There’s a lot I miss about running with SBAA on Saturday mornings. I’d forgot though, about Kenversations. Tailing far, far behind the fast people Ken and I would yap away throughout the tempos annoying everybody in front of us, (there weren’t any behind).
Happy Sunday morning today, I got to run with crazy trail folk. Ken was among them.
Cold in the morning up at San Ysidro. Somehow I’ve lost all of my warm running gear and showed up with a hideous orange Dunkin Donuts beannie that was handed to me at four a.m. in NY last year. I believe it was a booby prize for being dumb enough to get up in the middle of the night to get across a bridge to an island where I would stand around with 40,000 or so souls in a freezing rain waiting for the opportunity to run for hours in a cement jungle.
I thought that I was cold this morning but Nancy must have been colder. Her center of proprioception was indubitably frozen solid. See……….
Ken fell back from runnning with the manly men and I gasped at him for a while.
We didn’t talk about what we were training for , our mileage, or even what hurt. Instead we fell onto Maslow’s hierarchy, not in the context of running so much as in the context of relationships. The conversation was cut short when I took my leave, worried that my son was busily burning down the house in my absence. Driving home I thought some more about Maslow and his attempts at ordering his world through categorization. Running in groups and running in races could be seen as attempts at meeting tiers 3 and 4 in M’s hierarchy. Tier 3 regards the struggle to attain Love or Belonging. If we’re not finding those at home or at work, what better place to search then on a hillside in a canyon while moving steadily forward mile upon mile? Tier 4 ………Esteem. Well, when we do something crazy like an ultra or when we see our name high, or at least not rock-bottom, in posted race results we feel that we are something.
Anybody know a babysitter that wants to come to my house every Saturday at six a.m.?
