Midlife Meditation

9  Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.  10  Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.  11  Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.--Ecclesiastes 9:9-11 The race is not always to the swift, but to he who keeps running. --Motivational poster from the 1970s Prior to 1984, this would never have been me. As a child, I was a couch potato. There wasn't much to watch on TV in those days--just three or four channels, depending on where we lived, all of them black and white on our 19-inch screen--but it still drew me in. Even in high school, I ...

Get a load of the quads on this guy. It's September 25, 2001, two weeks after the towers fell. Two days ago, I completed my seventh marathon, the Top of Utah, setting a personal record of 4:19. Today I hiked every trail at Bryce Canyon. Every single one of them. I will never be this fit again. Four months earlier, I ran my sixth marathon, the Avenue of the Giants, and spied a t-shirt on another runner claiming membership in the "50 States Plus One" club. That person had run marathons in all fifty states, plus the District of Columbia. I knew in an instant that this would be my lifelong fitness goal. I already had three states under my belt: Oregon, Washington, and now California. Utah was next. I got home from that trip, and began planning to add another state to my list. Perhaps Arizona, or New Mexico, or even Texas, someplace warm enough for an early spring marathon. I took my usual month off, letting the massive blisters from Bryce Canyon heal, and began easing b...