Flashes of Panic

I guess it might look odd for me to abruptly go silent after a few days of four or five posts a day, but I did spend most of Friday as a guest of American Airlines (and doing some PHP coding on the plane which I hope to be able to troubleshoot online at some point. I'm so used to having the online manual available that I've yet to set up a self-sufficient development environment here on my Powerbook.) And after the meet, I did write two thousand words about what I'd seen... so it's not too shocking to find me gazing, unfocused, at the top row of the keyboard this afternoon before the second session. QWERTYUIOP.

Late this morning we headed up, in the rain, to an obscure dirt driveway west of the University of Arkansas campus, which dwindles to a trail and a chain-link pseudo-gate. Behind that, a loop of rocky trail about a mile and a half long which I think of as "Razorback Ranch." (That might actually be its name, but I don't have a source for that, so don't quote me.)

Running anywhere else in Fayetteville, even now when the local heroes are hosting (and contending for) the national championship, feels almost anti-social. There's a choice of concrete sidewalks alongside heavy-traffic arteries, or no-sidewalk winding, hilly side roads. At Razorback Ranch, we've run in to clumps of athletes and coaches from the teams here to compete: Stanford, BYU, Michigan, Texas A&M.

Two years ago, I was in better shape than I am now, and I went up to Razorback Ranch for a sixteen miler. I must have done eight or ten laps to make the miles, combined with getting there and heading back. It's a long enough loop that I don't feel like a gerbil on a wheel, like I would if I tried doing that on a track. I did two laps today, probably less than half the distance I did then, and I would gladly have done the entire run on that rocky hilltop instead of the roads of Fayetteville.

A. speculated today that the Arkansas runners share the "secret" of the Razorback Ranch with other runners to prove that there actually is decent running in the area. I speculated to the contrary: that they kept it obscure so people wouldn't find out that the best running in the area was a pathetic little not-even-two-mile trail loop.