The glory days are not always what you think they are

Posted on December 30, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth

I got my gripe session about the travails of 2019 out of the way yesterday. Now it’s time to look ahead to 2020. Let’s spare each other the obvious cliches about “vision” and “seeing clearly.” I’m sure we’ll find plenty of that on Linkedin feeds by clickbaiters eager to prove their business acumen.

In the meantime, I made some comment on a Twitter brag about Trump and this is what the Tweeter named The Modern Marilyn (@glamgabber) wrote back. “Aren’t you late for your meeting of runners who sit around and talk about the glory days of high school cross country? Donald J. Trump has accomplished more than you could ever dream. And you feel righteous in dragging him down? Yap on jealous running blogger.”

Of course I should now better than to troll another troll. But at least she was curious enough to visit my profile to learn that I’m a runner. And that’s what she chooses to mock?

I’ll admit that I haven’t enjoyed the same success as Donald J. Trump. I’m not a wealthy man. My running blog isn’t even a profit-maker, per se. It has been helpful in getting content work from people that read my blog and like the writing. So it’s not a total loss.

It is also a form of writing practice, an important tool of the craft. That’s a good thing for writers to do, practice. It is also a form of therapy, and that is also good. I’ve had the opportunity to interview dozens of interesting people about their lives past and present, and pushed their stories out to other publications and media outlets where they’ve gotten even more recognition. I don’t think that’s a failure in purpose, do you?

Taking an interest

Because taking an interest in other people and writing about your own life can in some small ways change the world. At times, it can have even greater effect.

As for the accusation that runners “sit around and talk about the glory days of high school cross country,” of that I am at least partially guilty. But so are about five hundred other former runners on the Facebook group Glenn’s, a closed group consisting of many of Illinois’ best runners, many of whom went on to success in college and beyond. We all raced each other on the roads. Some are still winning national championships or running and riding for health and fitness well into our fifties, sixties and seventies.

There is no doubt that many of us still likely think about our racing days when we were much faster than we are today. Yet running at the rate we can now still feels much like it did forty years ago. That’s not living in the past. That’s dealing with the present. And if it keeps us mobile, vital and healthy to the best of our ability, then the glory days live on within us. That’s called motivation.

Growing bolder

Many Americans are approaching their senior years with a more active countenance. Contrast that with the lifestyle of President Donald J. Trump, who claims exercise will shorten your life. He also drives a golf cart on the course no matter what, even pulling his wheeled chariot onto the greens in order to avoid having to walk anywhere, even to make a putt. By many accounts, he also cheats at golf.

Donald Trump cheating a weather map to make it say what he wants it to say.

Most of us don’t have the money or the fame or own country clubs like Donald Trump. So Modern Marilyn is right about that. And it is also true that no one in the world holds the political status of the American President. But our modest successes are still worth noting. When called upon to care for others, we do our best. When pressed to act with conscience, we try to make the right choices. When faced with decisions about whether to be honest or not, we seek to tell the truth.

I believe those character traits evolve from having done something really hard in life. running as fast as you can for as far as you can cleans out the spirit. That brand of pursuit forces one to be honest. It’s true with cycling and swimming as well. There is no faking it in any of those worlds.

Granted, there are people who cheat to win, but none of us really admires them. That steals genuine honor from those who deserve it.

Do cheaters prosper?

None of us trusts a cheater. That is why suspicions about the actions of Donald Trump are so profound in this world. When he pardons a Navy Seal whose peers characterize their fellow soldier as “freaking evil” and lacking conscience, Trump undermines codes of the military that govern how war should be conducted. When our President rewards a cheater like that, the cheating feels like the right thing to do.

That’s also how our military in Iraq came to believe that torture was an acceptable practice. It was “okay to cheat” on the rules of conduct according to the Bush-Cheney administration because any method that extracted information from so-called “enemy combatants” was claimed to be justified in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. So our nation conducted torture in the same facilities where Saddam Hussein once tortured and murdered his own people. In those moments, we became one with the despotism of a deeply conflicted nation.

Who can be sure that we’ve ever fully recovered from that compromise in principles? Our country became so deeply entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan we have still not vacated those nations. Even Obama’s withdrawal of thousands of troops did not eradicate the American stain on the region. We’re still mucking about in the Afghan debacle. All because our nation’s leaders tried to cheat reality by invading a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Cheaters never really do prosper in the long term.

More cheating afoot

That sense of suspicion about cheating is what made millions more Americans vote against Trump than for him. Yet his supporters feverishly welcomed the torrent of rash insults, misogynistic threats, racist taunts, insensitive mocking, praise for white supremacists and bigotry and outright lies used by Trump to win favor while inviting “Wikileaks, I love wikileaks…” to release potentially damaging information about his political rivals. On many fronts, Trump cheated the American political process and claimed that he was “winning.” But America as a whole was all the time losing something important that it once owned. Integrity.

Breaking the pattern

There is clear evidence that Trump actually received help from Russian in getting elected in 2016. Trump is loathe to admit that fact. He cannot stand the idea that he is in any way an illegitimate POTUS or a legitimate POS. That all contributes to why the House of Representatives impeached the man, and new evidence keeps turning up that Trump was trying to cheat to win the presidency a second time around.

I have running and triathlon friends that are conservatives. Some support Donald Trump and some do not. As this blog has consistently indicated, I am not afraid to call the man a cheater and a liar because it’s true. His fraudulent university, shady dealings with his own foundation, refusal to pay contractors and even stiffing the cities that host his rallies all point to a man so self-serving and dishonest he lets nothing stop his greed or his vicious desire for dominance over others. It is the opinion of many experts that Donald Trump exhibits all the traits associated with being a sociopath.

The Trigger Game

So the lady on Twitter who thinks Trump is a success, and who muses that people like me are failures that live in the past, surely know how to pay the trigger game pretty well. Still, I wished her condolences on the loss of her dog. That sucks for anyone to go through. Which makes me wonder how someone can love a dog so much yet gladly suffer the inhumanity of a mean-spirited man like Donald Trump? There must be something else going on.

The man has cheated on multiple wive and openly lusted for his own daughter.

