Becoming a Runner

Growing up in the Pentagon

My mom was a farm girl from North Dakota, who moved to Washington, D. C., right after Pearl Harbor. She was fresh out of high school, and America was going to war. There were jobs in D. C., so she jumped on a Bus and headed off for her career!

She lived in a small apartment a few blocks from the Capitol, and went to work in the War Department on Independence Avenue in D. C. Her entire office moved into the Pentagon the day it opened. She met my dad, got married, and I came along in 1946, a little over nine months after the war ended (I am a real baby-boomer!)

Mom took some time off from working at the Pentagon to start off the family, we moved to Falls Church, and after a few years of being a full time mom, she went back to work. As soon as I was old enough, I started my growing up period as a Pentagon brat! I remember my first trips there, when I was about four, around 1950. The place was huge!

Mom walked everywhere. For most of my growing up, the family did not have a car, so we rode city buses everywhere. Mom rode one non-stop from Falls Church directly into the Pentagon, then had to walk about 50 miles (it seemed) to get to her office.

And she could move! It was all I could do to keep up with her as we found our way to an office with a number like 3D-365 (third floor, D ring, third corridor, office 65! Gee! I remember the code after all these years!

Keeping up with mom turned me into a walker back then. I walked to school, around a mile away, each day. If I had the money, I might ride the bus, but I kept something in reserve so I could ride the bus to the Smithsonian museums in D. C. after school. Most of the time I walked everywhere.

I can remember walking from Falls Church to the Mall, around eight miles away. No big deal! I walked from Falls Church to Glenn Echo, in Maryland, just so I could ride the roller coaster. That was over ten miles away! Still no big deal. I did not run back then, but I put in a bunch of miles walking. I am not sure my parents knew how far I could roam. They must have had some idea, though!

Visiting Mom in the Pentagon as my favorite walk, and I surprised her many times by popping into her office in the late afternoon. Sometimes, I would visit her for a bit, then hoof it over to National Airport to watch the planes take off and land. I would make it back to the Pentagon in time to ride the bus home with her after work.

Walking, with occasional bus rides, was how I got around in high school. My best friend, Ron Tinkham, had a car, so I rode around with him a lot, but mostly I got around on my own as a walker right up to when I went to Virginia Tech.

College Time

I enrolled in the ROTC program, since I was going into the Air Force when I graduated. It seems that the Air Force had a program called 5BX back then, designed to keep troops fit. Us ROTC cadets had to pass this test each year! The test involved push ups, sit ups, and a few other exercises.

And running!

You had to be able to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes. So I started practicing to do that. It was tough, even for a walker like me. I could not go that fast. Still, as we got close to test time, I would run around the drill field at Tech in preparation for this test. I always passed it, but was not that into running back then, It was something I had to do! After that 1.5 mile run, I would collapse into bed and barely be able to move the next day!

When I graduated, I entered Graduate School, again at Virginia Tech, and was not active in the ROTC program. I was commissioned, but on academic delay to finish Graduate School before entering active duty. So, I quit running, but took up motorcycle racing, and got a ton of exercise riding cross country Enduro events. Those events involved riding a motorcycle off road, at 24 miles per hour for 100 miles. We were seldom on paved roads. Instead, we rode on paths through the mountains, across rivers, through mud bogs, anything the event organizers could come up with to slow you down. You had to figure out how to get through all of that and stay on time. I got a lot of exercise and stayed fit that way.

Into the Air Force

When I entered active duty in 1973, I discovered that I had to do an annual test again. That again involved running. So, I bit the bullet (as they say) and decided to start running every day.

The Air Force allowed four hours a week duty time for exercising, and most of us took time off around lunch and went to the gym, which was all of two blocks away. (What boggled my mind was that everyone drove those two blocks, so they would not wear themselves out before exercising! Silly!)

