar playing and non guitar playing.

When I got home someone asked me what I did up there for that long weekend.

I said ” We played music, ate good bread and drank strong coffee.”

Yep, that about covers it.

Also, I slept pretty well in that late summer mountain air.

It’s Like A Heatwave

Tags

ac, heat, summer

Burnin’ in my heart… It got hot here last week and everyone lost their minds.

Sitting on my back steps one evening instead of relishing the sound of no lawnmowers and watching the lightning bugs do their thing I was worn down by the constant and incessant whrrrs of a half dozen window air conditioners all tossing hot air into my backyard.  I’m not a fan of AC.

I wait all year for some decent open all the windows in the house warm and fresh air and then we have to play ” Let’s pretend it’s not July” by closing up the house, the car, the supermarket, the coffee shop force feeding cold air down our backs.

In conclusion, all I can say is that you don’t have to shovel heat no matter how hot it gets.

Those Crazy, Lazy, Hazy Days of Summer

Tags

music, songs, summer, teenagers

Since we’re only a couple of days away from the first day of the summer of 2019 It’s time to nominate your choice for summer tune that we’ll all be singing ad nauseum even though we probably don’t know all the words.

Which brings me to this – When did the song of the summer become a thing?  I know it is now but when did we hold a referendum and decide we actually need an anthem for June, July and August?  I must have missed it on the news.

In my tadpole brain I remember songs that came out in the summer but no one song ever claimed the crown as ” Song of the Summer.”

Here are some titles in no particular order of importance but that still remind me of those hazy, lazy crazy days of summer.  Hint – There’s one for ya right now.

Somewhere in my early teens there was ” So in Love,” By The Tymes, ” California Girls” by The Beach Boys, ” A Summer Place” by Percy Faith.  I think The Letterman jumped on the tune after it was a hit and scored with a vocal version of the tune.  Either one works for me.

” Summer in the City” of course.  Was ” Up On The Roof” a summer tune?  Sure feels like it along with” Under The Boardwalk.”  I know that ” Groovin”  was.

How about ” Hot Fun in the Summertime” and that tune by Mungo Eddie, or Jerry or whatever his name was?

And then summer ceased to be three months with nothing to do as we all got summer jobs, went maybe to summer school and then stopped coming home from college for the summer and grew up.

Summer songs – Whaddya think?

 

 

The Black Ice of Life

Tags

age, Beach Boys, getting older, ice, summer

I was carpooling this morning across what used to be the mighty and still lovely Susquehanna, before it was all dammed up, as snow flurries began to fall.

The sky was grey, the highway was slowly turning white and many cars were covered with a white and grey with a combination of snow, slush and road salt.

It was a ghostly looking caravan made a bit more treacherous because some of my fellow drivers neglected to turn on their car’s headlights, fog lights, tail lights or any other illumination required by law when using windshield wipers.

Some regulations appear to merely suggestions or just plain optional depending on the IQ and common sense of the driver.  In both cases low and lacking.  Great title for a future post I think.

In an attempt to pretend it was once again 80 degrees and once again July, 1963 I tossed this little gem into the cd player.

As me and my buddy ruminated on our respected ages, declining incomes, general desire NOT to work anymore and our collective inability to understand the current world at least the music brought us back to a simpler time when our roads ahead and our visions were clear, as opposed to the increasingly streak smudged windshield I was peering through.

And then in a flash of insight ( I thought so anyways) as we were talking about how great things used to be I somehow married our discussion with the weather and said something like:”  When we were young our whole lives were stretched out ahead of us just like this road except we couldn’t have possibly known about the Black Ice patches that lay ahead.

Boom – Dead silence and an aha moment.

Life is kinda filled with patches of Black Ice I suppose although it goes by many other names but this morning Black Ice seemed appropriate enough.  Some of those rough spots are of our own making and I take responsibility for those.

It’s the ones you never expect when you’re cruising along with the top down and radio blasting.

Freezing rain tonight followed by temps in the 40’s tomorrow.

I can’t wait until it’s 80 degrees and July 1963 again.

A Ten Mile ( Pound ) Run in a Five Pound Bag ( Me).

Tags

Marathons, Running, summer, ten miles

For all of you who were getting a little misty about the coming change of seasons Summer would like me to remind you that it ain’t over till it’s over as evidenced by this afternoon’s temps in either the high 80’s or low 90’s.

Headed out later in the day than I had planned but still firmly had my gaze fixed on 10 miles.  Crossing into double digit mileage for the first time this summer and had the temps been in the 70’s I would have knocked ten out of the park.  I had eight miles covered easily but the last two are what we say separate the sheep from the goats.

Ten miles turned into a slog that left me soaking wet and not from any passing rainstorm.  Tomorrow is most definitely a day off as I marshall my forces for eleven next Monday on Labor Day.