It appears the leap in faith required to worship a man like Trump has nothing to do with present reality and genuine human suffering. It is instead the need to embrace and promote the perception of winning in the face of life’s challenges that motivates so many to worship Donald Trump. It is also a need to claim persecution and seek vindication that motivates so many to support his vengeful nature. That’s the explanation for the evangelical support for a man with so many un-Christian attitudes and actions. They view him as a portal to the aims of their religion, a “necessary evil” to accomplish God’s work. So there’s a huge segment of the Christian community that believes it is fine to cheat in a thousand ways if one can claim that it achieves God’s work in the end.

I don’t buy that argument, and never will. Nor do others. We’re supposed to learn from the flaws of those servants of God, not emulate them while perpetually expecting forgiveness without any sign of repentance or contrition. Then demanding political favors while we go about the business of abusing others for power. Those things are wrong. And as a result, some are beginning to question that undying support for Trump will lead to ultimate triumph of the spirit.

I’ll take the “glory days” attitude that celebrating the accomplishments it took hard and honest work to achieve, be those moments past or present, as the right values for America. We should all choose those best examples of human spirit, and not giving up, over the sick notion that God chooses corrupt people on purpose to prove some strange point that all of us are flawed. I maintain that small and honest victories, no matter how insignificant they may seem, are the real accomplishments worth celebrating in any age. I believe Jesus would tell us the same thing, and scripture bears that out in manifold ways.

The glory days are still here if you want them to be.

The glory days, which are so often maligned as evidence of lost hopes and fallen dreams, are actually quite beneficial in recalling how to do things well. It is also true that those who forget the past are often condemned to repeat it. And you would be surprised how often our group of “glory days” runners share experiences that are far from glorious, but instead share the challenges of trying hard, and sometimes failing due to ego or other causes. That turns the notions of “glory days” on its head, but it’s true. We also laugh at our mistakes, openly lament or ridicule our crushing collapses from exhaustion or mental mistakes and confess: “I wasn’t perfect. But I tried my hardest.”

And those are virtues of both soul and mind.

Those glory days are proactive in a sense that they are always ours to experience and promulgate in positive ways if we embrace those values and hold ourselves accountable to legitimate standards in the present. There’s a lack of that virtue in America right now, and it’s all encapsulated in the profane choice to glorify a man that has cheated to win his whole life.

Posted in aging, aging is not for the weak of heart, Christopher Cudworth, competition, cycling, healthy aging, IRONMAN, swimming, Tarsnakes, track and field, triathlete, triathlon, triathlons, trolls | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

I sentence 2019 to the past

Posted on December 29, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth

With the year 2020 now approaching fast, I sentence 2019 to the forever past.

The year 2019 started off well enough with a triathlon training trip to the mountains of Tucson. But my neck kept tightening up during the rides and nearly locked up completely on the descent down Mt. Lemmon when the temperatures dropped and our nylon windbreakers really weren’t enough to keep us warm. I pulled over before crashing due to shivering, only to get a bee stuck in my chinstrap where it stung me on the throat.

I should have seen that as an omen for the year to come.

Because in May I got tangled up in a strange bike accident where some inattentive soul stepped out from between two cars along a rural highway. I was looking back to check on traffic in order to pass the two cars parked right on the white line. When I looked up there was no time to stop and I struck the dude smack in the ass with my front wheel. It bent the rim and flattened the tire. He then filed a police report trying to blame me for the crash but the officer called me to say, “I’d like to hear your side of the story.”

A month later I got a call from the guy trying to collect money from me for his medical bills. I told him, “That’s not going to happen.” He threatened me with a lawyer and I said, “You go right ahead.” Because I’d already talked to one of the leading bike law lawyers in Illinois and knew that this guy was completely in the wrong.

I could well have pursued that guy to collect for the painful hand and wrist injury caused by the accident. But it was my fault that the injuries were made worse when I tripped over a tree root during a run in Madison and fell on the same wrist that was injured in the bike accident.

So 2019 was already a thriller of a year by mid-summer, because I’d also left a job in a Mutual Separation Agreement about which I cannot say a word other than to say that sometimes you suffer strange circumstances for trying to do the right thing.

Thus I was hoping the rest of the summer would settle down when a horrendous tooth problem flared up that forced me to head to the dentist. The pain was caused by some bad dental work I’d had done in the past, and that led to an infected molar. My regular dentist opened it up, took one look and said, “This is out of my league.” But the endodontist to which he normally refers patients was out of town for the 4th of July, or something like that. But I was in serious pain. So I went through other channels and found the Michael Jordan of endodontists, who was in and out of that tooth in fifteen minutes because he does 3000 of those things a year.

But the tooth was not to be saved. We tried a couple times more to seal off the roots but finally I was sent to an oral surgeon who said, “This tooth needs to come out or you could die.” My face was swollen and the pain required several doses of 800 mg NSAIDs per day to stay sane. And when the surgeon saw my condition he literally punched a hole in my lower jaw lining to drain the swelling and said, “You come back tomorrow, and call me anytime if you notice this getting worse.”

And I did. And even after the tooth was yanked it took two weeks of antibiotics and repeat visits to get the condition under control. And it was only August by then.

But I’d accompanied Sue to a Half Ironman or two along the way, including Steelhead in Michigan. And while I was riding my bike into town to pick up some cash to buy lunch, some guy with a chip on his shoulder started yelling at me for riding my bike on the sidewalk. Dozens of other people had been doing it all day, especially the out-of-towners trying to get from the race staging area near the beach back to the hotels, but this guy wanted to give me a piece of his mind. I kept riding only to have him come around the corner at the ATM and challenge me to a fight. And I thought, “That’s all I need. Get arrested and sued for beating up some idiotic sociopath.”

So it took all my self control to walk away from that bit of potential ugliness. But it’s a sign of the times that self-righteous assholes rave at people just trying to get along and enjoy life. We’ve got a president who does it daily. And his followers love to claim persecution while dishing it out in droves.

It just wasn’t my summer. That’s all I can say.

Because I skipped the two Olympic triathlons in which I’d hoped to compete. I was all ready to drive to Wauconda at 4:00 in the morning the day of the race in July when massive thunderstorms rolled over the Chicago area pouring rain and lightning down from the sky. So that race was not to be. I got up anyway to drive the race number I’d collected for my sister-in-law the day before and plied my Subaru through rivers flowing across the main highways. Then I drove back home wondering if I was a latter day version of the biblical character Job from the Old Testament. The race was cancelled anyway.