The rules for running were simple. Get in shape, run the required distance in the required time, and do not die! Unfortunately, many folks put off training for this test, until right before it was run. On one occasion, an officer went to the gym, ran a few miles as training, laid down in the grass in front of the gym, and a few hours later, someone walked up to him, and he had died right there!

Not good! I decided to start making this a daily event. I would train by running every day at work.

In the Gym

When I first started out, there was a running track around basketball courts in the gym. That was great, since you could run rain or shine. What was not great was the turns. They constructed the track around the courts so there was a banked area at each turn, but it was pretty sharp. If you were running at any speed, you hit those turns, and bounced a few steps on the banked part and turned 90 degrees and ran another short straight part.

The problem with that was that while you were turning, one leg was crossing in front of the other as you turned, and you put a torque on the inside leg. After several months of this, my left knee started to hurt like crazy, so I went to the doctor at the "Air Force School of Experimental Medicine" as we called the base hospital back then.

The doctor took one look at me and said "Hmmm, you have 'Air Force Knee 101b'". He handed my a printed sheet outlining my options. (This must have happened a lot back then!) One option was surgery to pull the excess cartilage out from behind my kneecap, the second was an exercise program involving weighted shoes that would strengthen my kneecap. I elected the second option, and after six weeks of training, I could kick down brick walls with that leg, and the problem went away.

Moving Outdoors

Running indoors obviously was a problem. In more ways than one! I remember running on that silly track one day, when a player on the court inside the track threw a basketball to another player. The second player missed the catch, and the ball slammed into my head, knocking me into the gym wall as I went by at full speed. I collapsed in a heap on the track and laid there for a few minutes while I tried to figure out where I was. When I got that figured out, I decided I had enough of this, and started running outside.

Wright-Patterson Base was pretty big, and I could run all around the base. I found out that other runners had courses of varying distances laid out, and they posted maps of those circuits on the walls of the gym. I started off running a couple of miles at a time, but soon found that was not enough. I moved up to three miles, then four. Eventually, I did not feel like I had done enough work unless I ran at least six miles. I was taking about an hour to do that, shower and get back to work. Not a bad workout every day.

Thinking Time

Some runners spend their running time thinking about the run. I thought about what was going on in my life at the time. I thought about problems I was working on at work, projects I wanted to do in my off time, girls I would like to meet. Anything I wanted to think about. The miles just passed along, and I did not seem to notice them. I was running at a nice pace, and could stay on that pace to within a second or two per mile. It was becoming something I looked forward to each day. A time to myself, to work on problems uninterrupted by phone calls, meetings, or any other pressure to do something else. It was a great break from the work grind!

The runs started getting longer. I moved from six to ten miles a day.

I ran my first race in Dayton, Ohio just before I was transferred. It was a 10K run along a river in town. I do not remember much about it, but it was my first race.

Offutt AFB, Nebraska

In 1984, I moved to Omaha, Nebraska and SAC Headquarters at Offutt AFB. There was a great running track inside an old hanger there, over a half-mile long and constructed as a real running track, with rubber cushioned running surfaces. I tried that for some time, but quickly got bored looking at the same walls every lap. I also discovered a big problem with my mind.

Every time I passed "GO", I wanted to "STOP".

The solution was an old saying I had heard years back: "If you want to run a long way, run a long way away!" So, I returned to cross country running. At lunch, I started running off the base and all the way around the perimeter of the base and then back to the Gym. That was over 10 miles minimum. On weekends, I would run longer, eventually getting up to 22 miles! I was averaging something like 10 miles a day each week, and that included one day off each week! Yikes, I guess I had become a real runner!

Training Runs

I lived in Papillion, Nebraska, a small town about six miles from the base. It was surrounded by small farms and the area was divided off into "sections" a mile on each edge. There were major paved roads through the area, but a lot of the sections were bounded by dirt roads. I ran along those.

