Day 98 Full Day: Scary Road, Great Hummus, SHOES Arrived!

Day 98 Full Day: Scary Road, Great Hummus, SHOES Arrived!

Today has been one of those lovely, relaxed journeys that make retirement worthwhile!  Well, it wasn’t all relaxed.  Jack likes to explore side roads and byways, so we took a 21-mile dirt road from Green Valley, Arizona, across the Santa Rita Mountains.  The narrow, rutted road winds up through a canyon, with many hairpin turns, each one being a potential death scene should we meet anybody coming from the other direction.  Fortunately, we didn’t!

We had lunch in an old hotel in Patagonia, a restaurant called Home Plate which not only boasts photos of baseball greats but also serves the best hummus I’ve ever eaten.  It tasted like a normal hummus recipe with the addition of ground, dried tomatoes and basil.   Four YUMs for that lunch!

Had already done the five-mile run with Binka-dog in the morning.   By the time we arrived home, Jack was ready for a nap and I wanted to row and do the weight-machines workout, along with ten minutes of stretching.  The hot tub at the athletic center has jets that hit all the sore muscle groups.

Back home again, my new running shoes, the Fivefingers, had arrived!   They come with helpful instructions for donning them (“With the single strap fully open, insert your foot while gradually aligning each toe to the appropriate toe pocket—it’s often best to start with your big toe and work down to the little one. . . Check to make sure one toe is in each pocket"); even so, the process took me half an hour for the first foot and 15 minutes for the second one.  My toes weren’t used to being told what to do.

“Now that I have these on, they’re staying on. I may sleep in them tonight,” I told Jack  when all ten toes were in their right places, and I’d pulled up the heel cup and fastened the strap.

“That’ll certainly give you a running start tomorrow morning,” he said mildly.

I went out and ran a couple of blocks on macadam, then a few feet on the crushed rock that around here constitutes most of our front yards.  Felt fine on both surfaces.  The layer of rubber on the soles and around the toes is plenty to cushion against the pebbles.

Despite the colors blending well--black Vibram soles, grey and grey-green fabric uppers, the Fivefingers appearance is, well, weird.  "I feel like an ape," I told Jack.

"As long as it's a female ape," he said.

Running will never be the same. I’m looking forward to that.