Summer sez – Autumn?  Not so fast bub.  In the meantime I’d like to deposit ten miles in the marathon bank.  Summer miles mean November smiles.  Yeah, it’s a simple phrase but if I’m smiling at 22 then today was definitely worth it.

See You in November

Tags

Philadelphia Marathon, Running, summer, training

See you when the summers’ through…A song perhaps…?

So for all the whining and complaining about last winter it seems that the summer of 2015 has arrived a good five weeks early.  Which means that my marathon training is already proceeding ahead of schedule leaving me plenty of recovery time for the inevitable aches, pains and unexpected injuries.

Here’s my unscientific but personally proven marathon training schedule:

Get a calendar and circle Sunday, November 22nd which is the day of the Philadelphia Marathon.

Cross out two weeks prior to the 22nd as my last long run will be on Sunday, November 8th.

Work backwards from there – 20 miles on the 8th, a 19 mile run during the week of October 25, maybe 18 during the week of October 18, possibly 17 during the week of October 11 and so on and so on marching backwards through time to where Saturday, August 7th is scheduled to be a 6 mile run. I’m already at 6 miles.  I should be easily be running 10 milers by the middle of June.

Pick a date and add a mile a week until 20 miles and two weeks from the marathon coincide.

The math and the calendar dates work.  If this year is anything like years past I’ll probably top off at a 16 miler sometime during early November and that will be that.

It’s not like I’ll be undertrained, well, yes I probably will but after 9 marathons I know me.  I believe that experience and guile will help me navigate 26.2 miles. I also believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny but 26 miles in Philadelphia in November is like an old friend.

A belly full of bagels and bananas is my race day secret. Bananas and Powerbars at 6 and 13 miles are key.  After 13 it’s off to Manyunk (aka the Valley of Despair) and the turnaround at 20.  I plan to eat a pretty big meal the night before the marathon.  I don’t know but it works for me.

Most marathon training schedules assume that the sun shines every day, you don’t work, you never get sick or injured, your kids are perfectly behaved and self sufficient, the cat never throws up, and if you do work you can avoid working weekends and you like getting up at 5 am to run in August because it’s gonna be 97 degrees by noon.

August brings us a new pair of size 10 Saucony Rides from my local running store.

September has a number of half marathons around here so they pretty much fall right in place when I need to run 13 organized miles.  The week of November 15th is already designated as eat spaghetti every day week.

My goal is run through the summer and fall without getting injured.  Well, yeah, who’s isn’t?

Watch this space for periodic and humorous updates on how the summer running plays out.  Anyone else got big plans for the fall?

This Makes Me Crazy

Tags

shorts, summer

At one of the many places I work an edict came down not from on high but from somewhere in the labyrinths of middle management.

Much of the work I do is outdoors and physical in nature.  As summer approaches the weather continues to get warmer which is why this new rule makes no sense.  The rule is as follows:

No shorts.  It looks unprofessional.  Not a safety issue.  It just looks unprofessional.

This from a person who wears a skirt and sits behind a desk in an air conditioned office.

Everything Will Turn Out Alright

Tags

Don't Worry Baby, music, summer, Susan Cowsill

Spent time last night perusing the You Tubes for new /old music or old/new music and  happened on this one.  I do this a lot.

I’ve always liked this tune from the first time I heard back during the mid 1960’s and I think that somewhere in my back pages I wrote a post that features it.  I’ll look for that later.

But sitting here at the kitchen table on a snowy and cold Tuesday morning in January and watching birds flutter around the feeder I decided that I needed an instant summertime trip and so here it is.

This might not be your idea of July but it suits me just fine even with six months to go.

 

Seasons and The Circle Game

Tags

Fall, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, seasons, Spring, summer, Tom Rush, Winter

I’m sitting at the kitchen table this morning eating my bowl of generic Cheerios aka known as Oat-O’s around here.  I look out the window at the dogwood tree that forms much of the view.

The leaves are no longer green.  I see shades of red, orange, maybe purple with a little brown and yellow mixed in.  Then it hits me.  It’s Fall.  Never mind the calendar.

The trees have no qualms about accepting the change of seasons.  It’s time and they just do what they have always done.  Accept things as they are and move on.

What is it about us or maybe just me that wants to squeeze the last little bit of Summer out of Summer?

Fall is a transitional season.  It’s always in motion getting cooler every day.  Same with Spring except in reverse.  Summer lays in for a good long haul and Winter does it’s job of letting nature rest.

The answer to last week’s puzzler was of course Joni Mitchell who wrote ” Urge For Going.”  I first heard it on an album by one Mr. Tom Rush titled ” The Circle Game.”

Tom also covered tunes on that record by some other up and coming songwriters named Jackson Browne and James Taylor.  I wonder how they turned out?

Yeah, I’d like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so.

It will be Fall on Tuesday.  Have a great weekend.

Sometimes it’s best to have No Regrets.