Perspective

This morning the world briefly stopped turning. It happened so abruptly that, much like an etch-a-sketch, we were all rearranged, and what we had known was erased.

I ended up in Ethiopia, where all true runners belong. I stopped by Haile Gebrselassie's house and we went for an easy 10 miler. He's getting older so I went easier than I felt like going. I congratulated him on his recent marathon world record; he said that he wished it had been me. That makes two of us. He never complains much, but today he mentioned that his new shoes were not working out too well; it seems that someone "tweaked" the design just a bit and, though the name was the same, the shoe was not.

I consoled him and slowly the conversation turned to music. We both like Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, but not Brittany Spears so much. We agreed that Christina Aguilerra is hot, and, after humming a few bars of "The Edmund fitzgerald", agreed that Gordon Lightfoot was awesome.

After the run we were on the way to Dairy Queen when the world suddenly stopped spinning again, and everything was rearranged as it had been before.

I was back in the rut I've come to call "God is punishing me for lots of stuff right now." I struggled through an "easy" 8 miler; those hills always seem so gradual in a car. I saw a runner disappearing into the distance ahead of me. With a few quick mathematical computations I decided that they were running roughly twice as fast as I was...maybe it was Haile.

I had to stop to retie my right shoe; it just never seems to fit right with this years version of my favorite shoe.

"With a load of iron ore 26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty..." What a great song.