There were hills on those dirt roads, but they leveled those hills for the paved roads. The dirt roads were one hill after another. That was great for training. I would approach a hill, put my head down and focus on keeping up the pace as I climbed up the hill. If I looked up, I might get discouraged by the size of the hill, so I never did that! Instead, the challenge was simply to get to the top. I could rest on the way down the other side of the hill, then do it all again up the next hill. I could do that for five or six miles, then I might cheat and use a paved road to get back home. I did many of these runs after work on those days when meetings kept me from running, and on weekends.

I especially loved running in winter. Weird!

Snow Fun!

On cold snowy mornings, I might head out along snow covered roads with just a dusting of snow on the surface. My shoes would make neat prints in the fresh snow. I might work up a sweat, but my winter running suit kept the sweat from my skin, and if it froze, it was on the outside of the suit. I was pretty comfortable in the cold, and could run my full distance. The feeling was really neat. Almost white-out conditions, very few cars, and just silly me trudging along running.

Later, I used to do this near Albuquerque on Sunday mornings, with two dogs we had then. Often we were the first humans on the mesa west of town, and could see animal tracks in the fresh snow.

Bunny hop! Bunny hop! Bunny Hop! Red splotch! Coyote Hop, Coyote hop!

Guess what that meant!

The dogs loved the snow. One of them, a Pomeranian named Tawney, would jump from place to place in the snow. On one memorable jump, he hit a hole about two feet deeper than he was tall, and he just went poof and was gone. The other dog, a Westie named Zander, and I just stared at the spot where he disappeared for few moments. Then there was an explosion of snow, and this little Pomeranian bounded out of the hole happy as he could be. It was a hoot to see!

Horse Races

Back in Nebraska, I had an Arabian gelding named Jerry who lived in a barn off of one of those dirt roads near the base. On occasions, I would take him out of his stall, and we would go running along the dirt roads together. That was amazing. I would have a halter on him, with a six foot lead rope tied to it. Jerry would trot along beside me at exactly the same pace I was running at, no matter how fast or slow I ran. He seemed to love the adventure, and was always right beside me. I could have dropped the lead, and he would have stayed there with me. I never did that, since I was always on the lookout for cars or trucks coming over a hill. I did not want either of us ending up crunched along the road.

There is a kind of horse race I always wanted to try, but never got around to. It is called "ride and tie". The event is a team one: two riders, and one horse. One rider jumps on the horse, rides a specified distance, jumps off of the horse and ties him to a bush or something, then starts running. The second human starts off from the start point running after the first human and the horse. The idea is for the second human to reach the horse, jump on him/her, and head out after the first human who is now running. Got that? The horse and second rider pass the first rider, then reach another tie point and that rider jumps off, now rested enough to start running again. The poor horse is sitting there tied up waiting for the other human to get there. This goes on for the length of the race. The horse ends up running the entire distance, each rider about half of that. Sounds neat! I could never find anyone who wanted to try to ride my horse and run this race, so I never did one. Opportunity lost!

Base Running Program

The base gym at Offut AFB started a program for runners. You logged your miles each day, and every 500 miles, you got a cool T-Shirt indicating how many miles you had run. A few of us signed up, and the base soon found out it had a huge problem. We piled on the miles so fast, they were not ready with the required T-Shirts! I totaled about 2500 miles in nine months of running! Eventually, they stopped the program! But we kept running.

Airplane Watching

I used to love one part of the runs I did at Offut. I ran around one end of the main runway near the base gym, then along a two mile long road that paralleled the runway to the other end. Every Wednesday, the SAC Commander required one operational bomber crew to fly to the base and visit the headquarters offices. While they were doing that, folks assigned to the headquarters staff got a look at an operational bomber in real life. That was cool. One week we might have a B-52 visit, the next a B1B. The other cool thing was watching the bomber practice take-off and landings while I was running. I could see them flying in the traffic pattern around the base, then line up with the runway for landing. I would watch them approach and land within yards of where I was running. Then I could watch them take off again. Cool view for an aviation addict like me!

