The Best I Can Do While Lost
By ice rivers
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Before we armed our vehicles with dashboards, speedometers and GPS; distance, location and destination were continually problematic to vehicles traveling overland
Before wonder watches, fit bits and pedometers; distance, location and destination were contnually problematic to walkers and runners.
I'm a walker now, I used to be a runner. My running days ended when I rushed out of my house to give one of my daughters a phone message on our land line from a guy with whom I found out later that she had no interest in communicating.
I got out of the habit of running after the fracture. When I returned, the damaged ankle had cost me my stride. With my new stride, my hips began to suffer and pretty soon after that my frequency of running began to dwindle.
I had run my last race. Still, I have my memories of clipping along at seven minutes a mile.
Most of those memories are very good but some of them still piss me off.
I ran10k races and 5 mile races every weekend for a decade. Most of the races were well organized with mile markers and water breaks along the way. Every once in awhile, I'd find myself in a poorly organized "race" with neither markers nor water.
During the course of these runs only one thing was for certain and even that certainity was up for grabs. We runners were pretty sure we knew the distance of the race and we needed the mile markers to make sure that we were pacing ourselves correctly.
The first time I raced on a course without mile markers, I become disoriented after seven minutes. I kept waiting to see the sign that I had travelled a mile. No marker appeared. After another distance of what I perceived was a half mile, I still hadn't covered a mile according to the non-markers and my disorientation turned into fright and then anger as I continued on the course, passing other frightened pissed off runners and asking them "how far are we" and they shrugging their shoulders and saying "no effin idea". Exhaustion soon set in and I plodded along the five mile race which seemed like ten until finally there appeared a finish line. I made it to the finish. My finishing time was much slower than I had become accustomed to. I asked to see who was in charge of the race but nobody knew who or where that person was. I didn't see much point in berating people who had nothing to do with the chaos on the course. What the hell, I had my exercise for the day and I had my complimentarty tee shirt.
I was thinking about that experience yesterday when I was speaking on our land line to my old pal Johnny Crown. We were talking about the pandemic. Crown said what he hated the most was the fact that there was no finish line in sight and therefore we had no idea about the distance of the race that we were running. We agreed that America is a land where if we know what the hell we're doing, we'll do what we need to do to get it done. If we have to stay in doors for six months to save the country, we would stay indoors. The problem here is absence of leadership and the fact that not only is there no finish line in sight every time somebody tells us there is a finish line somewhere it's always a lie and when the lie is exposed we discover that the finish is even further than it was when we first thought that we were coming down the home stretch and what we thought was the finish line was really the starting gate whcih mean for all the exhaustion ans disorientation, the race hadn't even started yet.
I recalled the race without the markers. "Not only don't we know where the finish line is but also we don't know how far we've traveled, how much stamina we're going to have to hold in reserve in order to get to the finish line and yes, there is the possibility that a different finish line is ahead for many of us, a very personal finish line called death.
When you don't know where you are; when you don't know where you're going or how long it will take you to get to the place that you hope to reach, well there is nother word for that and that word is LOST.
Today was the first day since this whole thing started that I didn't want to get out of bed. I don't want to turn on the news. I write every other day and today is that other day. I got out of bed to write this and during the writing I forgot about alll the other crap for a moment even as I was writing about it. I hope when you get to these last few words, that you will have forgotten about the pandemic for a minute or two even as you were reading about it.
That's about the best I can do today.
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Comments
Exercise, in all of its forms
Exercise, in all of its forms, keeps us going - you're doing fine. :)
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Your best was well
Your best was well appreciated. Thank you for this story and you are not alone in your frustration- There is no one leading this band of runners - no markers have been posted to point the way out, except for the grim ones and now some don’t want to give us even that. The way your story takes us through that run and into the similarities happening with the pandemic was perfectly done. Sadly, at the moment, we have no turn around ending, not as yet...but there is always hope.
I enjoyed this very much and look forward to your next -every other day- entry.
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