The 3/4 foot long Goanna /Lace Monitor Lizard was still there - gave Lily a fright!
I measured the hill at L' Traverse in the wagon = only 1.4KM I thought it was 2KM but I guess its the degree of difficulty that cost all the time when running up it.
It stars King of the M45 World, Pete Magill, my link is about half way through 10 or so pages of chat but if you scroll the link down you have Pete himself (= "SoCalPete") discussing his life and point of view.It starts off where he is rebutting some "trolls" for having a go at him for training high mileage!
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Good grief, is this thing still going on?! And I see that it's mostly being kept alive by trolls like Longtimegone who somehow - miraculously, moronically, with the self-awareness of stones at the bottom of a very deep, very dark, very still pond - fail to note the hypocrisy of calling out the pathetic lives of masters runners by (get this ... snicker, snicker) spending their own time posting on running message boards. Trolls, a word of advice: look up the word "pathetic," face mirror, repeat said word aloud as a means of introduction. Life is great. Life is good. And life can be lived a hundred ways. A thousand. And yet still end up good. Anyone out there who carries a checklist and thinks that said checklist is the one and only way to achieve an honorable, fulfilling, enriching, and adrenaline-fueled life, another word of advice: throw away the list. You haven't lived much of a life if you think there is one rule, one path, one answer to the call this world sends out to the living. I hitchhiked the country in my teens. Traveled the world in my early 20s. Owned a rock 'n' roll bar in the Caribbean in my mid-20s. Started up an "online" business before most people knew what an "internet" was. Went broke a half-dozen times before most of the posters on this board were born. Wrote scripts for Hollywood in my 30s. Sold mortgages when my scripts stopped selling in my 40s. Smoked 4 packs of cigarettes at one time of my life. Drank so hard that my hands never stopped shaking from the time I woke up until happy hour. Put so much cola up my nose that I lost my sense of smell for most of a decade. I've made love with more women than most of our young trolls have had kisses - have made love in more countries than our trolls have had birthdays. I've read thousands of books, seen hundreds of movies, attended dozens of plays. And argued politics with socialists in New Zealand, communists in Soho, and Capitalists in France. I've been strip-searched on an airplane runway in India. Nearly raped by crazy Mormons outside of Provo. Shot at with guns. Stabbed. And involved in more fistfights than there are days of the year. I've hung and partied with and been friends with Hollywood stars, renowned poets, famous musicians, mortgage brokers, carpenters, cooks, dishwashers, and bums in the back alleys of Bourbon Street. I've trained 100 miles a week and set masters records. And I've spent days and nights in jails and ERs and the grubbiest places imaginable. And the happiest I've ever been - far happier than at any other time of my life - has been these past few years: running my miles, raising my son, getting a steady paycheck, and waking every day to the promise of a beautiful new day. Those of you who wonder what kind of a life a 40+ year-old can lead when running 100 miles a week ... Well, that made me laugh, because I always wondered what kind of life a young person could lead running that kind of mileage. I wondered how you could trade tasting the juice of life's fruit for the fatigue and monotony of pounding the pavement. But if that's the life a young person wants, so be it. And if this is the life I want, well then excuse me - excuse all of us - if we don't give your counter-advice much credence. Because this is the one thing I know: people who truly live their lives experience a world so large, so filled with variety and possibility and divergent life paths, that they could no more judge the validity of anyone else's life than they could pick a single star in the sky and marvel at only it. I love, admire, and respect all my fellow masters runners - not for their race times or their mileage or their success as parents or employees - but simply because for now, for this one moment, we are all traveling a path together. And if I don't feel that way about the people I'm traveling with, then what does that say about my own journey? No, I choose this path, and I choose to honor the men and women who walk along, ahead, beside, and behind me. It's hard to build a beautiful sand castle on the shore. Any fool can knock one down. |
At one point I thought Pete might break into a quote from Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) from my fave movie Bladerunner, where the Replicant says
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
My point is Pete has lived a wondrous and fulfilling life (maybe not the coke & smoke!) and is still loving it more than ever just running as a 47 year old.
Ignore the fact that he is one of the best in the World for his age.
If you have a spare hour, enjoy reading the whole lot from the start.
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