And the miles piled on.

Half Marathin Time

I decided I was running enough to try a half marathon. The best known run in Nebraska was the Lincoln Marathon, which started outside Husker stadium, and ran through the streets of Lincoln, and ended up inside the stadium. I was not ready for the full marathon, so I signed up for the half-marathon instead.

I wanted to finish the half marathon in time to see the winners of the full marathon when they came into the stadium.

I passed under the clock in 2:00:10! I just could not get under that durned clock ten seconds faster. Still, I was 10-15 minutes ahead of the marathon winners. What amazed me was realizing that I was running only half the speed of them marathon runners! I was running at 6.5 miles an hour, or around nine minutes a mile. The marathoners were running five minute miles!

What I could never figure out is this: If a marathon runner can run five minute miles for over 26 miles, why can't a human run one mile a minute faster? That four minute mile barrier (now broken) just did not make sense when you saw a marathon runner fly by!

I ran three more half marathons around Omaha that year, and my best time was about an hour and 35 minutes. Not bad, I thought! I was ready to try a full marathon, but I ended up being transferred to Albuquerque, and missed the Lincoln Marathon I wanted to try, and got to Albuquerque after they ran their marathon. So I missed my shot.

More Airport Running

Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque sits on the city Airport property. From my office in the Phillips Lab Supercomputer Center, I could see the terminal building. That was often annoying when I was late for a flight. I could easily have sprinted across a runway to that building in minutes, but instead, I had to drive all the way around the airport to get there by car, park, then run for the flight!

The runways at Kirtland were in the desert. Dirt everywhere! Once again, I was running around another 12,000 foot runway, this time watching airliners fly by, in addition to military birds.

When I got to the end of the runway, I was in for an adventure. As an airplane flies slowly towards the landing, a lot of air spills off of the wing tips, and creates a horizontal tornado off of each wing. Normally you cannot see that, but on windy days, with a lot of dust in the air, you could see those things just fine.

One day, a big airliner made the approach, tornadoes swirling off the tips of both wings, and landed near where I was running. The wind was just right. Those tornadoes swirled along, and did not move, except to keep on tornadoing (is that even a word?) along horizontally near me. One of them settled down on the ground, and picked up a bunch more dirt, making it look pretty scary. That thing walked along the ground right at me, and I was engulfed in it for several minutes. I could not see a thing. The wind was not strong enough to knock me over, but it was close. Durnedest thing I ever was in!

La Luz

My last big run while I was in the Air Force was the La Luz run up Sandia mountain! This particular run starts at an elevation of 6000 feet right at the base of the mountain, and goes up La Luz trail to the top. You run 4600 feet straight up in nine miles. Then you walk another mile along the top of the mountain to the tram, and ride it back down. Another mile of walking and you are back to your car. I made it up on my first try, but by the time I was nearing the top, what I was doing could not be called running. It was barely walking, but I did keep on my feet. By the time I reached my car, I never wanted to see that pile of dirt again! I got over that later!

I did run a few more half-marathons, but never managed a full one.

Hawaii Runs

The Air Force was mean to me on my last big assignment before retiring. They forced me to spend a month on Maui, set me up in a condo, and made me the technical lead in setting up the Maui High Performance Computer Center. We were there for a bidders conference, and had meetings every day getting ready to build the center.

My problem was I could not adjust to Maui time, my body still was on New Mexico time. So I would wake up at 4AM, put on my running gear, and go for a run along the beaches.

It was painful.

I had to watch fishermen get ready to go out to sea, watch the sun rise over the ocean, watch whales hop out of the water. You can only take so much! I suffered along!

Retirement

When I retired, I stopped running, and took up mountain biking. I would job shop in the mornings, then I would ride my bike on trails on the mesa near Albuquerque, or up to the top of Sandia Mountain along the paved road, then back down on trails around the ski slopes. I rode in the mountains on trails marked on riding maps we got in bike stores in town. I probably put several thousand miles on my bike while I looked for a job.

