FINGERS CROSSED

      We're seven weeks away from the JFK and so far, so good. Our training has been going well. Jim and I run together on Sundays and make up our own programs during the week. There seems to be a consensus in the information we've found on the internet that the best way to train for an ultra is to put in some pretty significant back-to-backs on the  weekends. For me, that means running up and down whatever hills can be found in good old Indianapolis (they're aren't many) on Saturday and going long on Sunday. We've done the first of what will be three thirty milers and we'll hit it pretty hard through the rest of October. The JFK is on November 20th, so we'll taper for the first three weeks in November.

  

      I have no doubt that Jim will  be ready.  After doing well in the Indianapolis half marathon on  May 8th and the Fargo marathon on  May 22nd, he went on to run the Rainier to Ruston Fifty Miler in Washington state ( race motto: "You can rest when you're dead") on  June 5th,  where he promptly set the "Men's Super Master (aka: "geezer") Course Record" by turning in a 9:11:04. That's Jim above being congratulated.
  
      That's a half-marathon, a full marathon, and a 50 miler in less than a month. Not bad for an old dude. But that's Jim. I don't think he's ever been out of shape. In fact a few years ago he spent several months in the mountains in South America teaching math to indigenous kids. (It isn't bad enough that they have to live in poverty high up in the mountains where there's never enough to eat and life is hard---they make 'em learn math, too). While living and hiking in the cold, damp, thin air he managed to get a nasty case of pneumonia. He drug himself down out of the mountains and made it to the capital where he sought help.  After unsuccessfully attempting to shoot himself in the butt with a syringe full of who-knows-what they sold him at a pharmacy, he stuffed down a handfull of the "miracle drug" they also provided (which turned out to be ibuprohen) and somehow got his obviously diseased carcass onto a flight home. They met him at the airport with an ambulance and slapped him straight into surgery where they cut him open and drained the fluid out of his collaped lung. I saw him. He was a shade of bilious, Grinch-like green you don't usually see on living people. Three months later he ran the Marine Corps Marathon. See what I mean? I think he can handle the JFK.