Deer tracks, running the bridge, and olives in the enchiladas.
We’ve been seeing deer tracks in the sand most mornings. Sometimes the prints just end as if the deer leapt forty feet east. A mystery, like the tracks in sand in Denzel Washington’s marvelous early film Mighty Quinn.
The Great Columbia Crossing, a 10k run mostly on the Megler Bridge, limited entries this year to 3,500. It filled last month. We started on the Washington side at Dismal Nitch, ran west a mile to the first suspension section on the north side of the Columbia River, over that and then south three miles on the flat portion which is really not a “bridge” by my reconning. It is an elevated two-lane highway. Then the highway tips upward for a killing hill (okay, killing for me—I could not run that hill 20 years ago and not today either) and over the suspension bridge on the Oregon side, down a long curved ramp and a final mile or so, west and east, at the Port of Astoria.
I’d run it before, meaning to take my time, but hustling in the face of the crush. I had much the same intentions of not hurrying this morning. I would not run that awful hill in the fifth mile. I would not.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 