Author Archive
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being. – Don DeLillo From Santee “Race Walk Capital of the USA” to Antalya and Paris by Foot! Welcome to the 2024 USATF National Marathon Race Walk Mixed Relay Championships & Santee…
My first Groundhog’s Day, February 2, 1947, I was forty days old in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. 301 Foundry Street. The less grand side of town. Big old Victorian owned by salt of the earth grandparents. Now a parking lot for a community college. Not many years later my uncle took me out hunting for the meteorological…
All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. – Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Published (February 1, 1962) Back in the mid-Seventies, I lived in a tiny bungalow, two…
Women are almost always angry with men for one reason or another. It’s one of things you’ll have to get used to, as you get older. – David Eddings I go to Muhammad & Sons, a black barber shop run by a Muslim who prays in the back room. Up front we listen to R&B crooners…
“The girls are in skimpy panties and bras, the dudes in underwear, so you see what everybody is working with from the jump. Even if their face is a 7, their body is a 20.” – Breaux Greer, American javelin thrower. Saw this book and I sent a fan letter to the author. I’d buy…
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come. – Rabindranath Tagore When it was his time, whenever it was God decided, the old man just wanted his ashes to decorate a warm blue sea. Where a fish might drink him and a bird might take…
Never ask from whence a “marketing crew” gets its numbers. – Anon. In today’s super shoes, women are running faster than Abebe Bikila could travel barefoot. Twenty-three year-old Kelvin Kiptum can see a sub-two-hour marathon from his front porch. Frankly, it’s all a tad mindboggling. Is this just natural wonderfulness by highly-trained gifted athletes? Is…
Agnes Jebet Ngetich becomes the first woman to break the 29 minutes barrier in a 10km race. The Kenyan clocks an incredible 28:46 in Valencia to break the world record by almost half a minute. Ngetich also split 14:13 for the first 5k – which ties the road world record set by Beatrice Chebet –…
Flagstaff, in the mid-1970s, I was self-coached by something of a maniac. There were stair workouts, observatory runs, tofu loaf for Thanksgiving, there were two-mile repeats, lost in the woods, European goats on the loose and Native American buddies, the devotion of young wives and so much darn fun. Must have been all that fresh…
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important. – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On January 13, 1904, a mob of white people lynched a Black man known as General Lee in Reevesville, South Carolina, for…