We got another wee dusting of the white stuff on Wednesday. It seems 0.02 inch is how Heaven doles it out to us these days. A bit stingy, que no?
Funny how a big dumper is more fun to deal with than one of these piddling dribbles, which barely shift the needle on the Drought-O-Meter®. It’s the little things that suck. Or blow, as the case may be, since these non-events usually come with a side of gale-force wind.
My go-to running garb for this noise includes Merrell Moab Flight trail-running shoes; Darn Tough wool socks; thermal Hind tights over some truly ancient Hind shorts; a long-sleeved Patagonia base layer that’s so old it was made in the USA; a pilled-all-to-hell zip-up North Face vest to keep the pipes from freezing (and transport the iPhone in a side pocket); a long-sleeved, high-collared, quarter-zip polyester VeloNews shell by Columbia; a Sugoi tuque; Smartwool gloves; and Rudy Project shades to keep the windblown sand out of my baby blues.
I shouldn’t need most of this kit today, since it should be warm enough — a high of 52°, with “light and variable” winds? — to ride the ol’ bikey-bikey. But I’m keeping that Paddygucci base layer on standby.
Whew. Looks like I picked a good week to go on a news fast. These pendejos are pitching fastballs. At this pace there won’t be a wall without shit running down it before Valentine’s Day. A lot of it won’t stick, but it’s gonna pile up. The forecast calls for deep doo.
My news fast coincided with a cold snap that kept me off the bike. I don’t object to cycling in the 30s if the sun’s out, but when Tōnatiuh abdicates in favor of Ehecatl, it’s time to go for a run.
Thing is, I’m not a runner. Not really. A runner certainly wouldn’t call me one. Especially if s/he’d caught me at it.
I can pretend for 45 minutes but that’s about it. And that doesn’t burn a lot of daylight for a fella trying to avoid the doomscrolling.
Still, I managed. For about four days. Who can avert his or her eyes while passing a domestic disturbance in daylight or an unshaded window at night? This is like driving past a five-car crash without checking the gutters for rolling heads.
So I eased back in, slowly. A little Kevin Drum. Then a bit of Charlie Pierce. This is akin to reading the police report, if Joseph Wambaugh wrote it. The Atlantic, for a soupçon of button-down viewing with alarm.
Finally, I hit the hard stuff. The New York Times. Holy shit, etc.
I hope the rubes who elected this bozo are enjoying the shitshow. Looks like it’ll be a good long while before he gets those egg prices down.
Glancing back through my training log it strikes me that I have spent November and December intercoursing the penguin, as we used to quip at Live Update Guy.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
In the Before-Time, when I was still racing cyclocross, September through December felt like one big pile of miles, perhaps because it was.
In my Golden Years, the glide from summer through autumn into winter seems better suited to a gradual change of pace. Trail runs, hikes, short rides; that sort of thing. Shake the old brain-box like a dice cup, see what comes rattling out, seven, 11, or snake-eyes.
This year the numbers told me I was getting slightly carried away for a geezer who wasn’t training for anything other than staying on the sunny side of the sod. I was grinding out weeks of 100, 120, even 150 miles. Which can be fun. But it burns an awful lot of daylight for a cat wrangler-slash-cook-slash-blogger who Frankensteined his dead podcast back to life around Halloween for no discernible reason. And come November I was starting to feel rode hard and put away wet.
So I backed off. A lot. Maybe too much. Running three or four days a week, doing a leisurely hour here and there on the bike, mostly on trails. At first it was nice to ease off the accelerator, but after a while this old endorphin junkie was jonesin’ for his fix.
This past week I did three short trail runs — but I also managed four rides, including a pair of back-to-back two-hour outings on my Soma Saga touring bikes, which had been dangling dolefully on their hooks for far too long. They’re stout and sturdy, with fenders and rear racks, and I’m not inclined to do anything wild with ’em; just turn the pedals over until I get tired of it.
