New Trail

I found some new trail this week. For the last year I've been running a brand new paved trail I can access directly out my front door, but it runs parallel to a major highway and the traffic and road noise are constant. 

This other trail likewise follows a road, but it is definitely the road less travelled. I saw a total of four cars in four miles. But that's not what made it great. 

The trail roughly follows the western shore of a very large lake. All of it is wooded, rolling and beautiful. The hills are there, but just enough gentle grade to give you a challenge without making you hate your run. 

The real gem for me was that it leads into two connected nature preserves. I ran through some of the last remaining old growth maples, oaks, and white pines left in the state. The preserves are laced by a network of trails, and so I turned off and made my way. 

I turned off down a two-track and ran through the forest. I ran through the entire preserve. When I hit the gravel road on the other side I took a right until I reached a meadow of mown hay. There I followed a trail back into the forest. 

It was amazing. The quiet dark forest. The  near silent impact of my feet on loam and forest duff. At one point my ankle grazed a strand of barbed wire, rusted and menacing, and I relished the element of danger, the untamed nature of this place. 

Soon I lost my way. It was overcast, and the forest all looked the same. I just kept running, faster and faster, taking every west and north turn, despite the fact that every trail ran in an arc. But soon enough I was back at the gravel trail I had started on, once again weaving through giant rolls of hay. Four deer watched me cautiously from a hundred yards away. 

I can guarantee you a bear has pooped in these woods. There's a lot of coyotes here. Wolf pups were collared a few miles away a few years back. It is magical country, full of life, and nothing brings it to life like being out of breath, my legs numb from the run, my heart pounding and free. 

It's good to be a runner, and it's good to find new trail. 

God and the Guinea Worm- What I Think About While Running

I hear a lot of people talk about The Zone. I think I know what they mean but I’m not sure. Most of the runners I know listen to music or books while they run. I see hundreds of them at races, ear buds clamped firmly in their ears, as if they’d die running without something to entertain them.

Now I’m not completely knocking it- to each their own. I do hard strenuous labor all day, and every day to the beat of a jobsite radio. The really bad part is I’ve been hearing the same songs every day for 35 years. AC/DC. Led Zeppelin. White Zombie. I like a lot of that music, but to hear the same catalog day after day, year after year, is soul killing. For Those About to Rock.

So up until now I just run. I let my mind go, set it free. Let it wander where it wants to go. It’s almost a Zen thing, if I knew what that was. It takes me to some strange places.

Today it took me to God and the Guinea worm.

I read last week that scientists and aid groups believe that the Guinea worm will be eradicated from the earth within the next two years. This may seem odd in a world of headlines blaring about endangered species and human-caused mass extinction. So what is the Guinea worm?

It is a parasitic worm that infects only humans. It lives in Sub-Saharan Africa. A water flea carries the larvae in its gut, and when a human drinks unfiltered water they swallow the fleas and the larvae are released.

They then develop into a 3 foot long worm that escapes by breaking through the skin around the ankle or foot. It takes about three weeks for a healthcare worker to wind this worm around a stick and fully remove it. Yank too hard, break the worm and the result is a bad infection with possible amputation. During the weeks it takes to get this worm out the victim is subject to horrible, incapacitating pain.

And humans are the only known host.

I quit practicing my faith some time ago. I don’t know why. Suffice it to say I have a very conservative Christian background. I refer to myself as a-religious. I want to believe in God, but I have questions.

If scientists are right and humans are the only known host of Guinea worms it presents a problem for Christians. It suggests that God created the Guinea worm to plague humans. This, of course, can’t be true since He is a god of love. He would never subject his human children to such torture.

Pat Robertson may suggest that God sent the Sub-Saharan Africans the Guinea worm as a plague for their idolatry. He is given to that kind of mindless frothing.

The other explanation, is that humans and Guinea worms evolved together, and it hasn’t been until now that we have had the technology and science to eradicate an ancestral enemy. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Now the faithful will tell you that when you see God face to face you can ask him this. I can see that conversation.

“So God- what’s up with that Guinea worm?”

