There'll Be One Child More In This World To Carry On....

I never liked rock bands that featured horns. They don't have any business being crammed into that format. I don't mind hearing them in R & B songs or in some of the Beatles songs. . . I guess what I'm really saying is that I always hated anything by Blood, Sweat, and Tears or Chicago or any band of that ilk.


Yesterday morning I'm padding my way through a long run. Robin is beside me on the bike. Things are getting pretty fluid after I've pulled my gloves at mile 3 and peeled off my shirt and nipple band-aids (another middle aged related atrocity that I have finally come to grips with) at mile 9 and I'm feeling better than expected. I even downed a gel pack on the fly without too much trouble. I have no doubt that I'll make the 18 miles that we had committed to.


Around mile 12 we had a technical setback. Flat tire. Saturday Robin had pointed out that we travel without a spare tube or a pump and I sluffed off the suggestion that we do anything about it.

For several weeks now I've been on this kick of making my Sunday long run a continuous (nonstop) run. Whether or not this is going to help me in a few weeks when I run a marathon is irrelevant. I think it will help and I'm sticking to it. It's a new running neuroses. There is no science to it that I know of.

Robin starts walking the bike and I run ahead and double back. I suggest (as I strafe to and fro) that she call our daughter to come pick her up. She walks the bike another mile or so to the entrance of a local cemetery and tells me that our daughter is on the way. I keep my nonstop running neuroses intact by running a half mile loop through the paved area of the cemetery. On the 3rd pass I realise that she is visiting the grave site of her father. I'm so self absorbed that I didn't really give much thought to where we are.

I begin to think about all the people that I know that are here. I'm running circles around the plots where they have been put to rest. There is my best childhood friend who was killed at age 19 in a car accident back in 1981... the daughter of our very dear friends who died of cancer at 13 a few years ago...Robin's Dad...

As annoying as it is for runners who get tired and drum up songs in cadence with their gait I find that I'm silently singing a song that I always loathed as a kid "And When I Die" by Blood, Sweat, & Tears. I bastardized the lyrics, I'm sure (and without remorse).

I run loops around and around the cemetery as the sun rises. Our daughter arrives. The bike is loaded up. I exit the cemetery stage south and carry on toward home for the last 2 miles which gives me another 16 minutes and 20 seconds to think about how grateful I am...to be alive, for the love of my family, for my friends, and for the health I am afforded to walk, let alone run every Sunday morning at 6 a.m.