The tooth and face actually took forever to heal, but my cycling and riding weren’t completely lost during the process. My resting heart rate was still in the low forties and I rode fifty miles wity my wife on the weekends as she prepped for the Louisville Ironman.

Still we wanted to take a summer break in late August and joined a couple friends on their boat on the Rock River. Against my own best instincts, and forgetting what a curse the year 2019 had already been, I overcame my best instincts and promises to myself and agreed to try getting up on waterskis. I’ve done it many times before, but this was 2019. On the first try I felt a painful tug along the inside of my left leg. I’d pulled the long tendon of my left hamstring. Humbled and disgusted, I climbed back in to the boat and sipped a warm Pepsi, thinking to myself, “How stupid can you be?”

That reduced me to walking slowly for a couple weeks. But there was plenty of need for that too. We’d adopted a dog named Lucy, a 50% pit mix with border collie, boxer and beagle mixed in. High energy and nippy as a puppy, she gave me caregiving PTSD at the start.

So I vowed to live vicariously for the rest of the year, and keep things simple by training with Sue and not worrying about when I could or could not again. Because it plainly was not meant to be.

In October Sue rocked her full Ironman, minus the swim, which was cancelled due to high toxic algae levels in the Ohio River. And I thought to myself, “Well that’s par for the course this year.” And we had a scare the day before the race when Sue’s front bike tire popped and she bumped her knee on the pavement. Coming off the bike in Louisville, she told me her knee was stiff. I was sorely disappointed at the thought she might not finish. But she did.

And a week later we flew off to the Mediterranean for a Norwegian Cruise Line tour from Barcelona to Naples to Florence to Cannes and down to Majorca before coming back home.

As we flew home over the giant expanse of ice covering Greenland, I looked down and thought about climate change and how the world is changing in ways that some people refuse to recognize and others feel panicked at the rate in which it is occurring.

Such is the condition of life in general.

A couple weeks later while standing stock still at the dog park watching our dog Lucy play with her friends, a big, fat yellow labrador retriever mowed me down with a hard strike to my left knee. I landed on my ass and lay there in the grass for a moment thinking about all that had happened in 2019. And I said out loud, “What the actual fuck?”

The knee has been loose and greasy feeling for weeks, and I can’t yet tell whether the damage and slight pain is permanent or just the echo of the impact. A week ago I took our pup back to the dog park for some play and met up with some young guys running their collie-Shephard mix around. Our dogs played together and then I ran after Lucy at a decent clip to race her to a ball. Upon my return one of the young men asked, “How old did you say you are again? You don’t run like an old man.”

That felt good to hear. Trying to keep age at bay is a full time job.

But 2019 was not done messing with me yet. Three days ago I took Lucy to the dog park again and within five minutes a big Lab-Shepard mix snapped at Lucy, pinned her down and bit a hole above her eye. It required stitches to fix and a $250 vet bill to boot.

So yes, I’m hoping 2020 looks better than 2019 for me. Between all of this and living with the smell fascism in the air, it has been a year of struggle and infamy.

Posted in aging, aging is not for the weak of heart, anxiety, bike accidents, bike crash, blood on the highway, Christopher Cudworth, cycling, cycling the midwest, running | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Catch you on the rebound

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth

It’s funny what one decent speed workout can do to help you rebound from the malaise of low training or injury. It’s not all that fun to hit the track without much fitness in the tank, and it hurts like hell. Those first couple laps at training pace feel awkward and slow. The middle intervals feel better but the last few test the lungs to the point of wheezy pain.

But within a week of doing speed the legs seem to perk up a bit. The old joke about burning out the carbon has some literal truth to it. After weeks of plodding along at 10:00 pace if I was lucky, I dialed it up a few times over the past week and found myself in the low 9s for a few four-milers.

As you can see by my 10:46 mile warmup, the first mile these days is a sluggish ordeal. That’s the price of being a runner in my sixties. It’s not easy for anyone to warm up, I know. But the body has something new to say each time a sexagenarian hits the road. And you heard that right. I am a ripely minted sexagenarian with two years under my belt. But I have forty-plus years of running behind me. And a knee that has been rocked and rolled more ways than I like to count.

Pushing it

Yet today on the trails at Herrick Lake Forest Preserve I pushed the pace and dipped below an eight-minute mile for a good chunk of the run. I even ran near 8:00 pace on the largely uphill fourth mile. That made me feel good even when I thought back to the fact that just three or four years ago I raced 7:00 pace for 10k.

I have no idea if that pace is possible again. My inspiration comes from the fact that many other sixty-year-olds I know are running that fast. My only concern comes with the greasy feeling in my knee resulting from that concussive strike from a hundred pound dog a few weeks ago. I’m hoping the knee heals well, and completely.

So it seems like I’m on the rebound. Finally running a little better and escaped the holidays with my weigh in the low-to-mid 180s. When that goes below 180 the rebound will be even faster. And so will I.

See you out there, and catch me on the rebound.

Posted in 10K, 400 meter intervals, 400 workouts, aging, aging is not for the weak of heart, Christopher Cudworth, competition, running | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

From allegiance to rivalry

Posted on December 18, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth
Running even with former Kaneland teammate Bill Sanders in fall of 1973.

In early 1973, right in the middle of my sophomore year in high school, our family moved 10 miles east from Elburn, Illinois to St. Charles. The rest of that school year I made a daily commute to finish the year at Kaneland, the high school where I’d just helped lead the cross country team to its first-ever conference championship.

I wasn’t a great runner, just a good one. Yet there was speculation upon our move that I somehow wanted to switch schools to run for Trent Richards, a Kaneland grad that had coached me on the Elburn baseball team from the age of 13 to 15.

To this day I’m pretty sure that our family moved because my father had lost his job and blown some money on a network marketing business. Yet when I asked him 25 years later why we moved, he replied, “I didn’t want your younger brother to play basketball in that slowdown offense at Kaneland.”

I actually don’t doubt that response at all. And my younger brother went on to earn a full-ride college scholarship at a Division I school. So whatever the reason for our move, it worked out pretty well for my parents and my brother.

Yet when my father told me the reason why we moved, I asked him: “But what about me? I was Class President and the top runner on the cross country team.”

