Jim Austin

His previous columns are archived HERE.

JIM AUSTIN

Drive-by Honking

I would like to dedicate this column to Vermont's Brattleboro Union High School cross-country running team. If you read the sports page you may know that they won the Marble Valley Championship again this year.

My son Shorty is a third-year man on the team and we know exactly what kind of guts and sacrifice it takes for these athletes to be successful. It is their success that has inspired me to try a comeback.

Actually "comeback" is a bit misleading. How can a "never was and never will" make a comeback? Read on and you will see what I mean.

Well, I am back on the road again, trying to stave off the inevitable encroachment of total physical shutdown. It was either resume my running career or log on to the "rascal" website and finance a scooter.

I'm up at 6:30 a.m., slather the thighs with vaseline to combat "chub rub", secure the walkman, set the pedometer and I'm off. This morning my route was three miles on River Road over a blessedly level surface.

I have been at this for two weeks every other day and I have been trying to break thirty minutes over the three miles. I'm always in the area but can't quite do it. Until this morning.

I was feeling pretty good, blobbing along at my usual pace. Unfortunately a glance at the stopwatch showed that, once again, I would fall short of my goal. With a half mile to go I spotted two adult Canada Geese with two little goselings. How exciting, wildlife right there on River Road.

As I approached, these heretofore serene fowl became agitated. Their eyes bulged, their beaks foamed. They started running along ahead of me on the other side of the road. I drew even with them and they became downright hysterical. Both adults started flapping their wings and charging, heads lowered, slavering beaks agape.

Not one to trifle with possibly rabid, geese, I took off.

They must have chased me for a quarter of a mile, snapping at my hindquarters. If they managed to hamstring me I could easily have become another innocent victim of peckicide.

My opposition to the leghold trap was ebbing by the second. By the time I hit the 3-mile mark I had new record: 29:43. If I could only get those geese to appear at the 3 1/2 mile mark of the Firecracker Four Miler, I might not come in 99th like last year.

Road work is a fairly predictable process. After so many training days the miles get easier and the breath less labored.

Every runner can probably tell you their own mental paradigm as well. After the first mile I wrestle with the idea of quitting. I have to use my natural self-esteem to promote the proper encouraging mind set. As in:

"C'mon you bloated pus-beetle, if you don't do it now then when?"

Later on, as my body adjusts to the rigors of the road, I get somewhat bigheaded.

"Maybe I should start marathon training," I muse. I can easily sustain this pace for twenty-four more miles."

One thing I have never achieved is this mystical runner's high I keep reading about in Runner's World Magazine.

"All at once it was as if my feet had turned to gossamer wings as I wafted like a fragrant vapor over the last twenty miles of my run," is an example of the specious burbling spouted by one of the bone and gristle fraternity.

Bone people are given to waxing eloquent over their running capabilities. Let them try hauling 220 pounds of heavily marbled meat over three miles and then we'll see whose got gossamer feet. Those poncey little twerps can't imagine the combination of running and dead lifting that we full-figured plodders go through.

As usual, the only runner's high I ever get is sitting on the deck after my ordeal letting the sweat dry as I quaff a frosty Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boy and puff on a Macanudo, which, coincidentally, emits plenty of fragrant vapors.