Half way thru the run though, I had to take the jacket off. Atlanta mornings are starting near 50 degrees but going up to nearly 80 degrees.

The gentleman sped past me with ease. I just shuffled along in the trail probably posting around 11 min/mile. A little distance later, I noticed that he had stopped running and was walking. As I got closer to him, he started running again and then eventually stopped and started walking. This kept on going like the old rabbit and turtle story. I think he was doing the “walk-run” routine many long distancers do.

Finally, I caught up to him. He had seen me just as we had approached a fork. I slowed down to give him the first choice to make a turn (I was not sure which way he would go). He started talking to me. I had to take my Airpods out of my ears and ask him to repeat. I assumed he was looking for directions.

“You ran the Original Marathon?”, he asked. I looked down and realized that I was wearing the Athens Marathon shirt – one of the two running shirts I had saved during my minimalism drive.

“Yes sir, in 2015”

“I have run the Berlin, London and Paris. But never the Original one. How was it?”. He was speaking with a distinct British accent. And he was clearly at least a decade older than me. it was also clear he had run a lot of marathons.

We had a great time exchanging stories about marathons (his many versus my one) and even our families. He and his wife have been empty nesting for a long time and recently they have started looking for houses near where we have moved.

We exchanged our names (he is Harry) and promised to run in the trail together sometime!!!

Sort of goaded by those medals, attempted a longer run (8K) today. Also, to relive the old days, went back to Fowler Park trail. The good news is that I was able to finish the course in 80 degree heat without losing a limb or two. More heartening was that the run shaved 30 seconds off my usual pace to 10:53 min/mile.

But the trail itself is a mess. Fowler Park trail is closed on one side. There was only a fraction of the number of people I used to see 4-5 years back. And the trailhead was infested with carpenter ants leaving little space to stretch out.

Originally, I had contemplated on throwing away all my running hardware while switching houses. I had learnt way late in my running career that the medals you win in running is referred to as “hardware” by runners. Which, as a computer engineer, raised many a question in my mind. But I let them pass.

As I was mentioning, with my running distances reduced mostly to a few miles and that too at a pace that would not cause a sloth to raise an eyebrow, should they have eyebrows, the hardware had lost a lot of their significance. Except that one particular one from the Original Marathon in Athens, I guess.

While unpacking boxes in the new house, I chanced upon these. Looks like Sharmila had decided not put them in the throw-way pile, after all. However, I was still unsure of what to do with them. They lay on my small work area for a couple of weeks.

During this weekend’s bout of reducing entropy in my work area, I had to decide in a quick moment what to do with them. And in one of those Daniel Kahneman’s “fast thinking” moment, decided to keep them. Not only that, I took upon myself to order a shelf from Amazon to put them up for display.

And there they sit/hang now. They are carefully placed in a wall so as to be not visible to any casual onlooker unless you enter my workspace. Figured it would save me from answering how come I race no more. Which will unduly bring focus to how old I have become and all the body parts that ache and so on.

There has been one glitch in my carefully laid out plans though. You see, while nobody else goes to my work area much, I personally do. Multiple times a day. And every time I see those medals, I involuntarily stop for a nano second. The thoughts of “Could I ???? Should I ????” flash thru my consciousness. And lately, those flashes are spending a little more time than a self righteous flash should.

Oh! Boy!!! I have this uncanny foreboding that this is not going to end well for my joints.

The shade and flat terrain worked wonders. Got a lot of the lost mojo back. Could have gone back for another round had it not been for Zoom meetings starting within 45 minutes!!

Only a seven minute drive!! I think I will go back to greenway running. Will miss the hills but love the shade.