If the miles behind me could be put into words before you, you would feel my efforts, my struggles, my desires. Most of all you would see my joy. Watch me from afar run the trails and hills and miles upon miles and you will see ...

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Long Run and the Find of the Year

My last long run before the Whistler 50 mile was 28 miles last Sunday from 176th st down 0 ave to 248th st, 248th st to Fraser Hwy and the Otter Co-Op for water then reversed the course. 3:30 at about a 7:25 pace which felt very comfortable even with a fair amount of rolling hills. I would like to have done a 35 mile run before Nov. 5th but that's life. Tomorrow will be a flat 3:00 then start an eight day taper. I'm feeling pretty good physically and speed-wise. After a few years of not doing dedicated speed work, it's been going well doing them on the treadmill.
So, The Find: on the second half of the run last Sunday I turned the corner from 248th st onto 0 ave when I looked down and saw, unbelieving, an iphone 4 staring at me. "Hello, what do we have here", I thought to myself. I picked it up and even though it was wet with dew it turned on, probably thanks to the Otterbox case it was in. There was no passlock on it so I could access the phone numbers. I have to admit that on the way home I thought how cool it would be to present this to Carrie and say she could keep it but that obviously wouldn't be the right thing to do. Plus what do you tell the kids and how does that look to them? Damn kids keeping me morally straight.
After hauling it home I called the person's mom's cell phone from the address book. She said it belonged to her 11 year-old son. Eleven! A lesson to all: (do i even need to say it?) Don't buy your kids toys like that until they're more responsible or at least until they can pay for it themselves and they might take better care of it. So this kid's mom picked it up that night and, not that I would have accepted, didn't offer any kind of reward for recovering this $400 or $500 item. I mean, come on, if I had lost something like that I would be ecstatic someone returned it to me. If not money then at least a gift card to Tim Horton's or SOMETHING. I guess Karma is reward enough.
That's the third phone I've found over the years either biking or running. I've recovered four or five driver's licenses, three Visa cards, and an 80gb ipod. Once there was a guy near the border standing on the side of the road as I rode my bike past. I didn't think anything of it, just kept riding. On the return trip two hours later he was still there albeit a bit further down the road. I stopped and asked what was up. He said he lost his Nexus card somewhere in the last couple kilometres from the restaurant he had lunch to where he was now. I rode back to the restaurant and traced his path back to where he was. A few hundred metres from where he was I saw the corner of the card sticking out from under some leaves (it was around this time of year), much to my surprise. The moral of that story: I don't really know if there is one but it never hurts to try and help someone. Which reminds me, from now until Dec. 10th I'm trying to recruit 100 people to give blood to coincide with my 100th donation. If you're interested check this out:

No comments: