Note from Matt’s marathon-training buddy out in Missouri (friend Andy G.):
This week my odds of an unfortunate incident rose sharply.
First, I realized you should not climb Missouri’s equivalent of Mt. Everest in the 10th mile of a 13-mile training run. I finished the run. But two hours later, tequila-hangover-like symptoms set in including the shakes, cold sweats, and a heart beat racing to 90+ bpm solely from walking upstairs to answer the phone. The body thought it had been poisoned. I was thereafter laid up in bed for three hours, with a trash-can on standy-by near by. Only tylenols and not moving could help. Lesson learned: Look for the pain of completing a marathon (if we can do this) to set in hours, not minutes later. Have someone ready not at the finish line, but afterwards, to help.
Second, my town, Creve Coeur, MO, passed a town rule permitting bow-hunting on residential plots of one acre or more to cull the deer population. Creve Coeur has many such plots, and I happen to run by them, and on more than one occasion I have experienced that moment of mutual surprise when I go jogging past a deer and see it/him/her at the same moment he/she/it realizes it got surprised. If you hear about an unfortunate incident involving a jogger and a bow-hunter, it may be because the next time I have such an encounter, a bow-hunter is readying a ‘kill shot’ (is that what it’s called in that sport???) just as I go by. Parents of Creve Coeur, and similar towns, do not let your kids where those fake-antler head-dresses during halloween or christmas!
(Note: if this seems unlikely, consider the following—Recently, a domestic violence incident was reported on the local news. In a quarelling love-triangle, one man shot the other with an arrow over a dispute about a woman. In a separate incident, an arrow crashed through a woman’s kitchen window, in a suburb, while she was having breakfast. It was a case of target-practice gone bad by a local sportsman. These occured within the county lines of a city of three million people.)
Until next time...
This week my odds of an unfortunate incident rose sharply.
First, I realized you should not climb Missouri’s equivalent of Mt. Everest in the 10th mile of a 13-mile training run. I finished the run. But two hours later, tequila-hangover-like symptoms set in including the shakes, cold sweats, and a heart beat racing to 90+ bpm solely from walking upstairs to answer the phone. The body thought it had been poisoned. I was thereafter laid up in bed for three hours, with a trash-can on standy-by near by. Only tylenols and not moving could help. Lesson learned: Look for the pain of completing a marathon (if we can do this) to set in hours, not minutes later. Have someone ready not at the finish line, but afterwards, to help.
Second, my town, Creve Coeur, MO, passed a town rule permitting bow-hunting on residential plots of one acre or more to cull the deer population. Creve Coeur has many such plots, and I happen to run by them, and on more than one occasion I have experienced that moment of mutual surprise when I go jogging past a deer and see it/him/her at the same moment he/she/it realizes it got surprised. If you hear about an unfortunate incident involving a jogger and a bow-hunter, it may be because the next time I have such an encounter, a bow-hunter is readying a ‘kill shot’ (is that what it’s called in that sport???) just as I go by. Parents of Creve Coeur, and similar towns, do not let your kids where those fake-antler head-dresses during halloween or christmas!
(Note: if this seems unlikely, consider the following—Recently, a domestic violence incident was reported on the local news. In a quarelling love-triangle, one man shot the other with an arrow over a dispute about a woman. In a separate incident, an arrow crashed through a woman’s kitchen window, in a suburb, while she was having breakfast. It was a case of target-practice gone bad by a local sportsman. These occured within the county lines of a city of three million people.)
Until next time...
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