And my dad replied. “Well, you were a social kid. I knew you’d survive.”

That’s true. It all worked out over time. After all, we’d moved from Pennsylvania to Illinois when I was only twelve. And that worked out just fine. I made friends through sports and school just as I’d done back east in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For a few years I tried to keep up contacts but they inevitably faded in the age of letters, long-distance phone calls and rare trips “back home.” Those former allegiances were real, but they inevitably take a back seat to the present reality.

Finishing sixth in the Upstate Eight Conference meet as a senior for St. Charles in fall 1974

The same thing happened when I moved from Kaneland to St. Charles. The pressure of finding and keeping friends as the “new kid” at school occupied all my time. Despite my love for the former school and friends, it was impossible not to move on.

The awkward aspect of that sophomore year transfer was having to compete against my former Kaneland cross country and track teammates that next fall and spring. I loved the orange shirts with the black and white shoulders of those Kaneland CC uniforms. My new St. Charles team had the same black and orange colors. But the team uniforms were made from a fabric called Sand Knit, so I wore a sleek shirt beneath the sleeveless jersey to make it more comfortable.

I wasn’t alone in transferring schools during those years. A top-flight runner from the northwest Chicago suburbs moved from Hersey HS to Batavia and took over the local running scene. At one point a local paper called me a “junior sensation” just before we met in the Tri-Cities meet. At the starting line, the ever-cynical Tom Burridge, who went on to compete at University of Kentucky and hold the American Half-Marathon record, turned to me and muttered, “Junior Sensation, my ass…” He trounced me good over the three-mile course.

So while I tried to compete with the best, I simply wasn’t one of them. That said, I still feel a sense of pride for those competitive years. This past weekend I was cleaning out our basement and found the photo (above) of me running against a former Kaneland teammate. It was taken at their own invitational during my junior year in high school. I finished fourth overall and our St. Charles team won the meet. It all brought mixed emotions on my part. To go from allegiance to rivalry was one of the first big lessons in life. Even firm expectations can change. It’s how you adapt to those changes that makes all the difference in life.

Competing with teammates Paul Mullen (front) and Dani Fjelstad at Luther College, circa 1976.

Running always helped me do that. It continued in college when encountering former rivals from high school who ran for opposing college teams. It was interesting to transfer those rivalries to an entirely new context. Yet something in me also wanted those high school competitors to do well at the college level. Rivalries are also a form of allegiance, in many respects.

Finally those rivalries spread out across the roads and I even wound up running with former rivals on club teams and other competitive opportunities.

To this day I still run into old rivals socially. What we continue to share is the experience of having done something hard and to the best of our abilities. That’s how we find allegiances all over again.

Posted in 10K, aging, Christopher Cudworth, cross country, healthy aging, running | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I now declare you husband and wife, and bless you both.

Posted on December 17, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth

While I believe the narrative of any wedding couple is their property to hold or share, I can testify that having the opportunity to be the officiant in a wedding was a unique and profound experience.

My roots with the family involved reach way back to high school, as the older brother of the bride was a runner five years behind me in the cross country and track program. As a result, we ran together some, shared the same coach and built a few memories that have lasted all these years.

His younger sister got to know me through that connection. We also collaborated when she was looking to promote an athlete clothing line a few years back. I helped her open doors to some running and cycling stores in the Chicago region.

We connected on social media after that and have shared some laughs. I always tease that I want her dog for my own. She has a beautiful border collie pup with eyes that steal your heart.

Yet from all my writing about theology and God, she wondered if I was an ordained pastor. “Not yet,” I replied. “But I can get that done.” So I applied through the Universal Life Church website where my son Evan was also ordained, and we were ready to go.

About five years ago a handsome man started showing up in her feed and they built a relationship that blossomed into love. Both of them love the outdoors and that’s why she asked me to serve as the officiant for their wedding. She’s read my blog and even hired me to write a nature-based piece for the magazine where she used to work. He’s also a cyclist and we traded a few training and racing stories along the way.

The wedding was held in a beautifully spare old church west of Elgin, Illinois. Her family built the one-room building back in 1843 in remembrance of their roots back in Scotland. The building has no heat, so we could see our breath the entire ceremony. The greens decorating the church had a spare and lovely quality about them. The plain benches were cold, yet welcoming in that honest fashion that harkens all the ages and people that have sat there before you.

Outside the church were many graves, several with the namesake of her grandfather, the sportswriter that covered my running career back in high school.

Weeks before the wedding, I interviewed the couple by phone and sent them questions around which the wedding talk was built. Some relevant scriptural perspectives were added, but the main message was that creation itself is the connection they both shared in having been raised by people with a strong love of nature.

That outlook is right up my alley in terms of life philosophies. It was a pleasure and an honor to invite the people in attendance to share in those ideas. I led them in vows, then an exchange of rings. But when it came time to declare them “husband and wife” it struck me how profound a moment that truly was. All I could think of to say after the bride and groom leaned forward to kiss was a simple, “Bless you both.”

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As to injury and healing, it often comes down to “What fur?”

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth
Sue and I with our pup Lucy

Two weeks ago I was mowed down by a 100-lb yellow lab at the dog park. The large pup nailed the outside of my left knee, possibly the worst place I could have been struck. That knee went through an ACL tear back in the early 2000s, then surgery to repair it, followed by another ACL tear two years later. That was depressing, for sure.

Then I did a stupid thing five years ago and hurdled a traffic cone on a snowy street during the Sno-Fun Run in Lake Geneva. The knee swelled badly but then sort of stabilized. Two years later a torn meniscus on the inside front of the left knee began to protrude and I had to have it surgically clipped.

Now this poor knee is going through pain on a low scale as it recovers from the bashing by the fat lab. The inside front of my left knee has a dull ache when I run. I can’t yet tell if it is an ‘outside’ injury with a ligament problem or coming from inside the knee where the meniscus may have suffered another insult. I’ll have to wait and see. I’ve been for four or five runs since the dog incident and things are improving. But this low ache has me worried.

A lefty problem

That side of my body has been through hell in life. My left clavicle is also surgically repaired. An accident due to bike wobble in September of 2012 snapped the collar bone in three places. The x-ray of the bone looked like a cirrus cloud. The surgeon fused it back together with a long metal plate and six screws. It sometimes aches on cold, wet days, or if I sleep on my left side too long.

