This time of year, the day after Halloween, things seem to happen fast.
Weatherman Tom Skilling of the Chicago Tribune this morning notes that November is the fastest chilling month of the year.
Those of us who run and ride certainly know the outline of that story.
Here in Illinois, we’ve had a few straight days of weather above sixty-five degrees.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that type of weather will hold out forever.
Most of us who run and ride have learned our lesson by now. November is the most fickle month of all. I well recall a November day twenty years or so ago that dropped below zero degrees Fahrenheit. To go from forty degree days to a sudden shot of cold like that is shocking. However, the temps have been moderating the last few years thanks to climate change. A mild winter is predicted here.
I have another measure of the changing seasons that I always trust. That is the migration of birds. Typically in our area of the country, the first and second week of November brings cool north to northwestern winds. That’s when sandhill cranes come thick and fast. They’re headed southeast to Florida for the most part.
We have cranes now breeding here in Illinois as well. They’ve become quite common, even to the point of lurking around suburban yards as if human beings don’t even exist. That’s a big change from even twenty years ago when the local population of breeding cranes was sparse and skittish. Now they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about human beings as long as one does not approach them directly. They even walked up to our bird feeders from our backyard several times this year.
The bird feeder is where one can most easily see the change of the seasons. The dark-eyed juncos have arrived along with the fall sparrows. They inhabit the feeder zone in rotating shifts it seems as each morning progresses. The sparrows might start, but then the blackbirds and grackles arrive and chase them out. When those leave the juncos swing into action.
But there are also progressions of birds that arrive and depart with the passing seasons. These mark the typically slow progression of fall into winter, or winter into spring. I welcome it all. Because what else can you do?
These have been the measures of the seasons for me for more than five decades. I’m still running like I did in the early 70s, and I still get out birding now and then. Or else I’m taking photographs of birds because that’s a satisfying way to capture those experiences.
I don’t suppose these rhythms will ever change much, or at least I hope not. We all need foundations for belief and interest. These also keep the seasons from running into each other without notice or observation. The world wants to be noticed and engaged. It is only ours to oblige, and abide.
There have been times in my life when I’ve blamed myself for not taking enough initiative. That was particularly true back when I was dating in my teens and early 20s. My foibles with women were as comic as any Rom-Com romance flick.
So she was an intense character, that runner girl, with one brown eye and one blue. I always thought she was a bit binary in some respects. And I’m not sure she was entirely faithful to me, as she had quite a bit of drive in appetites and the means to indulge them. She made $90K a year back then.
From that point forward I broke off the downtown relationship and turned full attention to the woman that I’d marry a year later. But when I told the downtown sweetheart (and she was at that) we were breaking it off, she literally punched me in the arm as I confessed that I had another girlfriend. “I knew it,” she hissed.
The bulk of us aren’t naive to the fact that people make romantic, sexual and emotional choices that don’t always fit between the white lines on the road map of love. Affairs are the 
I texted the title of this blog to my wife this morning. It stemmed from the discovery of my main set of car keys in the pocket of a jacket I’d hung on the rack in the front room. I was a teeny bit concerned that I’d taken that set of keys with me on the trip to Iowa this weekend, then lost them somehow.
When you’re an active person, especially a triathlete, it seems have your life is spent gathering stuff for the next training session or event. Just a swim practice alone can call for a bag of swimming implements; float, fins and board. Then there are goggles, anti-fog juice, swimsuit and a towel to remember. There’s also soap to get the chlorine smell off your body, and deodorant when the workout’s all done.
Cycling’s a total pain when it comes to the amount of gear needed to hit the road. Helmet, sunglasses, shoes, Garmin, lights, bottles, nutrition and phones are on the short list of necessities it seems. Before all that one needs to choose the right clothing, which depends entirely on the weather, the wind, precipitation or sun.
Well, there’s one more sport to consider before we’re done discussing the importance of habits and preparation. That’s the sport of running. Supposed to be simple, right? A pair of running shoes and shorts and off you go!
Add in all the other things I do in life and the number of habits required to keep things in order nearly spins out of control.
It all reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the movies The Longest Yard starring Burt Reynolds, the 1970s version. Somewhere early in the plot line, he pauses to reflect on his wayward life and remarks:
This weekend I drove up to Decorah, Iowa to visit friends and conduct some business on art and writing with former professors at Luther College. The weather was pleasantly gray in that Decorah way, often threatening rain. That only gave the wonderful bluffs of the Upper Iowa river valley a craggy cast, which I love.
After the morning run I drove into the hills north of Decorah to take reference photos for a new round of paintings. This year I produced an art exhibition titled Road Trip that celebrates the collected memories gained from going on a road trip. I know the roads around Decorah pretty well from having run on them for so many miles and so many years. But for new content I trusted a phone app to show me new roads, and I wandered afield with no plan and camera in hand.
On the way back home Sunday morning, I left early when a spitting rainstorm was locked over the Mississippi Valley. The roads were shiny and the skies took forever to lighten. As the road turned south from Effigy Mounds National Monument, I stopped the car to pick up two giant chunks of sandstone that had fallen off the face of the bluffs lining the west side of the road. I’d seen them on my way up to Decorah and vowed to stop and pick them up on the way home.
