
Still, it’s very
different than the first time I started driving when I was a teenager. When
I was a teenager I was very worried about trying to get a girl in the back
seat… now I’m worried about a little girl in the back seat. Back then I pushed
every speed limits and broke some (we once found an old west Texas road where
we put the pedal to the medal and I hit a speed I should probably not publish
in a public blog)… now I’m driving and actually haven’t broken the speed limit
once… I’ve mostly avoided highways when possible, some out of nervousness of
how fast people drive on there! And some because my car which had sat in the
garage is a stick shift and it would be embarrassing to have it stall on the
freeway in Austin’s stop and go traffic. While I got lots of rides when
necessary, two weeks into it, no adult has ridden in the car yet which I wish
there’d been one cause the first time I had to parallel park I nailed it on the
first on the try…
Still, the first thing that got put in the trunk wasn’t
groceries or anything like that. Appropriately enough it was the stroller…
where we went to do the hill repeats with the Ship of Fools. And somehow for
the first time ever since I got this stroller and since I won that marathon, it
got a flat. I had done the first set of hill repeats behind a stroller, after the
flat, the next set of them besides Kiana (who takes shorter recovery times than me and
most of the group), and the last set by myself while a shipmate hung out with
Kiana. I gotta say that all three occurred in one made it my favorite hill
workout ever.


While we were there, I saw an announcement for a 5k and an Easter
egg hunt. Kiana and I were up earlier than most of the family (most of the
Reyes and I live on opposite ends of the day and meet in the middle). I had no
stroller, no ipod and Kiana said she didn’t want to get her dress dirty and for
the first time in years… I ran a race without music or a stroller while Kiana
hung out and went crazy with the iphone pictures as we did a double loop around
and back. It was the first cross country race I’d ran since 2002, so in a dozen
years and while there were three of us that took off together, in the end I
took the win. And yet somehow when they let Kiana out for the Easter egg hunt
and when the Easter bunny was dancing, I couldn’t really keep up with either of
them…

But still for the first time in forever, I have zero road races on the calendar. There’s my first triathlon soon, and the Livestrong ride in October and some Spartans between now and then (let me be clear those are all things I knew nothing about before cancer… and I still keep saying that if you sign up for new things, things you’re ignorant about, things that are messy, it somehow manages to make the uninvited, messy, new things in your life a little easier to deal with).
But sitting with family and in the town I spent childhood in
made me think about the guy I was and thought I would be. (Just for your amusement here’s what the kid
looked like twenty years ago) That guy is not achievable any more between
medical, financial, and emotional fears, hopes, scars, and realities which are always
a question mark that the pills I wake up to and fall asleep with me remind me
will never really be entirely of the past.
Still, I always try to get bib #8 for races I sign up for in
advance. But this was one of those races that since I signed up day off, you
just got the next bib, which this time is 42. Now if you were never as nerdy as
me… you may not realize that is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything. That’s
from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy
where they program a computer which takes millions of years to figure out that the Answer to the
ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42… When the humans
point out that doesn’t mean anything, the computer states that we’ve just been
asking the wrong question.
I attend church but even there I bother some of my brothers
because heaven can’t be the meaning of life
since while the idea of heaven ensures eternity having avoid what so many of us fear, death, it still extends life. And I appreciate the grace of the universe and friends, with one of my favorite songs being from Larnelle Harris being both about races and grace:
since while the idea of heaven ensures eternity having avoid what so many of us fear, death, it still extends life. And I appreciate the grace of the universe and friends, with one of my favorite songs being from Larnelle Harris being both about races and grace:

And I wonder the place that we point at so grandly and call
heaven because the streets are paved with gold may well be reminding us that
what we value so highly is not worth more than pavement in a perfect world…
There are days and today is one of them where I struggle with
if I ever get back to any semblance of the life I once knew (I think the answer
is most likely no) but so far 2014 has had no gigantic surprises pleasant or
unpleasant so I’ll take a more predictable life for a bit (that doesn’t mean
there hasn’t been pleasant or unpleasant things, just none that floored me
literally or figuratively). Still… even if I can’t get back or if all I get is
a win with 42… I am glad that I still get to experience, life, the universe and
everything.
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