I’m not alone in this household with injuries. My wife had her shoulder repaired after a bike accident in 2013. The ortho surgeon who fixed her shoulder was the same guy that did my collarbone. He also fixed my meniscus. So both humans have had their share of orthopedic challenges. But there’s more…

Bennie, formerly known as Bernie.

There are two more members of the family that have had limbs surgically repaired. Our cat Bennie is a rescue with a back leg fixed by our veterinarian and triathlon friend Jeff Palmer, whose office put the kitty up for adoption.

When my wife Sue saw Bennie, she leapt at the chance to take him in. The vet’s office nicknamed him Bernie because he was a stray that got burned and had a broken leg after climbing up into a warm car engine. Following the surgery, we were told to keep him calm and not let him get too excited. But that indomitable kitty was having none of that. He started jumping up and down from the bed as soon as we brought him home. The surgery left him a tiny bit crooked in that back leg and he has a funny lilt to his walk that we no longer really notice. When there were four cats in our household with Sue’s daughter living with us a few years back, Bennie and his two other buddies tore around the house on a regular basis. Our other cat Wanda passed away last year at the age of sixteen. She was a lovely creature.

Wanda. Photo by Emily Cudworth, Letsgrowgold.com

Now Bennie contends with our new dog Lucy. At first the chasing was furious but Bennie is resourceful and quick. Lucy really can’t catch him, and she’s no slowpoke. I’ve seen her run down speedy, long-legged pointers at the dog park. She turns into a white bullet with her back hair up and legs reaching out like a greyhound.

Lucy with her surgery scar on the inside of her back left leg.

And yet she’s got a repaired back leg too. She was picked up from the side of the road in Tennessee and brought up to Illinois for adoption. The vets fixed her leg. The surgery left a colorful spot where the fur doesn’t show.

She fostered with another triathlon friend just south of our neighborhood. We visited Lucy a couple times at their home and met her beagle buddies. Now she’s part of our lives. I took her back over to visit her foster family last week. She nuzzled the beagles and tucked her head into the lap of the man who frankly admitted, “I didn’t want to give her up.” It was a sweet reunion.

Broken and healed

It’s funny how these sometimes seemingly broken pets can fix the lives of human beings. While I’m no militant advocate for animal rights, it does disturb me that people can be so cruel to dogs and cats and other animals. The Michael Vick controversy is bubbling up anew and while I think everyone deserves a second chance, the cruelty behind that story is hard to process. Yet as a competitive person, I admit to feeling a fast and furious reaction when a dog on the trails at our local park tried to attack Lucy this weekend. I know she’s no pushover, because I’ve seen her fend off and also dole out aggression at the park. But those are instincts dog owners are tasked with eliminating through training, not turning it into a sport.

The fact of the matter is that the world is in a constant state of injury and in need of healing. The world’s religions try to funnel that through Jesus or Allah or Buddha, but in the end, it is our choice to learn how to heal. Big problems required a little introspection on all of our parts.

Cozy at home with Lucy.

I’m frustrated to be dealing with a possible problem with my knee, but hoping it levels out over time. If not, then something else will need to be done. It’s been a year of injury for me all around. The strange bike crash back in May. The dangerous tooth infection and extraction in August. Then the knee injury two weeks ago. I’ll admit to being frustrated and bit depressed with how the year played out. My plans were radically different.

So there are days when it just feels good to pet the dog and take solace in the moment. One of my good friends always counsels me that we’re never totally in control in this world. It’s best sometimes not to “fight it” when things don’t turn out like you’d planned. Again, some toss that submission into the realm of trusting God, while others find a path to walk down, and wait to see what comes along. And then we ask, what fur?

Posted in aging, aging is not for the weak of heart, bike accidents, bike crash, bike wobble, Christopher Cudworth, competition, cycling threats, Depression, healthy aging, healthy senior, mental health, running | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Good energy all around

Posted on December 8, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth

The term “good energy” has been recruited to serve a number of purposes and connotations in this world. It substitutes for “clean energy” in the growing field of alternative fuels, and “good energy” means moral power in the realm of human emotion.

As we age, energy becomes a concern as we sometimes feel less of it coursing through our bodies. As young people, we tend to be driven by an alternating fuel of hormones and raging metabolism. Some of that comes through as sexual energy, which can turn out to be relatively good thing or something not so good, depending on how we use it.

Too good to function

I well recall being so horny at times it was nearly impossible to function. My daily morning ritual of jerking off in the basement shower before high school classes began barely stemmed the tide of young lust. Athletic coaches, especially boxing trainers it seems, moralized that channeling sexual energy was better than releasing it during preparation for competition. The thought was that putting all that “good energy” to use would keep a man from getting weak. And if it made the athlete a little angry inside, all the better.

That was not my experience as the world of actual sex opened up to me. I ran personal best times within hours of getting laid. The feeling of being loved and wanted was far more powerful than any energy sap it supposedly caused.

And when it came to creative output and work production, the other realm of competition in this world, it helped to wick off sexual energy in order to concentrate on the task at hand, no pun intended.

Changing times

Over the last twenty years, formerly repressive ideas about sex and especially masturbation have changed plenty. The fact that both women and men pleasure themselves for self-love, sexual release and emotional gratification is now well-documented and out in the open. There is good energy in no longer blaming people for their sexual urges. The old biblical maxims about masturbation being a sin against God have been debunked. We now know that so-called “Onanism” was a repressive attempt to selectively use a passage from scripture to rail against “spilling seed.”

And what about lust? We all know the Bible says some things about that. Specifically Jesus is often quoted that even looking at a person with lust is equivalent to adultery. Never mind that Jesus often spoke in strong hyperbole and even outright symbolism to get a point across. He once stated that He could tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days. The religious authorities laughed at Him because they took him literally.

But literalism is not always how truth works. The same is true with the good energies of lust. The major reason Jesus warns against lust is that it leads to covetous behavior, wanting something that is not by rights all at ours to possess. That is one of the 10 Commandments, “Thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife…”

And so on. But here’s the funny thing about releasing lust from our bodies. It often lowers the sense of taboo and desire for something about which we fantasize, and that’s actually a good use of energy. Not when it’s obsessive or addictive, of course. Because sexual addiction and chronic masturbation really don’t lead to good things. But a good healthy orgasm whether in company with another or on your own is a damned good bit of energy and in some cases, a matter of good health.