Yet it feels somehow significant to stand in the murk of dawn at the base of a massive cliff towering hundreds of feet over your head. After forty years I’ll admit that I echo its craggy features in my own aging face. I have driven past those limestone bluffs in various states of confidence or anxiety all those years. I have also climbed on top of those hills trying to find significance in the valleys below. Such are the heights and depths of our years.
Yet these cycles, for all their ups and downs, have also always made me feel real and alive. Those are my rock-hard values, seeking to live each day with truth and solidity in the best way I can. Yet I also allow for the reality of sandstone, that far more fragile substance that was also laid down by ancient seas. It has never really changed much in actual substance, yet it is the most temporal of all substances. It was sand then, and it is sandy now. It is the dust-to-dust evidence that the Bible draws truth from the earth, and that even things that seem eternal are forever capable of change.
This also applies to the notion that we’ll get an all-new material world when Jesus comes back. That belief entirely misses the foundational truth of scripture. For example, when Jesus told the religious authorities that he would 
But I couldn’t moon around long… wondering what the next day would bring. The pressure to perform well each week was now firmly on my shoulders. I’d been our second man in all but one meet, so there were now expectations to meet. No longer was it good enough to go out and race and hope to crack the Top 5. 
As if the Achilles soreness and dangerous prescription I was given were not enough of a challenge, that following Monday an incident that took place in the college union that felt like a social earthquake. Walking out of the cafeteria with my girlfriend, I felt her hand suddenly tug backward in mine. I turned in time to see her toss a glass of orange soda straight into the face of a guy that I recognized as a track teammate. She said something on the order of…“Don’t you ever…” and the rest I did not hear because the scene erupted into multiple voices shouting and pushing and confusion. 
During the summer months we often wake quite early to run or ride before the wind and heat pick up. A few times this summer I even rode in the morning on weekdays. That required getting out the door by 5:30 am to get in a thirty mile ride before work.
Sleep needs vary, and in some ways I sleep a little less than I did even back in college, when getting eight solid hours was vital while training 300-400 miles a month in distance running.
d in this case, wound up hung on meat hooks where their blood apparently flowed eternally, because every new queen who opened the door got washed with the blood of the previous victims. Only this time, the queen had given notice to her brothers that if she ever called to them from the tower they should come running to her rescue. So when the king warned her that she was about to become a member of the Meat Hook Clan inside the door protected by the Golden Key, she asked if she could go say her prayers in the tower. First.
The trolls are so popular and so profitable that the system to admit visitors has been overwhelmed by the amount of traffic entering the facility. As we experienced last Sunday, the lines to get in extend for a mile.
It’s also not the Arboretum’s fault that the preserve is surrounded by really big roads, especially to the south with Interstate 88 and on its east side with I-355. When those roads were expanded some thirty years ago, the project provided for massive earthen berms to be built to protect the Morton Arboretum from road noise and, quite ironically it seems, from the hazards of road salt flying off the highway.
The problems faced by the crowds crushing it at Morton Arboretum are in many ways an American phenomenon. Yet true to form, there’s an iconic image right at the entrance to the Morton Arboretum. One of the first trolls one encounters is holding aloft what looks like a giant stone. Below him on the turf grass is a smashed car. The troll is obviously taking out its natural frustrations on the car.
We got up to ride this past Saturday after a fun little Halloween Party in a restored barn with a Haunted House. We took part in plenty of food and drinks, and got home late.
Tarsnakes on the road 
At some point I started to fall away and clawed back onto Sue’s wheel. But soon enough I told her, “Go on ahead,” and smiled at her with a shrug. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Well, duh. It might be time to do something about that, ya think?
So I rolled around like a writhing little gator on the shag carpeting in our bedroom and worked those little hip (hop) flexors like they haven’t been worked in years.
I even grasped my own head in my hands for a minute. Just let the contact between hands and head resonate and carry all the way back through my toes. I was my own compact ball of sixty-year-old energy. Breathing. 
Yes, we ran quite a bit. And yes, we partied sometimes. But never enough to truly hold back our performances.
I definitely recall the track race he mentioned. I had tried to double back in the 5000 meters after winning the steeplechase earlier that day. But my legs didn’t have the zip and my performance fell short, clocking a slow 15:20. With their effort, Central College took the conference track championship after Luther had won it for 17 years straight. I also recall some very bad sportsmanship that day when some of their athletes cheered when our All-American 400-meter hurdler shattered his leg going over the last barrier. Things almost came to blows on the infield between our two teams. They were sick of us winning and likely considered us arrogant. 
A cool wind blew off the flat landscape of southwestern Minnesota as we jogged around the course in our bulky cotton sweats and noted that the course was composed partly of cinder trails and grass. That led us to check our spike lengths, because short spikes do not work well on cinders. Only a few teammates by then were wearing the Oregon Waffle racers we’d ordered because the shoes were so popular they were on back order through a running shop in Minneapolis. Such were the early days of the Nike era. 
