Running and Corn.

 

(Taken 21 June 2025, Robeson County, NC)

     This is a picture I just took this morning, not because of anything particularly interesting in the frame but because of what I was doing and how I felt. I was finishing up a half-marathon for the first time in over 7 years. 

     

     I wasn't even feeling bad in this moment, mostly because I was running very slowly. I only average 11.5 minutes per mile, a snails pace compared to what I used to run and certainly much slower than most other half marathons I have run in the past. But this run was more of an exercise in heart rate control, pacing and relaxation. Yes, relaxation. Not necessarily physical relaxation but more mentally. It went pretty well; I averaged a 146bpm heart rate but towards the end I got a little excited and increased my pace a little too much to maintain under 150bpm. Running is somewhat of a love/hate relationship for me. More love than hate, but the Army has certainly made running feel like a chore at times than the release it usually is for me.  But as a of recently I have decided to reclaim the love for running by committing myself to run a marathon; Also it helps that I am now again in a job within the Army where I can set my workouts every morning to whatever I want. (Brigade staff life has some perks I guess.)

     My love for running, or maybe just the beginning of liking it, started early. Some of my earliest and fondest memories were my dad taking my twin brother and I to the local high school quarter mile track and timing us running a lap or two. We even had a rubber mat that my dad would carve out our record times in the dirt on to keep track. This was a regular occurrence for a few years when we lived in Spring, TX. The reward, at the time for me, was that after our timed run my dad would then allow my twin brother and I free reign of the area immediately surrounding the track: the bleachers, the pole-vault mats, the sand pits for the long jump, under the bleachers and even up the bleachers themselves. 

     My dad got to the point where he would give Jake (my twin) and I two options for running. Option 1) 1x400m sprint, short break and then 1x800m run. Option 2) 1x1600m run AKA the mile. I'll never forget my first mile, I think I was in the first grade, it was an 11 minute mile and way behind my dad and brother's mile time. I was not okay with this and from then on I only ran the mile option when we went. Along with this training our school had a run club where your could earn different colored plastic feet pendants to put on your shoes. You had to run during PE class or during recess, which I did a lot of. Eventually I could run 8 minute miles, which I thought was pretty decent given that I was a head shorter than most kids my age. 

     Anyhow, my running career only accelerated when in junior high/high school I started running the 2-mile (a race distance I am intimately familiar with now thanks to military service.). Despite hitting the gym and lifting the heavy circles at a competitive level, I was still pretty skinny and able to run. I never really trained for track season other than what we did for football and the occasional run up and down my dirt road in Iola, TX. I was just okay enough to make it out of district track meets and go to regionals where I would get stomped. 12:30 for a 2-mile race is not nearly quick enough! It probably didn't help that I would also run the 1-mile race at the track meets either; this meant I would be the second race (the mile) at the track meet to run and then the very last race to be run (the 2-mile). Most of the kids thought it was a crazy long distance to run and at the time I really couldn't imagine running any farther. Oh the wasted years. 

     The service has only stomped my knees into the pavement with forced cadence runs and probably running way too much. Often times what happens as well is a long field event or a school will put you out of running regularly for a few weeks and then you have a to just hop right back into it as if nothing happened. These sorts of cycles are common and frequent in the Army and I can't stand it, but that's the way it is. I am thankful now I can do what I want, most days, for PT from 0630-0800. It's only been 12 years to get to this point but here we are.

     Long gone are the days where I wouldn't even blink at maxing out the Army 2-mile run for whatever flavor of physical fitness test we were taking; now I feel like I'm hoofing it just to get close to the 13:30 time. I am older, and quite a bit heavier than my running prime. Over the last year I went on a pretty hard bulk cycle, turned 30/31 and gained about 25 pounds. I remember after failing EFMB for my first time in June of 2014 I came back from Fort Stewart, GA feeling defeated and deflated at only 128lbs soaking wet. I now sit at 170 as of this morning and I have even lost a whole, verified, inch of height since 2014. 

     Despite the increase in age, weight and per mile times, running is still a great love of mine. This run past the corn fields was amazing. It was so foggy I could literally feel the moisture being inhaled through my nasal passages and weighing me down a little. I love the feeling of running down the middle of the narrow single-lane road, feeling as if for this short amount of time that I am the king of the road; only by way of mental claim and certainly not by might! Only a few cars passed me and everyone waved back today! Heck, one guy even honked at me and gave me a thumbs up all by himself! No dogs chased me either, which I mitigated by driving past what I call "woofin' dog's house". (A house that happens to be on the road I like to run, and the road I have to run to access my 6-mile loop route, that has a great pyrenes dog that hates my stinkin guts; another picture and 1,000 words in itself.) I don't use headphones, I run with my phone in my hand most days; today after a few miles I played some instrumental chill out music just to keep the positive thoughts flowing. 