Doctor’s orders

That’s what my doctor once told me during a time in my early thirties when I was experiencing some enlargement of the prostate. He fortunately identified the cause, which was caffeine consumption. Once I cut that out of my diet, my prostate no longer seized up. But for good health, he suggested, it was always good for the prostate to have frequent sex. “Can I get a prescription for that?” I joked at the time. He laughed and actually wrote it out on a piece of paper. “You’ll have to negotiate that with your wife,” he wryly replied.

It actually is good sexual health for a man to ejaculate even when copulation or other options aren’t readily available. Letting seminal fluid sit around in the prostate increases the risk of an enlarged prostate. And perhaps the stuff even gets stale.

It can be tricky to discern what’s actually going on with certain types of health issues. And when the subject is masturbation, ancient taboos tend to color the instincts of judgment. WebMD carried findings from an interesting study on the subject of masturbation in men. The study produced some convoluted findings, as shared here:

“For men in their 20s, “frequent masturbation” was two to seven times per week. Compared to same-age men who reported masturbating less than once per month, 20-something frequent masturbators had a 79% higher risk of prostate cancer by age 60.

For men in their 50s, “frequent masturbation” was one or more times per week. Compared to same-age men who reported never masturbating, 50-something frequent masturbators had a 70% lower risk of prostate cancer.

What’s going on? The study wasn’t designed to answer that question. But Dimitropoulou and colleagues have some theories.

They suggest that young men genetically predisposed to have hormone-sensitive prostate cancer will be at higher risk if their bodies naturally produce high levels of male hormones — the same hormones that give them an intense sex drive.

So it’s not masturbation itself that’s increasing prostate cancer risk in young men. More masturbation may just mean more sex drive — and more androgens bathing prostate tissues.”

Girl time

For women, masturbation touches on issues of emotional health as well as physical well-being. “Masturbating increases blood flow throughout your body and releases feel-good brain chemicals called endorphins. “That may explain why there’s a clear mood benefit, even if you don’t orgasm,” says Prause, a sexuality researcher at UCLA. And while men are more likely to talk about blowing off steam by masturbating, research suggests it’s a stress-reliever for both sexes. “It takes your mind [off your worries] while activating areas of the brain associated with pleasure,” Prause says.”

That’s all good energy. And my doctor also once told me that quitting caffeine can be good for women too. He said that much like my prostate years ago, the lining of a woman’s vagina has soft tissue that can be greatly affected by ingestion of stimulants. That can lead to yeast infections and other internal problems.

That said, we’re all prone to go a little insane with something that feels so good. That’s when good energy tends to slip into the realm of bad instincts. Just like activities such as running and riding and swimming, there is a possibility of partaking in too much of a good thing.

Obsessions

I recall a Sunday afternoon out in Paoli, Pennsylvania when I was living alone after a job transfer and had little else to do with my free time but run. During the morning I covered twenty miles in a club team workout and felt great. That afternoon I obsessively drove to Valley Forge to go for a six-mile run. Before heading out I noticed a small dog and walked over to pet it. The owner was a lovely woman named Karen. We hit it off right away. When I told her that I was about to go out for a run, she looked me in the eye and asked, “Do you have to?”

I should have ditched that run in the moment and sat down to talk with that woman. As it was, I did get her number and go out on a couple dates. But my God, why was running so blasted important that I had to do twenty-six miles of it in one damned day?

As the wrestling coach character in the John Irving book Hotel New Hampshire once said, “You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.” That I was at the time. With running. That is one of the tarsnakes of existence. It takes experience to learn what’s good and bad for you.

And I’ll confess that I once yanked it five times in a single day. Which brought to mind the phrase our college cross country coach used to holler out the car window at the young men covering miles under his watch. “Ah boys!” he’d chortle. “You can’t beat fun!”

To which we’d mutter under our breath. “Yeah, like a sore dick.”

And that, my friends, is the moral of good energy and bad. That which makes you too sore to function is probably more than enough for the day, the week, or your entire life. So I hope you find that good energy now and in the future. But not too much.

Posted in 10K, 13.1, aging, aging is not for the weak of heart, anxiety, Christopher Cudworth, competition, Depression, running, same sex adults, sex, Tarsnakes, triathlete, triathlon, triathlons | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How favorite routes are like favorite movies

Posted on December 8, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth
My fave movie of all time?

Most of us have favorite routes to run and ride. We even have favorite places to swim, be they indoor pools or lakes where open water swimming feels fun and safe.

I like to watch the seasons change on my favorite routes. On the run and the bike, I switch from roads to trails to paths. Variety is good.

But so is familiarity. Knowing how long a route generally takes to complete is predictable and practical. We can plan for that. There are days when it’s fun to explore and there are days when not having to think is beneficial.

The fictional (left) and real Erin Brockovich.

Today I was pondering my daily fitness life while scrolling through the menu on Direct TV. I stopped on the movie Erin Brockovich and watched the last 1/3 with the same appreciation and anticipation that I always do. Real or not, the depiction of the main character is both humorous and satisfying. We feel her struggles and root for her efforts to find justice for people beset by the negligence and corruption of a big corporation trying to escape responsibility for the pain and suffering it has caused some everyday people. And when Erin invites her biker boyfriend to witness a visit to a woman whose family members were afflicted with illness, there is real triumph and joy in the moment when it is revealed the household will receive $5M in compensation for exposure to poisonous hexavalent chromium, the substance the polluted the groundwater of an entire city.

I’ve watched that movie far more than ten times. The night before I watched a long section of Moneyball, the baseball movie in which Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill play a pair of risk-takers trying to make the Oakland A’s a contender by choosing underrated players based on statistics to form a winning team.

That got me thinking about the Top 10+ movies I’ve watched more than ten times. Here’s my list, not in any particular order.

