The trumpeter and the swan?

For the first time in quite a while, I ran with Barrie, my old running partner. I say old running partner in the sense that Barrie is neither old nor my partner. It's just that we haven't hooked up for a run in some time. Barrie's been concentrating on his soccer and kayak skills, and probably doing quite well at these thank-you-very-much. You see, Barrie is a natural at a lot of things; including, but not limited to, physical activites. Hell, he can even play the trumpet for god's sake! How many trumpet player do you know?! It seems he can be away from running for a while and just decide to go for a run and hit the ground, er.....running.

Our shoes hit the ground at his house and we ran up the hill towards Edgehill School. We then hit a trail known by a few locals as, "the tour de trail", and kept climbing and climbing. The first 2/3 of our run was pretty much uphill, and it was finally nice when we made a sharp right at the end of this trail, to turn onto what's called the "blue trail". There's even a painted concrete block there calling it the "blue trail". Who knows why? Now, the blue trail is what I would call running nirvana; slightly downhill, surrounded by trees and bush, it's best feature is a nice cushioned underfooting from the forest detritus. We kept following this trail till we ended up on Duck Lake road where we were met by Claire and her (and Barrie's) brood. We piled into the van and made our way to Donkersly Beach, for some fun in the sun. So, all told, we ran for 55' easy, which I'm going to call 11K. This was longer than I was planning to run, but it was a treat to run with Barrie again and get a few extra k's in in the process.

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Again, this from Runner's World:

The Astounding Ed Whitlock Clocks 18:45 For 5K at Age 75Whitlock was merely looking for the Canadian 75-and-over record at the Nissan Foundation 5K in Toronto. His 18:45 shattered the old mark by 117 seconds. "I surprised myself a bit tonight," noted Whitlock. You and us both, Ed. His "nonscientific" training "basically consists of trying to run every day as long as I can," which can be up to three hours.More, www.runnersweb.com

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"I promise to keep on living as though I expected to live forever. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up wrinkles the soul."-- Douglas MacArthur