Flashes of Panic

Sitting on a Boston-bound plane scheduled to arrive sometime after midnight on Tuesday, it’s hard to remember where this hyper-extended Monday actually started.

It was, I think, when I joined my relatively illustrious running partners for a last few laps around the 2K tartan track in Fukuoka. (I’m being coy; these are not names you’d know as runners, but certainly at least one you would recognize if you’ve been paying attention to the sport for the last year or so.) I listened with big ears to semi-lurid stories about the post-race parties which I had passed on. (“Passed on,” in this case, means “I was comatose by 9 PM.”) We didn’t make it halfway around the park when one of the many Japanese women also running in the park spotted us, lit up, and did an about-face to join us, exclaiming “Run-u?” It turned out that nobody knew her—but our Japanese-speaker knew of her, since she turned out to be a promising high schooler responsible for breaking several regional records. I don’t know if she knew who she had joined (at first; she was introduced,) or if she just spotted our “USA” hats and wanted to be friendly. She led us back to the hotel by a different route, and I realized that (1) I have no speed, and (2) Japanese runners all seem to train in racing flats.

That had me thinking about an incident on my outbound trip: I was selected for “special security screening” in Logan, which I found simply amusing. I was pulled out of the regular line for a pat-down and a bag search; the TSA officer doing the search spotted the RW logo on my backpack (I think that’s how he made the connection,) and asked if I was a runner. Turns out he ran (thirty or so years ago) for UMass Dartmouth, which was (over ten years ago) where I ran my fastest-ever collegiate cross-country time. I’m not sure how careful my screening was, given the two of us trading stories, but I didn’t have any trouble making my plane.

And then there was the relay of All Nippon Airways employees who literally ran me through Osaka on the outbound leg. If I hadn’t been able to keep up, I suspected they might have tried to carry me.

See? Runners take care of each other, just like I said.

I’ve got 600 words and a lot of “TKs” (bizarre editorial shorthand for “fill this in later when you can check it”) in a file for New England Runner and nearly 700 (but fewer TKs) down for Running Times. With any luck I’ll be able to fill those out easily and wrap up my work for the weekend; with a bit more luck, it won’t be obvious (without checking the byline) that the same hack wrote both stories.