09 - We Find Ourselves in the Statues We Build

Running Song of the Day:

🎵 This sea is my home, I wanna go home I got home sickness /
This Dramamine dose gets less and less and less effective /
And Iiiiiiiiii don't feel alive when we're off shore /
I take one, I take two, I take three more
I take three mooo-o-o-o-ooooore 🎵

This one’s a banger, give it a listen.

Today’s Run:

Feels like 59°, wind 6mph. That’s runnin’ weather.

Dicked around most of the day doing baby things and this and that.

Got out with the sun totally covered by clouds. Overcast sky, looked and felt like rain. But it held out.

Knee felt fine, overall everything felt fine. Decided to run 10 today.

On my normal path, there’s a shrine? I don’t know if there’s a “real world” term for this kinda thing, but in Oblivion they were called shrines. It’s some religious statue with like a little stone walkway and patio thing. I run past it on my easy long route, but usually don’t make it all the way up to it.

I’m not religious or anything. I’m not aggressively atheist or whatever either. I’m just a dude who likes to go running and write weird stuff on his computer; religion doesn’t really enter my thought process very often.

So I kinda approach this thing as like “huh, who paid for this? Why is this just in the middle of nowhere? And who upkeeps it?” All good questions, Mike V. All good questions.

The answer is: I don’t know. I’m never going to know. And I don’t need to know. This is a cool little spot to receive a blessing that increases my speed for an hour. I like running past this thing and because I needed an extra mile today, I was able to run up to it and check it out.

I always feel like I should kneel and pray at this thing. I don’t know any prayers. It’d feel kinda fake to take a knee here when I don’t really mean it. I usually just bow my head, close my eyes, and try to think of something meaningful. Usually my mind stays blank.

On my way back I pass through what is essentially a park, but it’s not a park. It used to be a retirement community, a really big private place, big campus yadda yadda. They tore it down a few years ago and basically completely leveled the land out and replanted grass everywhere so other than a few rock layer structures, you’d think that this big lot was always just like a grass and trees park.

Anyway—I noticed a single lane bike trail going up a small berm in the not-park today. Curious by nature to a fault, I decided to follow it.

When I got to the top it just…ended. No trail anywhere else to be found. I thought that was kinda weird.

But then I got a good idea; what if I ran around this not-park and made a running trail from repeated use? I don’t know who owns this land, and I don’t really care because this place should just be a park anyway, but I know no one is out here doing anything with the land every day, so if I run here and then run laps around a course of my own devising, I could probably wear-in a path in like a week.

I got really excited when my brain cooked this up while I was running back home. A guerrilla running trail, out in the open. I really like this. I think we got something cookin’ here folks.

Stay tuned for further updates. We can call it the Legg and Brain Trailway.

10.05 miles
in
1:36:42
so it was
6.2mph on avg
with
787 ft of vert
and i’ve run
65.88 miles this Spring

Long Form Essay of the Day?:

Another Mike who’s both a weirdo and a writer put out a great essay this week about video games, escapism, guilt, and…life? If you’re into any of those topics, you should give it a read.