Running, paddling…

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

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

5 Responses to Running, paddling…

  1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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