The Old Runner

After the surprisingly tough time I had with last week's downhill half marathon I decided to take it easy all week, skip speed work altogether, and just run easy right up until today's 5k, the Run/Walk the Greenway 5k in Salisbury. This is a well-established (15 years) and well-managed race and the course, the post race food, and awards are among the best you'll find at any 5k. I woke up at 4 a.m. as usual and tried to shame Linda out of bed at 5 a.m., but she wouldn't budge. She later attributed her slothfulness to the fact that I tossed and turned about half the night secondary to the piriformis syndrome that's been trying to remind me of my mortality. That and the fact that I ate a bunch of watermelon right before bedtime and went to the bathroom about a half dozen times. Whatever the reason, I headed up the road to Salisbury by myself, armed only with a thumb drive full of John Prine songs to keep me company. I was fairly late getting to the race site

It was the second running of The Scream! Half Marathon, which is a point-to-point race that begins in the North Carolina mountains in the town of Jonas Ridge and ends about 2,000 feet below in Mortimer, which as far as I can tell isn't really a town but more like a small, sparsely populated community that might or might not be found as the smallest dot on a map. I ran it last year and it was a lot of fun and the only half marathon I know of anywhere in the Carolinas in the month of July. Since I try to run at least one half marathon every month it'll probably be on my schedule for as long as they have it in July or until I give up on the half-marathon-a-month business. Incidentally, this was my 10th half marathon of 2012 and my 40th half marathon since I began running almost four years ago. My reasoning has been that if I run a lot of half marathons I'll get used to them and it won't be a big deal, and while that plan seems to have worked in some ways it's still

After this past Tuesday's melt-fest at the Firecracker 5k where the temperature was a toasty 98 degrees at the start of the 7 p.m. race, I was ready to get back to business. I had intended to run that race but after gorging myself on pizza and ice cream for lunch and then having dinner with the family at the Original Pancake House just an hour or two before the race, I just wasn't feeling it, so only about a half mile into the race I decided to opt out, pulling over to the side and waiting for my grandson Ryan and his half brother Andrew to catch up so I could run with them. Andrew was told by a doctor last week that he would need surgery on his badly swollen ankle so he did what any normal 23-year-old would do -- went out and ran a 5k. I stayed back and ran the rest of the race with Andrew while Ryan ran on up ahead with our friend Heather.  I actually felt fine after I stopped running hard and enjoyed our slow 3-mile jog. As we approached the finish I had decided to not cro