     I saw many rabbits, countless birds, what I think was a fox and a dead king-snake on the road. I saw  a lot of trash, purposely dumped, that made me pretty angry. Degenerates around here just can't afford trash service I guess. I saw many houses that were new and many more that were old. And I saw a lot fo corn. You can see in the picture how tall and dark it is, with it's little pollen covered stem thing at the top. The ears of corns are pushing out the little stringy bits as well. All signs of a great period of ample rain and intense sunshine for the last few months. I'll be a little sad to see the corn harvested and in the interim between crops looking at the foot tall dead stalks the harvester leaves behind. 

     But I will love to run by it nonetheless. 

The "Abandoned Parking Lot"

 

(Oren and Ryker surveying the abandoned lot; 10 March 2023 6:18 pm)

     What is the charm of places from long ago? Why do the spaces where things once were, or events once happened, continue to draw us? I don't know, I'm sure there are some pretty good scientific guesses out there but I'm certainly not going to claim any one to be true. I'll just say what one of these places was for my family and I. 

      The lot here is actually a lot bigger and has way more concrete than this picture lets on. It used to be a hospital annex building that was surrounded by a concrete parking lot and one of those pull in/drop off front entrances that most hospitals have these days. I'm not sure why it closed down and was subsequently demolished but the main hospital it served is still located across the street. the shrubby area in the background is where the building used to be, on top of some sort of massive crawl space without a real solid foundation. Basically its a city block of concrete with a square-ish hole in the middle where there is now a western Texas desert type micro ecosystem of rocky soil and shrub plants that has long been cared for. Even the concrete shows of it's age and decay with it's many crack, bumps, humps and chipped corners.

     This, for my family, was a kind of a safe place and somewhere we wanted to go when the outside world was nice. The lot was only a few hundred meters from the front door of our house and little to no cars ever drove through the lot. Our own driveway was too steep for any real play on scooters so I often took the boys here to scooter around on their plastic Radio Flyer 3-wheel scooter's that my mom had bought them. Even without the scooters this lot was a destination of choice for my boys who were more than happy to play "balance" on the parking bump stops and collect coins, bottle caps or whatever little trash they could sneak back to the house. For me it was somewhat of an escape. I could stretch before/after a run here. I practiced low speed motorcycle maneuvers there occasionally. It had a beautiful sunrise some mornings that I enjoyed in the (mostly) quiet mornings every now and then.

     In this picture my boys are looking out into the not so vast expanse of wild. They are wearing some really beat up sandals if you zoom in that endured an unknown number of miles on the hot Texas pavement. It is kind of a tradition for us to get the boys new sandals at the onset of warmer weather from Sketchers; by the time they are ready for new pairs they often look just like the ones in this picture: well worn and dirty! Although this picture was taken in March, and despite the fact they are both wearing pants, I'm sure it was still at least 75 F outside. (Pretty cool for Texas!) 

     There, off to the right of the big blurry oak tree, is another smaller oak tree. A post oak tree to be exact! A very common tree to the area that doesn't grow to be gigantic like other species of oaks and takes quite awhile to grow to any size of note. Anyways... there is a shrubby post oak tree in the lot that has a GeoCache nestled in the crook of it's main branches. I think it was an old pill bottle with a wet piece of paper in it when I first found it, which I replaced entirely at one point. Not a very exciting GeoCache but it was very accessible so it had more than a few visitors. 

     The only events that ever happened in the lot was the occasional farmers market that an older couple ran every weekend or so. I forget, but they did have a regular schedule where they would sit and sell what they had. I'm not sure I ever saw more than one or two people there at a time but they must have made at least enough money to keep coming back for the 3 years I lived down the street. I'm not sure we ever bought anything from them, but we would wave when walked by. 

     When I wander about, with the family or not, one of the main things I do is look for wildlife. Mostly looking for reptiles or amphibians because that it what our family is most interested in. Always trying to score a catch, a picture and at the very least a sighting of an animal to tell my family about. Sadly, the lot was not exactly a great place for wildlife. I never saw any snakes, and I don't recall seeing any lizards or frogs. There were birds, of course, but not any animals we would have considered interesting. 

     On two of four sides the lot is bordered by wood fences (and one very fancy metal one) from houses on the street we lived on. We didn't live on the lot side of the street so we had to walk around the street to get there; what a dream it would have been to have a house with a back gate to an abandoned lot! We had a few usual dogs that would greet or bark at us, mostly the latter, and the occasional cat. There was a series of fences that had very overgrown bushes/vines that produced beautiful leaves and flowers during the year. The air was sweet and cool next to them in the summer/spring and I took a good photo of them once. I loved to see the plants literally spilling over the fence and onto the concrete by a few feet...

     As of last week, the lot remains unused. The for sale/lease sign that used to be there is gone. I used to dream that one day maybe a church would be planted there and we could become members there if we retired back in our old neighborhood. Still a dream.