july 1- and memories of john mercaldo

if memory serves me right and i am in england without my date book, today would have been john's 60th birthday. i may be incorrect about the years but i do know july 1st was his birthday. hard to believe it has been ten years since john passed away. john was one of four people in my life that i talked to virtually everyday of the week when they were alive that have now passed on. and i can tell you that it has certainly not been the same since the day i was told he was gone. an ironic thing was that of those four, three knew each other very well. my computer has been on vacation since with 10 less emails a day asking about workouts or describing the workout just done, etc etc. i smile.

at any rate i ran with john a few days before his death and we talked of how we were going to get faster and lose some weight and do more speed work and steve and frank both told us we were kidding ourselves and they were right as it turned out. i have my own little monuments for steve and frank in my yard.

i guess the last race i remember was the gw 15k the previous april. i will stop the dwelling now. i never run north on the parkway that i don't stop at john's bench and say hi. and today when i was too tired to run i ran anyway and did it for john. if he treated the rest of the world like he treated me that i am certainly not alone in still missing him. hope mindy is doing ok.

so today i just gutted out the run. a really pretty day early in the morning and almost cool, though it was supposed to be the hottest day of the year here in oxford. up the lane and over to the river and down the thames we went. slowly but steadily past the cows and swans and ducks and new construction on the trail and through the detour, the standard around the river loop and then towards the house. gail headed home at that point and i slowly moved towards the park.

at the park i ran the loop around the outside on the two bike paths and then back to the 100 yard track lanes. just for strider purposes i ran about 20 of these and even ran one 200 turning and going back, carefully making the sharp turn. then stretched and ran the bike path loop back to the grocery store, added some miles just in case i was smart enough to take the day off tomorrow.

i hope that the old gang all had a good run wherever they were today- don, tommy, jane, melinda, karen, jean, etc etc -- you too linda kennedy!

the rest of my day went pretty much like most- i went to city center to pay bills and do some shopping. i hit balls at the range for a change, and had various discussions on the politics of this country and the usa as well as china and the EU.
another day done. warm, but nowhere near as bad as we are used to back in virginia.

and so tomorrow the alarm will go off if i am not already up as i am most days and i will take my heart rate and gail will say are you going to run- i thought you were going to take the day off and i will give it a moment's thought and then i will....
depends on how dumb i really am....we'll see i guess.