March 6, 2000

Fourteen years ago today, my Mom quietly passed to a more peaceful and pain-free life.  After years of smoking and battling COPD and Emphysema, she succumbed to the disease.  Each day of running brings a myriad of thoughts, some that you just want to wrap up and store away forever and others that you want to bring to the forefront.  Depending on which thoughts are conjured up, they can be intensely good or intensely bad.  This is because running intensifies thoughts.  My thoughts of my Mom have always been good except when I put them into the context of my own failures.  Of course, maybe that is true of all thoughts - the good, bad and ugly.  In longer runs, most notably ultras but also the later miles of marathons, the mind becomes clouded, jumbled and sometimes unable to discern thoughts.  I also understand that the later miles of ultras can also provide some interesting hallucinations.  In these cases, the runner may have been running overnight where sleep deprivation starts to play tricks on him.  I hope to run a 24 hour race at some point in the next couple of years, maybe 2014.  Unfortunately, they fill up quickly.  My Mom was at my very first distance race in West Windsor, NJ in 1993.  Here is a throwback Thursday special. Notice all the hair I have and my svelte body and my shorty shorts.  I cherish this picture.  When I run these days, I often think that I am taking all the breaths that she couldn't take and all the breaths that my father couldn't take.  He died of Lung cancer.  There are a lot of runners who have given up smoking and other addictions and now live through their running.  I'm glad that I have running.  It keeps me grounded in the rest of my life.  It allows me to moderate on everything else.  I'm not convinced I will live longer through it but I am convinced I will live better.  What a great picture.

Today day 65: 4 miles: 2014: 353 miles