Saturday, June 23: Northfield (#136)

Well, that was the best smelling race I've been in so far.

I speak of the "Aurlow Stanley Memorial Dare 5K" in Northfield, N.H., which I ran this morning when the day was much, much younger.

The smell, specifically, was the smoky scent of a wood fire being started in a stone barbecue pit near where I parked, under a canopy of tall pines that makes up Northfield's town recreation area. The property's name is, straight-forwardly enough, Northfield Pines.

The pines themselves are truly enormous:


The fire and the food vendors and souvenir tents were all part of some kind of festival -- for what I never exactly found out. Unusual items being set out next to a van selling CHEESECAKE created this curious still life of inflatable aliens and rubber ducks:


But the day's events included a 5K race, and that's what brought me to town.

It was a good morning for a race -- the first reasonable temperatures after a three-day stretch that brought humidity and highs in the upper 90s to our part of the world. But this morning dawned refreshingly cool and dry, so off I sped to Northfield for the 8 a.m. start.

One noteable aspect of today's race was how easy it was to find. I have a bad habit of cutting it pretty close with races, and often find myself bombing along back roads trying to find some obscure town rec area with 15 minutes to go before a race starts.

Not in Northfield: You swing off Interstate 93 at Exit 19 and there it is! It could not have been more convenient, and one consequence of this was that I had a whole half-hour to register ($20), stretch & warm up, and smell the wood smoke. Here's everyone milling about the registration area:

The 5K race itself, an out-and-back on local roads, began with a couple of mild hills, then took us under I-93 and into rolling countryside. Although it was still early morning, the summer heat was already building in the sunny spots.

A gradual ascent led to the turn-around spot, which consisted of a murderous up-and-down loop which quickly gains significant altitude, thens lose it just as fast. Ouch!

I felt kinda tired throughout the whole thing, and could tell early on it wasn't going to be anything like a PR. During the last mile, I became so separated from other runners ahead and behind me (mostly walkers) that it was almost not like a race at all, but just a private run. I almost wanted to take a detour to explore "The Memorial Arch of Tilton," some kind of large cemetery monument that we passed by but I couldn't see from the road.

The Memorial Arch: erected in 1882, the keystone contains a time capsule whose contents include "gold and silver coins." Don't get any ideas...

I'd never heard of it, but later research found it to be, yes, a big granite arch erected in the 19th century by one Charles Tilton, a local resident. Inspired by a trip to Rome, Tilton decided to erect an arch for peace (rather than war) in his hometown, and did just that, sparing no expense. It was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and rehabbed shortly thereafter.

Tilton built his arch for the ages, but any thoughts of immortality were scattered by the next landmark down the road: a rather large home for handicapped senior citizens.

The last stretch before the finish was a nice shaded downhill alongside the same park, right through the woodsmoke again. It was marred somewhat, however, but a middle-aged woman who had finished the race but had taken it upon herself to loudly criticize the technique of all those making their final dash.

"Loosen up" she screamed at me. "Relax! And open up that stride! Open it up!"

Geez, the last thing I expected this morning was a flashback to high school gym class, but that's what I got. I appreciated her concern for my running style, but, really, there's a time and a place.

Because she was near my parked car, I got to hear her comments for the next 15 minutes or so. At one point, she bellowed her "encouragement" to runners while lying on her back along the road and stretching her legs against a fence.

I didn't stick around, taking advantage of the convenient highway exit to make a quick get-away. The Memorial Arch of Tilton will have to wait for another time...

The stats: finished in a rather slow 31:16, or 10:04 pace. 78 out of 123.

Looking forward to May 14, 2016

Well, we continue to enjoy the softest winter in some years. Hardly any snow in our part of the word, and yesterday afternoon it was 50 degrees. Running with the dogs on Feb. 1 in a t-shirt and shorts! Amazing. Note: Yesterday (Feb. 3, 2012) I ran 7 miles with the dogs!

Of course I say "enjoying" knowing that this kind of weather has cut into my opportunities to go downhill skiing this season. I'd like to get at least moderately proficient at it before I get too old to do it at all, and that time is coming...

But the up side is that I've continued to run regularly, which has been good for our dogs as well as for me. It's now February, and with the weather cooperating and with lack of a snowpack, I really haven't stopped running outside this winter. As a result, I feel stronger than ever, and barring any kind of injury, I should enter the 2012 running season in a good position to start finishing races below that 10:00 mile pace that's become my middle-aged baseline.

However, there's one thing new about 2012. I've been checking the Web sites regularly, and out of dozens and dozens on the New Hampshire calendar so far, only a handful are taking place in towns that I haven't yet reached. In past years, by this time I'd have a list of a dozen or more to look forward to, sometimes several on one day to pick from.

But now, after having completed races in 130 of our state's 234 cities, towns, and unincorporated places, the ones left where actual official races take place are becoming few and far in-between.

Well, this had to happen at some point. After all, it's not really reasonable to expect, say, the north country town of Odell (population 0) to hold a 5K anytime soon. And so it looks like the "Running the 234" challenge will be entering a new phase in 2012: one in which I begin to pick up towns where no road race is likely to ever take place, at least in my lifetime.

So, for each of those places, the goal will remain the same: to run at least a 5K within its borders. The only difference now is that it won't be in the form of an official race. And thus I will be able to start adding towns such as Dalton and Windsor to the list of towns completed.

And now that this second phase has started, I have come up with a date by which I want to complete it. The date is Monday, May 14, 2016, when I am exactly 52 years and 121 days old. (I was born on Jan. 14, 1964.) There's a very specific reason for this date, but I am keeping that to myself for now.

And now that I've gotten this far, I have just discovered something that is quite surprising. It seems that I've had my "number of cities, towns, and unincorporated places" wrong all along. It turns out that 234 is the total number of New Hampshire's incorporated cities (13 of those) and towns (they number 221), but that figure does not include the state's unincorporated places, of which there are 25. Ooops! I thought 234 was the total of them all. Learn something new every day.

So what to do? For me, the bottom line is that in completing this challenge, I hope to be able to finally color in every single nook and cranny of my big wall map of New Hampshire. And if I stick with the 234 number, and don't include the 25 unincorporated places (most of which are small slivers of land, but some of which are quite sizeable), then my map won't be colored in.

Well, looks like I just added 25 more locations to run 5K in order to finish this quest. I'm only just now beginning to process what that means, but right now I don't think it will prevent me from completing the quest. So onward we go.