“Yeah- that was a mistake. . .”

“A mistake? But I thought. . .”

“Well, we outsourced it. We had to get better control of our supply chain.”

There’s also other logical scientific explanations that Christians would be happy with, such as that humans are a crossover species and that the original host for Guinea worms no longer exists and Guinea worms adapted to us, that our fall from grace allowed our scabby sinful bodies to be attacked by all sorts of diseases and parasites, or that there is yet some unknown host which the Guinea worm still infects and thus all of God’s creations will be preserved.

I guess I still don’t know the answer. But that’s what I thought about on my run while you were listening to music.

For the Love

I started running a year ago.

Okay, so that is not remarkable. What is remarkable is that I’m a fly fisherman. 50 million Americans fish on a regular basis. About 58 million Americans run on a regular basis. Only about 5 million Americans fly fish, so I would say that’s pretty remarkable.

Yet my running is remarkable to me, as perhaps your running is to you. I’m a construction worker. I lived the middle American life, with the mid-life slide into mediocrity and obesity. Whenever I passed runners on the road I would think, or even shout, “run faster!”

I’m 44 now. I went through my midlife crisis. I detested my weight gain and bad habits. I got over the idea that I was going to die, or that life would end, at 40. I realized that I didn’t want my life defined by weight gain and loss of mobility. I was always the skinny kid- where was he?

I have also always been strong despite being slight of stature. People always underestimate me. But when I injured a leg on a backpacking trip into the mountains of Colorado, at the peak of my weight gain, it was a wakeup call. I had always been the strong one, the one carrying the extra load, the one helping others. We were on a strenuous hike for sure, with sixty pound packs and a steep climb of 4,000 feet over 8 miles up some very tricky terrain. But I had never had to be rescued before. And it was my own fault. I had let myself go.

What had happened to me is what happens to all of us. When we are young most of us (at least from my generation) took being thin and fit for granted. We rode our bikes everywhere, often several miles a day. We played tag for hours, running our hearts out without a thought.

In our twenties we went to college, hung out with friends, went clubbing, dated, and were too poor to pay too much attention to food. We also played hockey or basketball or football or all three. In other words we didn't eat much and did a lot.

But in our thirties things changed. We got married. We had kids. We had careers. In the perfect storm of adulthood we settled down, stopped running around, settled into careers and became sedentary. We could finally afford good food and lots of it. We didn’t plump out all at once- we gained a few pounds every year. 

By the time I was 38 my 5’7” frame weighed 195 pounds, up from a healthy 155. When I bent over to tie my shoes I would get out of breath and red faced.

The answers did not present themselves immediately. I knew that I was unhappy and needed to change. I did the Adkin’s diet and lost 37 pounds. I gained a good share back, but not all. I went through and survived my midlife crisis.

Then I started a partial love affair with veganism. Now mind you, I have been a life-long hunter and fisher. I take pride in my smoked butt. But I started realizing that having meat, eggs, cheese, sour cream, and more cheese in every meal wasn’t healthy. And I love vegetables. Then one of my customers, a chiropractor, said that they are vegan in the evening- all veg for dinner. This made sense to me- cut meat and animal products out of one meal a day and you have eliminated a bunch of calories, saturated fat, and cholesterol. I did that and loved it. It took a while, but I started to realize I didn’t need meat in every meal.

Then I dated a vegan. But that’s another story.

She did get me running. Or I should say she bought me running shoes. I have always been self-motivated. No one can make me do anything, especially not a significant other. I had been looking for a simple form of exercise that would get me going, help me lose some pounds. I was into biking in my teens and so I bought a bike and hated it.

But when my girlfriend bought me those shoes a gong went off in my head. It was too simple to be true. Plus I knew I’d hate it.

She got me to go on a run a week later. I pushed through that I’m-going-to-die feeling and ran 4.5 miles. My first run. I haven’t looked back. I ran my first half-marathon Memorial Day weekend this year.

I love running. I love it for its simplicity. All you need are shoes, shorts, socks, a shirt, and desire. It doesn’t matter how far you go, or for how long. It only matters that you do it.