On I went, out of the wood, passing the man leading without knowing I was going to do so. Flip-flap, flip-flap, jog-trot, jog-trot, curnchslap-crunchslap, across the middle of a broad field again, rhythmically running in my greyhound effortless fashion, knowing I had won the race though it wasn't half over, won it if I wanted it, could go on for ten or fifteen or twenty miles if I had to and drop dead at the finish of it, which would be the same, in the end, as living an honest life like the governor wanted me to. -Alan Sillitoe, "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

I pay a lot of lip service to not caring about medals. Tied in to that, I don't really save my bibs... or do I?

I was going through an old filing cabinet this weekend, and I came across a most peculiar cache:


Bibs. Loads of them. Loads and loads of them. Dating from 2002-2003.


And other stuff! Like... the back of this bib:


(Do as I say, not as I do, and do NOT try this at home.)

And what's that in the background of my stress fracture bib? Why, it's Frank Shorter's signature, of course! Two different bibs autographed by my heartthrob, Frank Shorter:



And one by Alberto Saladbar Salazar:


And Jackie Joyner Kersee, even, looking all '90s:


And, lest you think that last weekend's victory was an anomaly, here's proof that it wasn't:


That is a printout (whose direction I don't know how to rectify) of the time I took 2nd in my age group. At a local 5k, yes. And sober, too!

I think the take home message here is quite obvious: I've always had the tendency to race frequently. And J-Jo-Ke needs a new haircut.

4 comments:

  1. Not one, but two Frank Shorters? And Saladbar? AND you were racing with a stress fracture but wrote about it on your emergency contact? You're kind of a running big deal.

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  2. I love this post. Love love love it. In part because I ran so many of these races with you. But mostly because I had no idea that you wrote the stress fracture note.

    I actually thought about your stress fracture yesterday and how it served as a great example of my strategy for Sunday. My hamstring is healing nicely, thanks to generously administered NSAIDs. I remembered that you were told once that you could take up to 20 Advil in 24 hours before the dosage became toxic strain on your liver. Do you think I'll need that many to get through 30K? How much confidence do we have in my liver?

    I'm going to do a light jog tomorrow and if all goes well...we will be running Around the Bay on Sunday! Wooohoooooo!

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  3. I am too sentimental to not trash my bibs... but they are one of the only things I keep.

    Were you going to write about the Shorter write-up in RW? I vaguely remember you writing about that.

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  4. "I have a stress fracture in my tibia" ?????

    You may be a marathon maniac if....you ran a marathon with a stress fracture and felt the need to write that on your bib in case you REALLY got hurt?

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