I have to admit I am not as obsessive about going out for a run or walk as I was in my younger days. With so many rainy days lately my ventures outside are limited. My younger days would find me heading out the door with a ball cap on to keep the rain off my glasses. With more time indoors I thought it would be beneficial to clean up around the house and workshop and put things in some sort of order. It was evident that a few areas had not been cleaned up or organized for many years.
On a shelf of older books I found some texts I bought when I first started running and was looking for guidance on this sport. There was the book from Consumers Reports on “Running” that was informative. Then I found “Improving Your Running” by Bill Squires written in 1982 that was still up to date. The “Interval Training” book by Fox and Mathews had a publishing date of 1974. When I started running marathons the book by Skip Brown and John Graham titled “Target 26” was read cover to cover. There wasn’t a publishing date in the book but a list of marathon times stopped at 1980. There were several more books on running and training that were around that time frame.
Within the various stacks of material on running I found three posters that I used to have pinned to my wall. One was a poem titled, “Why Do I Run?” that appealed to me. There is a poster that said, “The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep running.” It was a photo of a runner looking at a long road heading down into a scenic valley and up a long hill. It looked like he had about a mile or more to go on this country road. It reminded me of some of the photos that were taken at my Better Half Marathon with runners struggling up that big hill on Center Point Road. Then my favorite poster showed a runner bent over losing most of his pre-race meal with the caption, “Run for Fun”. It brought back a couple of memories of similar experiences.