A ride of two hours or better not only refills the endorphin tank — it puts the Voices in my head to sleep for a spell, same as a car ride does a crying infant. It’s another welcome change of pace to have only the one murmuring to itself in there as the year winds down.
The Colorado Mountain College running team’s 2024 graduates: bottom, (l-r), Brooklyn German, Aslynn Wardall; top: Nate Encinias, Harrison Walter, Adaline Fulmer, Paulo Aponte. Not pictured: Kenneth Obregon.
By Hal Walter
For the first Sunday in a month of them, there is no long training run on tap for cross-country or track. There is no homework. There will be no evening commute to Leadville to deliver Harrison Walter to Colorado Mountain College.
The Blur, it seems, graduated from CMC this past Friday with an Associate of General Studies degree and proficiency certificates in welding.
It’s really a strange feeling and I am still processing it all. For the past two years life around here has revolved around Mary and me supporting Harrison through college. We’ve put about 30,000 miles on vehicles in doing so, and untold mileage on our brains. We knew it was a big risk sending him to Leadville to live in a dorm, but anything worth doing is worth the risk of failing. We also didn’t have a clue what we were getting ourselves into.
Between the ages of 62 and 64 I spent about 150 nights in a dorm room. We traveled to six states to watch Harrison and teammates run for the CMC Eagles. As his academic aide I learned how to operate Canvas and Basecamp. I read textbooks alongside him and helped guide him through countless assignments. During both summers I coached him through his running workouts.
All of this was out of the belief that a person on the autism spectrum deserved a shot at a college education and experience. He graduated teetering on the brink of the Dean’s List with a GPA of 3.46 (final grades are not yet in). It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns, as he is surely on another Dean’s List for the number of write-ups received, all related to autistic behaviors.
Harrison at Huntsville (third from left). Photo: Hal Walter
As an athlete he left CMC with the school record for the track 10K, and runner-up best times for the 5K and 3K. In cross-country he holds CMC’s third-best cross-country 5K and fifth-fastest 8K, which he ran at the NJCAA National Championships in Huntsville, Ala. He also won the 5K Colorado Cup Snowshoe Race, hosted annually by CMC.
He received the running team’s Most Valuable Runner Award, as well as an award for his GPA and a letter.
And when he wasn’t studying or running he worked part time at Community Threads in Leadville.
There are too many people to thank in this space, but we owe a world of gratitude to his teammates and fellow students, coach and professors, faculty, staff and administration for the patience, support and compassion over these two years. There is a book in the works.
Perhaps rather than a month of Sundays it was an era of Sundays. The future, as Tom Petty sang, is wide open.
DeeCee being a rather long slog via Subaru, I decided I’d settle for a short mood-altering run on the neighborhood trails yesterday.
I won’t travel by air, as you know. And if I did, the airline probably wouldn’t let me take my torch and pitchfork, even as checked baggage.
Anyway, what do I know about taxidermy? Sure, I could collect a few souvenir heads in our nation’s capital with my handy-dandy Gomboy folding saw, but then what? The TSA says you can board a plane with fresh meat, but they may decide to add a cautionary note about “the severed heads of Supreme Court justices” after running your lumpy carry-on through the scanner twice because they didn’t believe what they saw on the first pass.
And if you do manage to make it home without incident, preserving and mounting your prizes for display in the den is not a chore you want to hand off to anyone who doesn’t owe you a really big favor.
Shucks, even a six-pack of ears pinned to a cork board in the garage can make for some pointed conversations you’d rather not have, even if you explain that the fuckers never used them for listening, only to keep their trifocals from falling into their black robes or onto the bench, and anyway, with the fat stacks of attaboys they get from their rich pals they can have a new pair grafted on before you can say, “Case dismissed.”
So, yeah. Herself and I went for a nice trail run in the sunshine, and afterward I decided I was still not in the mood to update myself on the latest news, so I changed costumes and took the Voodoo Wazoo for an enjoyable 90 minutes of light gnar-shredding in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
Today I see the courtroom drama has shifted back to Manhattan. Time for another run. I can’t remember where I put that saw.
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