I Tri

 Wow, a third post in just over a week after nearly six months away.  Do you get the sense that maybe I'm attempting to develop a habit?

In this world, there are winners and losers, lovers and fighters, sinkers and swimmers.  A wee on the lean side, I don't float well, yet still, I am drawn to water, especially now that it is officially summer, which makes the air significantly warm and me significantly drippier even without the help of a swim hole.  Yup, I'm all wet, but in a slightly more pleasant way when that water isn't diluting salts, body goo, and the other key components of sweat, so this sinker does enjoy a leisurely swim now and again to avoid being such a stinker.

With the solstice amble under my belt, and the portion of my body under my belt still feeling its effects, on Saturday morning, a friend's group invitation to a Sunday run didn't strike me as a wise thing to accept.  Then, being the contrarian that I am, a night older and less wise, my bike and I rolled north to Deerfield at 8 AM for the anticipated two hour ride to the start of the run.  As further evidence that trail runners are a group of welcoming and understanding people, after I finished the ride a half faster than expected, locked my bike in the woods, and walked down to the other early arrivals, they didn't even groan when I punned that my ride to the Stillwater Road meeting point was far more RAPID than estimated.

To continue with you equally welcoming and understanding readers who haven't closed the page after that one, we ran.  Well, they ran, and I ran half way dangling at the back of the group before exiting onto Conway Station Road to shorten my return trip via an old railroad grade along the Deerfield River.  But by shorten, I apparently mean distance, not time.  It had been three years and one TBI since I'd ridden that way, and turns come up distinctly more slowly when running than riding downhill, so I turned about a quarter mile too early onto what I thought was the old rail track.  It did take my down to the Deerfield tributary I knew I needed to cross, and it even treated me to a lovely waterfall view, but then a quarter mile amble, crash, and splash along that tributary to where I had intended to cross.  Sure, I could have returned to the road to go the "right" way and keep my feet dry, but I would have missed the handful of wild strawberries I found along the way.

After my bushwhacking diversion, I made it back the starting point and wonderful swim rock in the Deerfield River where I found Jake and Matt who had taken my suggestion, as I had parted, of enjoying a a refreshing dip.  I refrained from greeting them with awful puns, although that may have been more a result of low blood sugar than any social tact.  A short while later, we were joined by the original run-instigator Wouter who in completing an extended seventeen mile loop had managed to take even longer than I did on my shortcut.

But I don't live at the Deerfield River swim hole, so I had the pleasure of tri-ing a little bit more.  Well, a little bit more more would have been heading directly home the way I'd come, but a chunk of the inspiration for joining the run, in addition to deceptively feeling good when I woke, was the opportunity to ride in the direction of Greenfield.  In the fall of 1996, the Greenfield High School allowed me to influence a few of their charges to complete my student teaching practicum.  I genuinely liked the town and still do, so I'd been feeling due for a visit, but hadn't had a particular task to take me that way, until the run meet offered to take me one town away.  I rode north to Greenfield.

In case I haven't already said it a hundred times, I like riding a bike, and I liked my ride to Greenfield.  When living there in '96, I would rave about how quickly the town ended and the roads became rural.  Luckily, not everyone likes Greenfield as much as I do, so that aspect has stayed reasonably intact.  In fact, I enjoyed my ride enough that part way home, I thought repeating an amble up that way the next day would make for uniquely enjoyable repetition.  That ended up a fortunate inclination since it meant repeating the ride up the swim hole where I'd dropped my running water bottle holder in no way felt like a droll chore!

So, yeah, ride, run, splash, run, BIGGER SPLASH, ride home, that sounds like my kinda tri!