A blue heron looked up from the slimy water and gave me a sly sideways look, just as the digits 11,999 started to roll.  This was during a 1.6-mile barefoot stroll along the paved trails of Andrew Brown Park, Coppell, Texas.  I’m kidding – I don’t actually carry an odometer.  Rather I measure distances using a GPS watch and track my training (walking, hiking, running) in an excel spreadsheet with 16 tabs stored in the cloud.  It’s only in the spreadsheet that I see the world in digits.

From Andrew Brown Park it was off to DFW and then there was the long flight back to New York and a dark drive home in the rain.  The next morning, I emerged from boreal gloom onto the open summit of Wittenberg Mountain, where the southern view unfolds before your eyes as you step toward the edge of a flat sandstone ledge – nearly 100 miles of rolling green ridges, spring forests, hazy clouds — and it occurred to me that this, too, will end.  Instead of counting up past 12,000, maybe I should be counting down from (X-12,000) to zero, where X is my total lifetime mileage.  Only, I don’t know X.  Not yet.  But with each year it’s drawing closer.  I can sense it, just like when parachuting at night, how the invisible horizon rises to greet you – that’s when you flex your knees and get ready to roll. Continue reading “12,000 Miles Barefoot” →