Thursday, November 26, 2009

Look Out!

Note to self: large quantities of beer and five hours of sleep before running 6.2 miles is not recommended.

Whoof.

Long day, my friends! Long, good day. The Turkey Trot was a struggle from start to finish and I was dragging most of the day, but I had a great dinner with great friends and their family and got to tickle the belly of the cutest little girl on the planet, so all is well.

Cutest Little Girl on the Planet heard her Uncle Don making a 'booping' noise and seemed a little startled by it. It sounded like the alarm large trucks make when backing up and I joked that she must have a fear of construction trucks. Which reminded me of a Grace story...

Grace is my dearly departed maternal grandmother. For most of my life, she drove a 1970-something green Chevelle. And teenage boys used to salivate over that thing. With a little tweaking, it would have been an awesome muscle car. It was a moderate-sized boat.

Her mechanic convinced her at some point that there was too much wrong with it for her to keep it alive. It had lived several lifetimes over because my grandmother rarely drove it faster than 25 mph. I can remember her giving me rides home from school and my friends walking past her car faster than she was driving...

Anyway, my grandmother and our neighbor, Keith, went off to find her a replacement. She was in her late 70s at the time, so they settled on an economical, compact car. I believe it was called the Pontiac Smurf. This thing was a Smart car before Smart cars were invented. It was essentially pocket-sized.

Noticing my grandmother's age, the dealer suggested a special accessory -- a literal bell and whistle, if you will. He installed an alarm on the back of the car that emitted a shockingly loud "boop boop boop boop" when she drove in reverse. It sounded exactly like the alarm on those giant trucks!

So my grandmother would be backing out of a parking spot at the grocery store, for example, and all of a sudden people would hear this alarm and start looking around for a huge truck to avoid. And instead what they'd find was this little old lady in her little blue car, moving at the speed of molasses.

I thought it was absolutely hysterical -- until I had to borrow her car to commute back and forth to college for a week or two. I drove around and around and around trying to find parking spots that wouldn't require me to put the car in reverse.

Boop boop boop boop...

So embarrassing!

PS -- Happy Thanksgiving, you turkeys!! Hope everyone had a great day. To be continued...

And for that, I am very thankful. ;)

2 comments:

Bert said...

I am sooooo bloated from not only yesterday's gluttony, but today's leftover gluttony. I will see if I feel up to trying 10k tomorrow. Hell, I know i won't feel like it, but I might still try.

Bert said...

I thought I would post here because there was a running reference...

I did my first 5K this morning. I had no idea that the group run would have such an impact. I think it definitely kicked up my pace just a bit. I finished just over 24 minutes (24.03 or so).

I definitely know that it was a slightly quicker pace than I normally would have gone with. I was telling Linda that there was a young girl (15, 16?) 5 or 6 feet ahead of me for 2/3 of the run. She laughed and said "oh, so you were looking at her ass the whole time?" Trust me - I play innocent really well. Truth be told, I really felt like she pulled me along. Then she faded and I pushed a little harder.

As a novice, I think I made one mistake by passing another person on the inside of a turn - I won't do that again...but they had passed me moments before and they happened to be on the outside.

I am not so certain I am physically able to think about long distances, but I did enjoy this short one enough to try again (I have another one next week in New Brunswick). There is a half marathon in Asbury Park in April. I am going to put that in the back of my mind and see how things go.

Thanks for listening.
; ^ )