I was walking through the grocery store parking lot, heading in to pick up a few supplies. Just minding my own business. A middle school kid on an e-bike swerved to miss an approaching car and braked to a sudden halt ten feet in front of me.
"How do you like my bike?" he yelled. Yelled. Like we knew each other.
It was sudden and unexpected, a character in a movie breaking the fourth wall and talking to the audience directly from the screen.
This week is Trinity League finals for track and field. Frosh-soph and JV race Tuesday. Varsity on Friday. I may have been enormously busy over the last four months, or maybe just distracted, but the end of the season is coming way too fast. May will bring the section and championship races but the majority of my runners will be done by Friday.
"What's our gate?" I asked Calene. We were connecting through Denver.
"B43."
Wow. I'd waited sixteen years to pass through that gate again. My flight out of New York got delayed by weather back in 2009. I was there to have lunch with my agent and the guy who became my co-author. The flight landed so late during that particular Denver connection that I slept in the airport to make sure I got the very first flight out in the morning. That, and I was too cheap to pay for a hotel room for just four or five hours of sleep. Airport seats are separated into individual sections, making it impossible to lie down, so I slept on the floor behind the counter at Gate B43.
I wonder how the Madagascan Martin Dugard is doing?
There is a British Martin Dugard, a speedway legend from Eastbourne. There is also a Dugard Corporation, which engineers machine tools. Facebook shows a bunch of other Martin Dugards.
But it's been thirty-two years since I was in Madagascar, covering the Raid Gauloises adventure race along the desolate southwest coast. It was my first big journalistic adventure….
Woke up this morning feeling very good about The Long Run. Last Saturday I had lunch with a good friend who was a mover and shaker in the running business. He pointed me down a new line of inquiry for the book — one so novel and out of nowhere that I couldn't wait to weave it into the text. At last, after months laboring to separate fact from legend, a clear path forward.
Somewhere in a New York City recording studio, a team of professionals is recording the audio version of Taking Midway. I receive periodic updates, mostly about pronunciations, though I'm on the other side of the country. I'm spending the morning doom scrolling in the chemo ward, wondering if I should wander over to the cafeteria for a bold cup of coffee or just drink the ordinary stuff from the machine. The wifi isn't so good, so I use my phone as a hotspot. In typing that last sentence I learned that hot and spot make one word instead of two.
I just finished Chapter Eight of the new book on Friday. Printed it out then headed to Board & Brew after practice to edit. Just me, the pages, and a pencil. Sitting in a crowded place and losing myself in the words is easy, having spent the early years of my career writing at the kitchen table when the boys were newborns.
We held a neighborhood St. Patrick's Day party in the cul de sac on Saturday night. Everyone brought an entrée and a dessert. BYOB. It was nice catching up with everyone in person, rather than just waving as they drive by on their way to work. The evening sky was clear but it was California-cold, most of us wearing something down.
