Montana de Oro 50K

I'm gonna write something about the Montana de Oro 50K I ran last Sunday...but not yet. Busy-ness. But it was lovely. And hard. But in a good way.

The picture above is from the very end of the race, like the last 30 yards. The rest did not look like that at all: as in no roads, many mountains. My legs are really scratched up from a run in with a bush during an out of control descent, and I've got little poision oak patches, despite washing my legs off post race in a little creek with the special wash race director Sarah let me borrow. And I have some pretty good bruises on and around my knees, but those are mostly from the rock climbing gym adventure Kevin took me on last Monday. Anyway, my legs look...like mine, and better and happier to me than I can recall them looking in quite some time. They're quite lived upon. : )

sometimes in the course of being what we're not, we become what we are.

On Ears

I was really trying to think seriously about something that I believe is important this morning. But instead, as I strode down the sidewalk beginning another day of this life, all I could think of was my ears.

It was the breeze that got me started. Wisps of hair kept blowing around, all wild-like, getting in my eyes and my mouth. First I noted that my hair felt a little coated. Perhaps that new conditioner I bought isn’t so great. I should have bought a smaller bottle. I don’t know. And then, grabbing a fistful of wild strands and combing them back off of my face, silently imploring my ears to tame the unruly madness, I got caught up thinking about those ears.

What neat little hooks they are. I mean, our hearing evolved the way it did so that we could hear, but I wonder if maybe the shape of our ears is sort of a neat trick of evolution too. Really. Think about a caveman- they always have that long wild hair, and I think if two cavemen were out hunting, the one with ears shaped to be better hooks, to keep his hair out of his eyes better, would be more successful, thus feeding himself and his progeny more effectively. Same goes for being able to see predators. Really, anyone with long hair can see that this is probably true. The hook-like, unruly strand taming function of the ear is very important. In a time when survival depended on our being able to see and be aware without being distracted by things like wild hair, even more so. Seriously.

Good to have that figured out. How, oh how, would I go on were it not for that contemplation? I might have to think about...something. ELSE.

Welcome to my mind…