The Old Runner

Friday was my birthday, so when Linda asked me what I wanted I was more than happy to announce that I had picked out a race 400 miles away for this Saturday in Jacksonville, Florida. After last week’s bone chiller in Asheville we were both ready for something a little less frosty. The forecast for the Carolinas was miserable but Jacksonville was expecting a high of 80 degrees for Saturday. I liked the sound of that, and with the little bit of leverage I gained from it being my birthday, we were off to the races in the sunny confines of Florida. We arrived at Jacksonville Beach about midnight Friday and got an oceanfront room so we could enjoy the rest of Saturday after the race and got up bright and early and headed for the Ortega River Run. The weather was as beautiful as the 5-mile course that wound its way through tree-lined neighborhoods as well as across two bridges that crossed over the Ortega River. This was my first 5-mile race (you might remember I just started running 6 mon...

It was a rare Sunday afternoon race, and to paraphrase an old Bible Passage, “Many were cold, and a few were frozen.” As a devout coward when it comes to cold weather, I religiously checked weather.com all week, hoping the Lord would smile upon us with warm weather for this race, but despite it being in the afternoon the temperature never did warm up — at least not enough the suit me. Temperature at the 2:30 race time was about 32 degrees with a 20 mile per hour wind, making the wind chill around 24. I’m not really complaining because there’s nothing anybody can do about the cold — it’s one of the fringe benefits of running in the winter in the mountains. According to the race director, there were 420 runners for this year’s 17th annual running of the Frostbite 5k — 100 more than ever before. True runners it seems, unlike myself, laugh in the face of cold weather, and possibly also in the face of those of us who are praying for some warm weather to come soon. We arrived about an hou...

Maybe I’m showing my age a little bit (there’s a scoop for ya) but this week’s trip to the town of Rutherford College, North Carolina (population 1,272) provided a welcome return to normalcy after the pandemonium at last week’s Krispy Kreme Challenge in Raleigh. We had originally planned on running the Cupid’s Cup race in Charlotte but last week my long-time friend Michael Fox emailed me and said he was going to run in Rutherford College. Michael is the inventor of the Dulcijo and is one of the world’s greatest clawhammer banjo players (and the fella who taught me to play the banjo 30-something years ago). So Linda and I changed gears and headed to Rutherford College. The course was a challenge, with a couple of steep hills, but the run through the countryside (you can see it in the photos) was spectacular. I stopped about ten times during the race to snap a picture. I figure I’m not going to win anyway so a few extra seconds shouldn’t matter, and in the end all three of us — Michael...

So today we traveled 200 miles down Tobacco Road to run the Krispy Kreme Challenge in Raleigh along with 5,000 other sweet-toothed runners. Run 2 miles, eat a dozen doughnuts, and return to the starting point. The “challenge” is to finish in one hour. This was a race without a real sense of urgency, so I stayed with Linda throughout the race and we just kind of ran in mosey mode. Just as well, because when we arrived at the Krispy Kreme that was our destination there was a bit of a logjam (as you can see in the photos) with a few thousand other people trying to get and then eat their dozen doughnuts. The mess on the ground was pretty bad, but didn’t really compare with the organizational mess of this race. It took probably 15-20 minutes just to get the doughnuts so it was probably best to not worry much about how quickly you were going to finish the race. I was in the “Challenger” (timed) category and Linda was in the “Casual” (untimed) category. Before the race I wondered how the cha...