The terror of winning a race.
In September of 2010, I won the POAG Hot Pursuit 5K Road Race. Yes, that’s right; I won a race. Let me explain.
Before retiring I was a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Any state or local law enforcement officer in Georgia is eligible to join the Peace Officers Association of Georgia, also known as POAG. The POAG holds an annual convention, usually in August or September, and usually at a location on the Georgia coast. One of the events at the convention is the annual running of the Hot Pursuit Road Race. It is billed as…
Neither concerns money.
Let’s go ahead and get the money question out of the way so we can discuss the important issues. It goes without saying that certain financial means are needed in order to retire. How much and how to achieve those means is not the point of this article. If you are serious about retiring at some point in your life then there are many ways to build your nest egg. How big that egg needs to be is a personal matter. It could depend on several factors and one is certainly the lifestyle that you want to…
Warning: This isn’t rocket science people.
I recently saw a headline that read “How to Run Uphill.” Really? Are there people who have to be told how to run uphill?
I began running and reading about running in 1977. Over the years I have watched this simple activity be examined, dissected, autopsied, discussed, studied, debated and argued over from every angle possible and to levels of nit picking that defied logic.
While thinking about the absurdity of instructing someone on how to run uphill, I decided to put my years of experience and knowledge to work. Herewith, I answer ten…
Both for running and for moving into 2021.
2020 mercifully draws to a close. I hesitate to think that anyone skipped through this year without feeling totally bummed out at one point or another. Since we often use running as a metaphor for life I refer back to my first ultramarathon.
The wheels came off somewhere around twenty miles into the Long Cane 50K. It was a warm and humid May afternoon in South Carolina and I shouldn’t have been surprised. My training leading up to the race had topped out with a long run of seventeen miles. And while the Long Cane course is an endless succession…
Two very important miles
I stand on the walkway and wait for the satellites to acknowledge my Garmin. A wind from the south drives clouds across the sky with rare patches of blue peeking through for a few seconds at most. The choppy, slate grey ocean sends relentless ranks of waves to curl, crash and turn to foam as they chase sandpipers to higher ground. The Garmin beeps. I turn south and slowly jog into the wind.
I am back on Amelia Island, a barrier island off the coast of Florida, and the place where I sustained a pinched nerve one year ago. I…
Really, what is left to say?
Before I retired I kept a half dozen running books on my office bookshelf. A non running coworker looked at them and asked if there was really that much to be written about running. At the time I didn’t think much about it but now I have to reconsider his question.
The idea occurred to me while reading the December issue of Ultrarunning. I first subscribed to the magazine in the early 1980s and after a brief hiatus resumed in 1991. I haven’t missed an issue since. …
How it can help us in our current chaos.
In the early 1920s, Max Ehrmann wrote a piece of poetic prose named Desiderata. The word desiderata are Latin for “things desired” and Ehrmann’s work certainly contains advice and ideals that are desirable for our current world. This world of the pandemic, social unrest, political rancor, and uncivil discourse. Can we, in the beginnings of the 2020s, learn from something written in the beginnings of the 1920s? I believe we can and we should. …
It’s a bigger deal than it sounds.
On November 17, 2020 I ran an entire mile. That’s not much to most people but it was a significant milestone in a 337 day long rehabilitation process. It was the first entire mile I had run since December 13, 2019. On that day I ran three miles and felt fine. But the next day, pain in one foot caused a limp that then caused my back to hurt. …
Who rescued who?
Bella the Wonderdog was two years old when she chose us to be her family. It happened at a local doggie day care/rescue kennel. I was there to pick up my daughter’s bulldog from day care. When I exited my truck the owner of the kennel stood about fifty feet away with a long legged, flop eared, brown hound on a leash. She knew that we had recently lost a dog and as if fate were guiding her, she looked at me, smiled and unsnapped the leash.
The hound sprinted across the yard and reared up to…
But one I can live with.
My wife and I were on the way to Taco Tuesday at the Salty Pelican when the doctor called.
“Dude, you got cancer. But don’t worry. You don’t have much and it’s growing really, really slow.”
Maybe he didn’t put it quite that way but the message was essential that I had a very small tumor that he expected to grow very slowly.
Slow-growing cancer sounds like a curse you would put on your worst enemy. But on the other hand, I guess it’s better than a fast-growing one. …
Micah Ward
Micah is a retiree who writes, runs, prays and enjoys craft beer in the rolling hills of central Tennessee. He goes to the ocean when he can.
