Say 'hi' to my little friend.

My little yellow foam roller is the perfect companion.  I roll all over it two or three times a day grunting in agony and selfish ecstasy and it never complains.  It does get a little depressed.  Who wouldn't?  After a thorough and sweaty 'session' my weight will have literally created a depression in it which takes a while to work itself out.  It's just a little too thick though for anything else.  Ahem.  Story of my life. Just kidding!

Seriously though, my little yellow foam roller has made it possible for me to run again  You see, I have a little something called ITBS.  ITBS stands for something, but really it stands for "I'm in This predicament Because of Stupidity".  Basically, late last year I thought it would be cool to run twenty-eight miles.  Problem was, I hadn't really run anything of any appreciable distance in a couple years.  In fact, my longest run EV-ER until then was, I think, thirteen miles and that was as a seventeen year old.  But I did it.  This was me afterwards...

I've been hobbled since.  Until, that is, a yellow foam torpedo and this weird thing called 'stretching' came into my life.

But why twenty-eight miles?  For me the answer gets complicated.  Distilled, and to borrow a phrase from someone eminently more qualified, "because it is there".  There's not always a Mount Everest near you but from the moment we're born there are twenty-eight miles in every direction around us waiting to be explored.  Or fifty.  Or a hundred.  Or three hundred and fifty.  Or one.  Doesn't matter.  As bi-pedals (am I saying that right?) we're pretty much obligated to walk and run around the areas surrounding us.


"Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see."  Do yourself a favor and go read this.  It's called "Walking" and you can find it in its entirety all over the internets.  Thoreau can be read for pith or wit or both.  He isn't really flowery (unlike his neighbor, the sometimes-impossible-to-understand Emerson who write things like "In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side") and most of him is a ridiculously fast read and contains lines throughout which will accumulate in your mind like molten lava...if molten lava could accumulate in your mind.  It's too hot but whatever.  The point is, the world that always surrounds us - always - is too vast to ever be explored thoroughly.  We are just as territorial as your common bear or marmot or something.  Stay in a landscape for long enough and you'll find this out.  I hope we all can find a landscape that resonates with us deeply.  That it becomes a language through which we both speak its beauty and ours.  Humans divorced of such a place are halved.  But it doesn't have to be like this!  Even if you live in the concrete jungle.  Though I rail against it sometimes, I have a deep connection to my little spot on the littorals of Puget Sound.  And when I leave, which I must for sanity someday, I will miss it.

Hey, it's sunny again today!  Oh my god!  Two days in a row!

Here's a parting shot of my little companion.  Go get yourself one if you want.  I'm going to roll on mine now.