Maddy tagged me

Maddy tagged me with the latest meme. I could swear I've done this twice before in other time warps. Five oddities of my world:

1. I was always the home team for neighborhood baseball games when I was young. I had the best field. We played in my dad's church cemetery and used grave stones as bases and markers as surplus fielders. Hit the marker on the fly and you were out.

2. I used dual purpose tactics in my run for election as student government vice president in college. I targeted the sorority houses and girls' dorms for my door-to-door campaigning. How could that not be successful - one way or another? I won the election and married a co-ed.

3. In a similar vein, in boarding school where there was "coordinated education," meaning the boys campus was by the river in the valley and the girls school was seven miles uphill on the mountain top, I formed a cross country club team which allowed for off-campus training runs. That's when I developed an affection for hill work.

4. I was never in better shape in my life than the summer before seminary when I worked on a stripping crew. (When was the last time you saw seminary and stripping in the same sentence?) The stripping crew pried out the wood forms from under highway bridge overpasses after the concrete set in the road surface above. I learned a lot about the hardscrabble life in that short period.

5. I have the humiliating distinction of having dropped a Vespa motor scooter seven times in five weeks. It was in Martinique where a bottle of French wine was a standard for every meal. To this day and all those ahead, you will never see me riding a motorcycle.

I am not one to tag someone so you are spared. Spared except for having to read my odd stories to get to here.

Repeats. As I wrote yesterday, I am aching to run long. Today I bagged the 1600 intervals even though I love the track. I wanted to do something else so I ran over to the Chelton hills which is a lovely little neighborhood with pricey well-kept homes that surround a former sink hole. I have a perfect one-mile circuit there that includes three ascents and descents per lap. I did four of them in succeedingly faster times. From 9:25 down to 9:00 for the last one. With the 3/4 mile warm up and cool down from the house to the hills I was feeling challenged enough cardiovascularly to take the edge off my ache.

Tomorrow I'll go easy for a few. Thursday is the Turkey Trot race; and this weekend I will go about 15 (Yes!). I realized that the following weekend will be a mess as I head to the Army-Navy Game in Baltimore. I just hope I don't have the same problems as Runner Susan and can find someplace to run 10 miles or so.