In the end, I took a job back in Omaha, then quit that when I found out working around local politicians was no fun, then started up my own consulting business.

I was still running a lot, but I now lived in an apartment in La Vista, a suburb of Omaha.

My runs now were along a road that was next to a golf course. I had to duck on occasion when a stray golf ball whizzed past my head!

On one memorable run, I was nearing the end of the run when I saw three men stringing cables on power poles along the road. One was on a ladder leaning on the pole, another at the base of the ladder, and a third about 20 yards up the road. The ground was wet from recent rain, and one of the men was twirling a rope with a metal clip at the end, getting ready to throw it up to the guy on the ladder. When he let it go, the clip sailed up in the air higher than the power lines running above the guy on the ladder. He caught it and I ran on.

A half hour later, I was back in my apartment, and the lights went out. I later found out that all three men had been electrocuted and died! My memory of that rope sailing up higher than those high tension lines haunted me, so I called OSHA to report what I had seen. They took my report, and added it to others as they tried to figure out what went wrong!

Then I met and married Cheryl, and soon after we moved to Austin Texas so she could help build a new art museum.

Texas Running

Our home south of Austin sits in a nice neighborhood with plenty of roads where I could run as far or short as I liked. I kept building up the miles, and eventually managed to make 13 miles my normal run. That is a half-marathon every day!

I still loved the time alone with my own thoughts. And, it kept me in shape. Even after I passed 50 years old, I was running these distances almost every day, all year around, now.

Then I hit 60, and soon after got clobbered by cancer!

My running screeched to a halt while I fought to stay alive. I got through my first bout with cancer, and seemed to be in pretty good shape. After a year or two off, I started back up running again. I was not quite as into it as before, and my thoughts now were all about cancer and how I was going to fight it. The running helped.

Five years later, the cancer was back, and I had more surgery. Part of that one stripped a chunk off of one leg to provide tissue for a patch on my face. I was not sure if I could still run after that, but I did try and managed to get back up to six to eight miles in a run. It took awhile. I could barely walk a half mile when I started.

A year later, a third attack, and this one cost me an eye, and more tissue from my other leg. My running pretty much stopped.

Until a couple of months ago!

Back to Running

"That which does not kill us, makes us stronger"

Friedrich Nietzsche

I finally decided to fight back, again! Even though both legs have big scars where tissue is missing, I felt fine, and decided to try running once again.

Again it was slow at the start. I walked a mile or two, then tried to actually run. I could not really do that, so I shuffled along at a fast pace, and can not really call it running. I managed to get up to two miles, then three, and four. Then six, seven, and today nine miles!

My time is pathetic by my old standards. But I am out there piling on the miles once again. However, I looked up what good times should be for folks my age. What I found out is that I am not doing so bad. Old(er) runners are not as fast as younger runners (Duh!) I am fine with what I am doing, and plan on keeping it up.

I carry my iPhone with me, and have an "app" that shows my course on my Facebook page. I really enjoy it when someone sees the map with me trudging along and pushes that "like" button. I get a "hooray!" message on my iPhone!

Cheryl says she watches me run on Facebook, and if I ever stop, she will jump in the car and rescue me. Actually, on several occasions I have been caught in a rain storm, and she has found me using the map and carried my soggy butt home!

I am a Runner at Heart

Running is my way of telling the world that I am still here, fighting every day against those things trying to pound me down. The big one is cancer. I am doing fine now, and plan on being in the best shape I can be if it ever tries to find me again. I may not be fast, but I am making tracks! I am running!

Like me on Facebook if you can. I will hear it, and will check on you when I cool down.

I am better now.My thoughts on my run today you have just read! I was remembering all those runs I had done in the past, and I decided a blog was in order. So, here it is.

Now, I need a nap!