Found While Running

There will always be the philosophical, "I found myself while running" story but that will have to wait for another time.

Today I logged an easy 3 miler. It was a variation on the "short loop" near the house. I parked the car at Salem Woods Elementary and timed the run just so I would finish as Gabe was released from class. As I descended the grade to the school parking lot I spotted a 1 1/2 wide roll of black electrical tape. That would have been helpful last night. I installed a CD/stereo in my little Civic and has no tape to wrap the spliced wires with, so I cannibalized what little tape I could find inside the dash. It was ugly. this roll will come in handy some time.

I finished the run picked up Gabe and came home then thought of all the interesting things I have found while running. To shorten the list I dismissed all the natural items like cool rocks, driftwood and weird leaves. So here are a few.

Twice I have found $20 bills, once in the parking lot of Sultan High School and once on the pipeline trail just up the street. Other monetary items include various coins here in the states, Mexico and in Managua Nicaragua. Money is an easy on to start with pennies are to easy unless they are tails up and are wheat backs, for some reason the wheat backs are cooler.

Tools are another category of items I find a lot of. Wrenches, screwdriver, hexes, hammers, a hatchet, socket parts. The best are the Craftsman tools for the lifetime guarantee. I stop in at Sears tell the guys I found in on the road and they scrounge up a new one lickety-split. I guess they know the guy who's truck it fell off will be in some day to replace it.

one of my most memorable finds was this aluminum miners helmet. I was easily 8 miles in on some back logging roads near Sultan above the Skykomish river, somewhere near the summit of Haystack Mountain. I had reached the end of the rugged roads overgrown with small alder trees when I came upon a clearing with a bunch of old logging debris; cables, rusty metal parts and this helmet have buried in the dirt. It was pretty mangled when I found it so I tried to open it up a bit but it seemed to not like being worked and started to break along the crease lines. It was a cold fall day and there was an early snow on the ground. I had not worn gloves and used the time proven "pull-your-sleeve-cuffs-over-your-hands" technique. It was working wonderfully. So carrying the helmet with its wonderfully effective ability to conduct heat seemed to be sucking any remaining warmth from my already chilled hands. Oh the price you pay for"take-me-homes".

A while back I found this water bottle. Most water bottles on the side of the road are most undesirable being filled with unwanted fluids. But this bad boy was open and left in the middle of the road. I surmised, due to its pristine condition, it had fallen off a bike. It smelled like the typical plastic water bottle and has proven itself very useful since being sterilized with a strong bleach bath.

Various pieces of sporting equipment would include: golf balls, baseballs, soccer balls, basketballs, a left footed Jr. snowshoe, three baseball gloves, and a play swing with chains. That last one was tough to carry home.

I recall going on a run to clear my head from a project I was working on at home. It was a tree stand for hunting deer in the woods. While on the run I found two large chunks of pressure treated 4x4 perfect for finishing the project.

I remember a story of a gent who collects lead tire balance weights. I see a lot of those, but leave them for him out of respect. Of course

I don't recall many other items right now but I'm sure in my now 17016 miles I have found many other things.

Now on to running goals. I really have only three hard goal the soft ones are not worth mentioning. But he hard goals are: running a sub 5:00 mile, running a sub 3:00:00 marathon and running around the world. I attained the mile goal a few years back running a 4:59 on a really hard track at a High School track in Lynnwood. Qualifying for Boston I hammered out a 3:08 marathon on the old flat and boring Seattle course. I don't think I will ever have the chance to train like that again. But we'll see. The run around the world thing is a lifetime goal. The number I have chosen is 24,902, though people argue about the exact number. I am currently at 17, 016, only 7886 miles to go.

"Trials of miles."

Tony