I’m back in a running groove for the first time in 8 or so years. It’s taken about 5 months, 3 times a week, to slowly get the machinery working and circuits and plumbing opened up. I can cruise, I can run 8-9 miles, and the mountain has never been more beautiful than right now. My tempestuous affair with running is on an upswing. It’s good to be on the trails again.
Yesterday I took my Joe Bark racing paddleboard out in the lagoon. At certain tides, there is a winding 1- or 2-mile long channel that I paddle through. It’s 20-30 feet wide, mud bottom, pickleweed growing on mudflats, birds abundant. It was a quiet day, overcsst, kind of warm, and the water was glassy like a mirror, but with bits of foam from the incoming tide. I’d paddle hard for a while, and there’d be a spray about a foot long on either side of the nose, like a slow speedboat. This thing skims across the water. I crept up on a beautiful egret. A few days before I’d been watching a flock of terns on a mudflat when two of them took off and flew together in perfect unison, diving, climbing, soaring, an aerial dance, the pair joyous with synchronization…how do they know to both take a right turn at exactly the same moment? In the book Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon described starlings or some such birds in a huge flock, and how they all turned at the same time as if the group were a collective intelligence…
Above photo, taken 10 minutes ago, of divider strip on Columbus Street, outside Cafe Roma, North Beach, San Francisco
I heard this fun story on NPR a couple weeks ago:
Backpacked Birds Reveal Who's The Boss
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125665334
When I was a little girl my dad made me a paddleboard, but it was a huge thing that he had to put in the water for me. We would go to the calm back bay near Long Beach as a family and I loved to paddle it around in the shallows. One thing you could never call it was a racing paddleboard. Yours sounds like a lot of fun. – Margy
I have egrets nesting in the pine tree directly above where I park my black truck. I am thinking about just putting some clear epoxy over the mess and calling it an art car.
I've been doing a lot of walking lately. Maybe it is time to run in My Muskoka ! I popped over from Powell River!
I ran cross country in high school, and in the intervening 18 years, I've hardly run at all. This year (starting in January, which is super chilly here in Colorado) I started back up. It was amazing how out of shape I'd become, so I started by walking a 5K every weekday. Eventually I started running. It's amazing what you can do when you go about it slowly but persistently.
You are truly an inspiration, with all that you do. Thanks.