Outdated Satellite Photos, A Biblical-style Plague of Gnats, Five Miles and Striders

Ran five miles at the local high school track tonight. I threw in 10 x 100m striders after two miles. The entire run took a little over 47 minutes.

My original plan was to run at the track I thought was at my daughter's elementary school. When I visited the school in June, the woman who was showing me around mentioned that they have a program where the kids can run laps at their 1/5 mile track during recess. They log their miles and then their names are put on banners once they reach certain milestone totals, such as 50, 100 or 200 miles.

Driving by the school since we moved here, I had never seen anything resembling a track, but then I figured that since the track was not a standard distance, perhaps it was really just a dirt path in one of the fields behind the school. However, when I went online tonight to look at satellite photos of the local schools to see which ones had tracks, I saw that there was one right behind my daughter's school. Since it's the one that would be closest to our house, I decided to check it out.

I wasn't even sure if the track would be open to the public. There are high chain link fences surrounding the school grounds. Behind the school there was an open gate that led to the athletic fields and I could see that there were people going back and forth from a pickup truck parked just inside the gate. It was a couple of adults and a couple of kids. They appeared to be unloading mulch or soil from the truck into a little garden next to a detached corrugated steel building behind the school.

I asked the woman if there was a track back there somewhere and if it was open to the public. Turns out there used to be a track but they removed it so that the entire field would be grass. You could still see a little bank in the field where the ground had been raised so that the track would be level. Someone was walking a dog on what used to be the track. I asked her about other tracks in the area and she suggested one in the next town and she wasn't too sure about the high school or middle school tracks, about which she was a bit embarrassed. "I really should know more about my own town," she said.

I thought about running on the former track there, but I wanted to do my striders on an actual track. Then, the woman and I were attacked by swarms of gnats, the likes of which I have never seen before. They seemed perfectly intent on and content with kamikaze-ing into my mouth ears and nose. I decided to go to the high school. It was right in the middle of the city, where I hoped there would be fewer bugs dying to be ingested or inhaled by me.

Found the track, noticed a sign on the fence saying that walkers and joggers should use the outer lanes. In my old town I ignored these signs because everyone did and no one had ever said anything to me about using lane one. For some reason, though, I was worried that someone would accost me for doing so here. I have this irrational fear that there are all sorts of rules and customs which are strictly observed here and which I know nothing about and that I am always about to run afoul of them. This is how I am. I'm still like a grade school kid, worrying about "getting in trouble."

There was an older man putting a high school girl and boy through some drills that looked a lot like plyometrics for runners. If anyone is going to have a problem with me running in lane one, I thought, it will be this guy. I figured I would run in lane one anyway, until someone told me not to; then I would make some smartass comment in retaliation before dutifully moving to the outer lanes.

No one noticed, or if they did, they didn't say anything. I did my entire run in lane one (which my Garmin Forerunner 101 told me was 5.00 miles, validating its accuracy for me, which I sometimes doubt, especially if it seems I've run faster than I expected).

Going into my striders, I still get that feeling that there's still enough left in the tank to run some decent times before I'm too old. However, I looked down after the first strider and saw that it had taken me 23 seconds to run 100m. Slower than six-minute pace. Still, I tell myself that I don't feel any different than I did in high school and that if I still weighed 140lbs (about 35lbs less than I do now), I'd probably be doing these in seventeen or eighteen seconds.

I have to keep reminding myself that I just started running a few weeks ago after a couple of months of practically nothing. It will get better.