The Longest Mile

Distance	Time	Route	Pace
1.5 mi.	??	'round the bend and back from the dell	??

Ahhhhh, the country. What better way is there to spend the weekend then packing up the old wagon, loading the kids in the rumble seat and heading out into the country for some good ol' fashioned country runnin'?

That's what I did this weekend. And let me tell you, there's nothing like running out past the edge of civilization, where the only hazards are the great wide open and the occaisional moonshine still or meth lab.

Being an amicable traveling companion, I took one of my non-running friends out for a jog with runinng-celebrity Jon Segal. We'll call him hairy-bear. A regular gym rat, he wore basketball shorts and a new pair of Converse Chuck Taylors (all-stars) out onto the road. They are, in his words, athletic shoes after all.

It was truly an adventure. We were running down a trail, behind some abandoned industrial complex, when a dirt bike came ripping through from the other direction. It was a narrow trail and the dirt-biker, who I swear had a skull painted onto his helmet, didn't look like he was going to stop.

Visions of "Mad Max" flashed through my head as the bloodthirsty biker gunned his two-stroke engine and set us in our sights. It was fight or flight for me and hairy. Since I had neither a four-foot length of chain or a mace on me, I turned tail and ran. Out in the open, the biker gunned past us and did a wicked-bad jump off a bunch of rocks, breifly turning to look at us tauntingly as he flew in the air and buzzed off into the distance.

A few minutes later, my new running buddy asked a question: Why is running so much harder than using the elliptical trainer? I'm still not sure what the answer is, but I'm guessing that, in the gym on the eliptical trainer, you don't have to flee from crazy hick dirt-bikers.