  1. Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner
  2. Gladiator, Russell Crowe
  3. Erin Brockovich, Julie Roberts
  4. Moneyball, Brad Pitt/Jonah Hill
  5. The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg
  6. Bad Teacher, Cameron Diaz
  7. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Kristen Bell
  8. Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon
  9. Bourne Trilogy (all probably ten times)
  10. Lord of the Rings (all probably ten times)
  11. The Fugitive, Harrison Ford
  12. The Parent Trap, Lindsay Lohan (guilty pleasure, sweet)
  13. Superbad, Jonah Hill/Michael Cera
  14. This is the End, Seth Rogan and crew
  15. Midnight In Paris, Owen Wilson
  16. Amelie, (many, many times…)
  17. Open Range, Kevin Costner/Robert Duvall
  18. Kill Bill 1 and 2, Uma Thurman
  19. Moonrise Kingdom (and other Wes Anderson stuff, Fantastic Mr. Fox, etc)
  20. The Hairdresser’s Husband (French film, amazing)
  21. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (fun and mystical)
  22. National Lampoon’s Vacation, Chevy Chase/Bill Murray
  23. The Meaning of Life, Monty Python
  24. The Holy Grail, Monty Python
  25. The goddamn Princess Bride (not so proud of this one)

Honorable mention: Star Wars

Favorite routes. Favorite movies. I guess we need them all.

Have a good weekend.

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A night in tune with The White Album

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth

The Arcada Theater on the east end of downtown St. Charles, Illinois is run by Ron Onesti and Onesti Entertainment. That organization is the portal to every aging rock band in the universe. Last night a group assembled by the rock legend Todd Rundgren came to town and played nearly every song on The Beatles White Album.

It’s been fifty years since that classic came out. I well recall sneaking into the living room when my brothers were out of the house to put the record on my father’s prized turntable. In 1968 it had been Sgt. Pepper that dominated our lives. In 1969 it was the peripatetic White Album that took over our consciousness.

Beatle George Harrison denounced the White Album for its excessiveness. He believed that album could have used an editor, someone to tell them “yes and no” about which songs should be kept, and which discarded. Yet The White Album (which is actually titled simply, “The Beatles”) with all its ups and downs is a time capsule of sorts from the year 1969.

Second from left, second row. Eleven years old and a major Beatle fan.

At least it was for me. I was twelve years old and discovering all kinds of things about the world. My schoolyard friends had just passed word around about the joys of masturbation, and the mysteries of sex began to open for all of us. That made the Beatles song “Why don’t we do it in the road?” all the more mysterious. We knew what “it” meant. But we sure didn’t realize how to accomplish that between the white lines, or anywhere else.

What I had discovered by the age of twelve is a love of running that would soon turn into a lifetime avocation. I’d always led the running drills for our baseball team, Local 285. But there was a single moment of discovery that made me realize I had a degree of talent for running. During a seventh grade gym class our PE teacher had us run a twelve minute time trial as part of a fitness test. I led the class by covering 8 1/4 laps. I’d broken twelve minutes in the two mile wearing plain old tennis shoes on a cinder track.

Years later I’d pass through that same distance in 9:15, the fastest I ever ran two miles. That wasn’t world or even national class pace. But I’d come a long way in training to do that race, and finished a 5K that night in 14:47. It felt good to see the results after working so hard.

Growing up

In the years since growing up with The Beatles I’ve watched and listened to many recordings of their rehearsals, heard alternate versions of their songs and been amazed at how their music traveled from raw demo cuts to what feels like perfection no matter how you play them. Recently when asked by Steven Colbert how he writes his songs, Beatle Paul McCartney calmly shared the process of writing down lyrics or working out a piece of music on piano. Then he added, “And I’m a genius.”

That last insight was quite important in the development of The Beatles. Each member of the group offered genius that grew into something individually and collectively great. They took musical risks that changed how the world saw music.

They also faced the rhetorical music for sharing insights about using drugs and commenting on their popularity, which John Lennon once compared to Jesus. That got them in trouble with the arch-right Christian factions in America. They burned Beatles records and made a show of their supposed righteousness after Lennon offended their sensibilities. “Christianity will go,” he had said. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock & roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

John Lennon was correct about how Christianity twisted the message of Jesus into the gospel of power, money and prosperity. The Christian religion stole these obsessions straight from the religious authorities who conspired to get Jesus crucified, then turned around and blamed “the Jews” for killing Jesus. That inner conflict is a truth Christianity desperately wants to avoid. Hence the overreaction when the truth is pointed out.

A cynical eye

That degree of insight is what originally appealed to me about The Beatles. The White Album tore back the fabric of society to reveal the flaws behind the self-righteous drama of people trying to pretend they are perfect when everyone can see they are not.

Perhaps I absorbed a little too much of that Beatle cynicism along the way. Being honest about work and life and religion is not appreciated in many circles. It cost me some over the years. My liberal leanings emanate from Beatle insights on many fronts. John Lennon wrote the song Happiness is a Warm Gun to mock the world’s obsession with guns. The name of that song echoed a popular book by Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz titled Happiness is a Warm Puppy. I owned a copy of that book, which made the lyrics to Lennon’s song about the corrupting power of guns all the more potent:

When I hold you in my arms (ooh, oh, yeah)
And I feel my finger on your trigger (ooh, oh, yeah)
I know nobody can do me no harm (ooh, oh, yeah)
Because…Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is (bang, bang, shoot, shoot)

The bitter irony is that John Lennon was shot in the head by a man jealous and disturbed by Lennon’s fame. That act of violence took place on December 8, 1980. I remember sitting at a stoplight that night in my gold Plymouth Arrow when the news came on the radio. I sat there pounding the dashboard screaming “NO! NO! NOOOOO!” Lennon was right all along. Guns have the power to corrupt the human mind.

I understood when The White Album came out that The Beatles were trying to tell us the world is never what it seems on the surface. There were songs on that album that celebrated love, such as “I Will,” an uplifting piece penned by Paul McCartney. Yet the song Blackbird was a metaphorical testament to the civil rights struggles of the 60s:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

I’ve run a ton of miles singing songs like that in my head. Dear Prudence. Glass Onion. Birthday. Piggies. I’ve even learned and played a few Beatles on the guitar over the years. Julia. I’m So Tired. Obla Di Obla Da. Those efforts make me appreciate the genius of The Beatles even more. I’m not a great singer, but it sure feels great to sing. I guess that’s a gift the Beatles gave to all of us in some way.

