Runs Remembered

I’ve intended to make this post for some time. OK, weeks. The day after my last post I set out on a run down the Highline Canal. I hadn’t run that route in at least 7 years, maybe more. Though I’d run here many times in the past, my starting location was new. I left from my brother’s house and began to run north through the snow and 11 degree temperatures. I wondered how long I’d manage. My plan was to go for and hour and fifteen minutes and after about ten minutes, I was warm and comfortable.

Within a couple of minutes I entered an open space area where the path winds along a creek and sometimes crosses it. This area seemed vast as a youth, but now, older and faster, I crossed it’s entirety in only a few minutes. I passed “the cliffs” were my brother and I explored when we first moved to the area, and later as a teenager on some faded Indian-summer afternoon, my friends and I, swung from a rope tied to a high tree branch, way out over the water and back. I ran past the pond that once seemed large but now only a puddle. It hasn’t really changed, but I have.

Further down the path I ran through Cherry Knolls Park where I frequently played two-man volleyball with friends, hit tennis balls with garage-sale-bought golf clubs with my friend Dave, and met classmates for parties. I ran past the steep hill where one summer my friend Adam and I did hill repeats in prep for the upcoming football season. Further on I ran under the Arapahoe Road bridge to the most familiar and formal beginning of the canal trail. The same canal trail on which I’d run so many times before. Often as part of stutter starts and stops in an attempt to “get back into shape”. The same canal on which I rode a bike next to my Dad and passed him water as he trained for a marathon and on which he DID his first marathon one week before his first official marathon! I can’t imagine…

As I approached the South Suburban Recreation Center I recalled the last time I ran here. Instead of running, I had driven to the rec center to start my run and had only completed four miles, two out and two back. And it was not easy. Still, I felt like I’d done some good work. Later that evening, I had met some friends at a bar, drank too much, and probably smoked most of a pack of cigarettes. Yikes…

But this is now and not then. I ran further down the canal, all the while recollecting bits and pieces of runs past. It was easier today though. Despite my now low-altitude Arizona acclimation, were I afforded the opportunity to race myself, I would kick my own younger ass. As I floated past the old turn-around point on still fresh legs, I felt gratitude for the changes in my life and my health and my fitness.

I went a little longer than planned and did around 10 miles in 1:20. It’s going to be a good year and I hope in a few more years, I’ll still be able to kick my own younger ass. It could happen.