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Menstruation chronicles

Posted on November 29, 2019 by Christopher Cudworth

As a young runner living in the City of Chicago during the early 1980s, I met a woman through track workouts at the downtown Northwestern University cinder track next to Lake Shore Drive. After scoping her out the entire workout, I admittedly fibbed that I had no car parked nearby in order to beg a ride home with her to my apartment on Clark Street next to Lincoln Park. We started dating and training together, a relationship that lasted nearly a year.

She ran 10K in about 36:00, a time that to this day would win many women’s road races. When our track workouts moved to the University of Illinois campus in the southwest Loop, we joined a couple dozen other runners every Tuesday with coach Tom Brunick from the Athlete’s Foot running the group.

She was running 50-60 miles a week. During our wild little romance she confessed to me that her period had ceased. “I have amenorrhoea,” she mentioned one day. “It’s been going on for a few months.”

Breaking news

A few weeks after that admission, she told me that the front of her leg just below her knee was hurting. I guided her to a podiatrist that I knew. He diagnosed a likely stress fracture. At that point, my girlfriend and I had a talk. I suggested it might be a good time for her to take a break. She had one brown eye and one blue eye, and I sometimes wondered whether there were two of her inside that head of hers. She looked me straight in the eyes and said, “No, not yet.”

She was an intense young woman who worked as programmer for a big publishing company. Her salary was $90,000 a year. In early 1980s money, that was big bucks. So she was smart and driven and all the things that a young man like me found intimidating at times. But I still tried to counsel her that continuing to run when her period had stopped and her knee was showing signs of bone stress was a bad idea.

Bad break

Worlds Colliding. Artwork by Christopher Cudworth.

And then it happened. I was jogging back to start another interval at the weekly track workout when her group came charging through the finish line and I heard the bone in her leg snap. I’d heard that sound before when a college teammate broke his leg in several places toward the end of a 400 IM hurdles race. He’d trained all spring in the pool because his shin had so many sore spots that the coaches did not dare put impact on his legs. But when the conference meet came along and he needed to earn a qualifying time for nationals, he entered the race and was leading his heat when his leg collapsed underneath him with an loud crack. He went sprawling on the track.

It was a horrific thing to witness, but the worst part of that moment were the cheers that our conference rivals made upon seeing him skid along the track. Never had I witnessed such lack of sportsmanship and such cruel desire. Fights almost broke out around the track.

I thought about that tragedy as I watched her limp off the track. She looked lean and fit and frankly had a terrific body. But at that moment, all I could think about was her health. I’d tried my best to get her to downshift a little, but she was having none of that.

The breakup

Not long after that, an incident occurred that forced me to break up with her. My downtown romance was in fact a deception. For two years prior to our meeting, I’d been dating the woman that would later become my wife. She lived out in the suburbs, and I was enjoying city life and wasn’t yet convinced it was time to settle down. But after a night in which my downtown girlfriend and I went out dancing, my actual girlfriend rode the train to the city on a Saturday morning. I’d told her that I was spending the night out with a mutual friend named Larry. When I met her at the train station to pick her up she asked, “How was your night out with Larry?”

I launched into some story about what we’d done and she interrupted by saying, “That’s funny. I rode the train in with Larry this morning.”

Busted. A week later I broke off the relationship with my downtown girlfriend and never cheated again. She punched me in the arm and said, “I knew it.” Two weeks later she slept with a friend of mine in act of revenge. Okay, I deserved that.

Breakdowns

I share that story because so many moments in life serve as forks in the road. But when I read these stories about young girls in today’s world of running missing their periods due to intense training and getting injured time and again, I think back to the young woman I dated for a while and realize how strength and determination sometimes overcomes common sense. It’s a far more difficult path to sustain high levels of training for women than men. While I got down to 3% body fat at one point in my running career and suffered colds, illness and even migraines from overtraining and burning the candle of life at both ends, I still didn’t have a menstrual cycle to worry about.

Breaking in

My own blood on the sleeve of my cycling kit after a bike crash at 40 mph.

Much later in life, about twenty years into the marriage with my wife, she began to experience heavy menstrual flows that were nearly debilitating. Sometimes she dealt with symptoms about three weeks out of four. So I suggested she get a checkup, but she worried that the diagnosis would be an automatic hysterectomy and in her words, “I don’t want to go to some butcher.”

We were in an HMO at the time and finding good health care took diligence. So I empathized, but ultimately took the initiative to find a female gynecologist and urged my wife to set up an appointment. During the examinations a smallish cyst was discovered on one of her ovaries. That led to exploratory arthroscopic surgery, a process that actually never should have happened. The gynecologist broke apart the cyst, an act that allowed the cancer cells to burst forth and spread throughout her abdomen. So in that respect, my wife’s suspicions were well-justified.

Months later after we’d worked through the HMO to find a reputable gynecological oncologist, he performed hysterectomy on my wife and told me he could feel the cancer nodules on the inside of her abdomen “like heavy grit sandpaper.” That doctor was a master in his trade and kept her alive for another eight years. It took a tremendous amount of effort on his part, and on hers. She was one tough lady.

I kind of knew that going in. Within weeks of having first met her, when she was just 22 years old, she had two large cysts removed from her ovaries. I visited her in the hospital following her surgery and she dropped her panties down to show me the surgery scar. “It’s a bikini cut!” she grinned. “Well, I guess this relationship is serious,” I muttered to myself on the way out of the hospital.

The Right Kind of Pride

As it was, we made it through those eight years of treatment for ovarian cancer by working together through cycles of chemotherapy and surgeries and periods of remission. I wrote a book about that survivorship journey titled The Right Kind of Pride; Character, Caregiving and Community. It talks about the power of vulnerability in making life decisions and getting practical and spiritual help through openness and honesty.

But all those experiences come back to some of the basics of what women go through just to function in life. Menstruation is something men never have to go through with their own bodies. But men who ignore the impact of that blood cycle in the lives of the women they know are fools. It may not be a topic men like to think about, yet menstruation is the literal heartbeat of this world, if you think about it.

And you should. Think about it. And give thanks that women have the strength to deal with it, and many other things as well. Bless you all.

Posted in 10K, 400 meter intervals, bike accidents, bike crash, blood on the highway, Christopher Cudworth, running, track and field, training | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment