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garycohenrunning.com
be healthy • get more fit • race faster
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"All in a Day’s Run" is for competitive runners,
fitness enthusiasts and anyone who needs a "spark" to get healthier by increasing exercise and eating more nutritionally.
Click here for more info or to order
This is what the running elite has to say about "All in a Day's Run":
"Gary's experiences and thoughts are very entertaining, all levels of
runners can relate to them."
Brian Sell — 2008 U.S. Olympic Marathoner
"Each of Gary's essays is a short read with great information on training,
racing and nutrition."
Dave McGillivray — Boston Marathon Race Director
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Benji Durden was a member of the 1980 United States Olympic team in the marathon which did not compete due to President Carter’s decision to boycott the Moscow Olympics. He finished second in the Olympic Trials Marathon behind Tony Sandoval with a personal best by over three minutes of 2:10:40. At the 1983 Boston Marathon Durden led through the Newton hills until a huge blood blister caused him to slowly fade to third place in his all-time PR of 2:09:57. Benji’s eleven marathon victories include 1981 Nike-OTC (2:12:12), 1982 Houston (2:11:12) and 1982 Montreal (2:13:22). He was overall champion of the 1991 Atlanta Marathon as a Master in 2:25:53. The prolific racer ran twenty-five sub-2:20 marathons. His nearly 41-year span between victories at the 1977 Carolina Marathon and 2017 Texas Quad the Waddle Marathon is the longest known duration between first and last marathon wins. Benji and his wife, Amie, completed the ‘50 State Marathon Club’ in 2013, and he is the only Olympic marathoner and sub-2:10 marathoner to do so. His 100th marathon was at Estes Park in 2014 and he now totals 137 marathon finishes. During the covid pandemic increase in virtual racing, Benji and Amie ran the GVRAT, Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, and were members of a CRAW team which ran the Circumpolar Race Around the World relay race of 30,167 miles through twelve regions of the world, finishing sixth out of over one hundred teams. He is a 1973 graduate of the University of Georgia where he ran a 4:15 mile and a graduate of Jesup High School (GA), where his 4:36 mile is still a county record. Benji was inducted into the RRCA Hall of Fame in 1998, the Colorado Running HOF in 2009, the Cooper River Bridge Run HOF in 2012, and the Boulder Sports HOF in 2015. His personal best times include: 880 yards - 1:56.6; Mile - 4:13.2; 5,000 meters (track) 14:10; 5,000m (downhill road) 13:20; 10,000m road - 28:36; 15k - 43:28; half marathon – 1:03:11 and marathon – 2:09:57. Benji, Amie, and their four cats reside in Boulder, Colorado, where they owned a race timing and scoring company before retiring in 2020. He was very kind to spend over two hours on the telephone for this interview with additional details provided by Amie.
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| GCR: |
Back in 2015 I interviewed you and we spent considerable time discussing your racing and running highlights from your younger days. Now we are going to catch up on the last seven years. First, we spent some time at the 2020 Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta and how much fun was it seeing friends such as Kyle Heffner, Ron Tabb, Dean Matthews, Bob Varsha, Randy Stroud, Lee Fidler and others?
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It was lots of fun. I had seen Lee a few times over the years. I hadn’t seen Bob or Dean in many years. Those are two guys from my developmental days as a runner that I hadn’t seen in decades. I had seen Kyle about a year earlier and we had caught up. I had talked to Ron a couple times but hadn’t seen him in a decade or so. The last time was around 2008. So, it was lots of fun to catch up. We didn’t realize at the time it would be the last time we travelled out of the state of Colorado for a long time due to covid. It’s hard to look back now and think that this was the last time we saw many of these people for a while. I’ve talked to some of them on the phone but haven’t seen any of them in person since then.
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| GCR: |
The reason we were all in Atlanta was to see the Olympic Trials Marathon competition. I was one of the representatives of the Greater Orlando Sports Commission because we are bidding to host the 2024 Olympic Trials Marathon. As someone who raced in the Olympic Trials Marathon and finished second in 1980, how cool was it watching these athletes compete to make the Olympic team and what are some of your takeaways from that day?
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| BD |
We had anticipated the course being more difficult, so that was weird. It was fun to get a chance to go and observe the runners. We got around the course a bit and were able to see the athletes. The beauty is that, because it was the Trials, there were lots of people around the course. I know of many top athletes who were in the race, but don’t know them personally. But I do know some of the coaches and some of the fans of some athletes and it was fun to get to see them. As I watched the race develop, it was interesting to note the change in our sport because of the shoes. That is a big deal.
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In general, when we compare the current elite marathon scene to when you were in your heyday, back then there was appearance money and under-the-table money for places and early professionalism. How different is it now when the top runners are total professionals with better shoes and increased access to massage therapists and nutritionists and the latest in scientific coaching though, amazingly, they aren’t much faster than the athletes from forty years ago?
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| BD |
I don’t think physiologically there has been that much improvement in humans. That is part of it. Training hasn’t developed that much. We did have access to many of the things you mentioned. I didn’t have a nutritionist. They were out there and, if I went and looked for one, I could have had access. I didn’t think about that as there were many areas I focused and that wasn’t one. I had a massage therapist. We all did what we thought we needed to do to get better. I don’t think we were stingy about paying for things that could help us. The difference is that a lot of guys like me that were competing in road racing were making a decent living. Beyond a very few athletes today, I’m not sure that many are doing more than breaking even. The shoe companies are much less approachable. There are more of them, which helps. Now there are Hoka and Altra and several other new shoe companies that weren’t around back then. I had a good contract from Nike through my best years and that isn’t happening much anymore. There are lots of guys running now in the 2:12 to 2:15 range that can’t even get free shoes. I was getting support when I ran 2:20. I got second in the Nationals and that is part of why it happened. I started getting what I would consider payment, since they paid for my trips to races, shortly thereafter. I see guys now that run in whatever shoes they like because the shoe companies aren’t that focused on helping. It is the same for women. Shoes have become very important with technological advances. Nell Rojas left adidas because the shoes weren’t giving her what she needed. When she was running hard, they weren’t helping her to run as fast as she was capable. So, at the Boston Marathon, she wore Nike shoes again. When I was racing, it didn’t matter that much what shoe you wore. The company that supported you mattered, but the shoe wasn’t that big a deal.
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| GCR: |
You mentioned about top runners not receiving support, but there is another significant difference in now and then. I was like many runners when I graduated from college in 1979 and went to graduate school. Most of the runners, whether we were in graduate school or starting to work, all got into the road racing scene. In the southeast U.S., we went to races including the Peachtree 10k, the Jacksonville River Run 15k, the Vulcan Run 10k, the Virginia 10-Mile and everybody ran these in addition to trying marathons. At the marathon distance, the 2:25 to 2:30 guys pushed the 2:20 to 2:25 guys, and then they pushed the 2:15 to 2:20 guys who pushed the elites and there were so many more runners in each of those categories. Now the elites are strong and deep, but the sub-elites who ran 2;20 to 2:30 and could push the faster runners or move up have decreased and almost disappeared. What it your take on that?
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| BD |
It's hard to know, but part of it is since marathon running is considered to be a career endeavor, if you aren’t making a living at it, you quit and don’t focus your energy on running. The runners that we see who are running well, 2:11 and under, we know about them. But they aren’t racing much outside of their marathons. They aren’t road racers. They run their marathons, but we don’t see them running Peachtree. Beyond the top ten runners at Peachtree, the quality of the field trails off quickly. I think it’s partially because there is no longer any incentive. Part of the reason we raced so much was people paid attention to us and that was a goal. The race results were printed. That isn’t happening now. We would get our names in magazines like Running Times and Racing South. Now it is hard to find race results publicized anywhere. I would run a 30-minute 10k and win and people would know about it. The other thing that was different back then which isn’t going on now is you would get help at each level. If you ran a 32-minute 10k, you would get some free shoes – not many, but a few. Then if you ran 31 minutes, you would get more. Then when you got faster, you might get shoes with special colors that weren’t available on the shelf. When you went to a race, everyone knew you were a good runner. It was a different culture. We enjoyed racing and enjoyed beating each other and the challenge of competition. We didn’t think of it as a job. We thought of it as a passion. The other thing that is different is that we learned our skills by running so many road races. Now the teams are avoiding races except for the big marathons. They do time trials and race simulations within their groups, but they aren’t developing the tools for racing. They have a safe environment to run hard and, if they blow up, nobody knows about it. When I had bad races, everyone knew because I was sticking my nose out there. The way to avoid that is to avoid racing which isn’t good because you don’t learn the racing skills. If runners avoid racing, they don’t learn the skill of how to race right.
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| GCR: |
Let’s switch gears and talk about your health issues. When I interviewed you in early 2015, you were over a decade removed from prostate cancer, but received a diagnosis of colon cancer later that year and have had lung cancer more recently. Can you take us through how you developed symptoms that eventually led to the colon cancer diagnosis?
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| BD |
The colon cancer had possibly been there for a year or two when we did that interview back in 2015, but I didn’t know it. There had been signs I had something because there were races where I didn’t feel one hundred percent. Another sign was that I ran a marathon with Amie up in Manitoba and she beat me. She is a tough competitor, but I had trouble finishing the race. We went out to eat with a friend and I had fish and chips. I felt terrible and still have a problem eating fish and chips to this day. These were the beginning of the signs that there was something wrong with my digestive system. That was in early June. If you look back at the marathon races I ran, up until 2014 I was consistently in the 3:40s and 3:50s and lower. Suddenly, I started to slow down. I didn’t think about it at the time but after the fact, I thought that I was getting older, but I was slowing down much faster. Those were warning signs that we didn’t know at the time. I should have been paying more attention because my sister had been diagnosed with colon cancer and went through the entire process. She was the only one in my family who had colon cancer, so it was hard for me to believe I would have it too. Nobody else in our family had colon cancer of which we were aware. There certainly could have been older family members who died before colon cancer was known to have killed them. I had some increased symptoms in 2015 after I talked to you. We were timing a race and I felt terrible the whole weekend. We set up the timing and cameras for the finish line and I said to Amie that I had to go to the Emergency Room. I was feeling that badly. We were in a small town in the southeast corner of Utah. It wasn’t a huge hospital but, because it was so small, I got right in. I didn’t wait around. They did all kinds of testing. They determined I was anemic. It took a while to determine why I was anemic. I did switch from running to race walking for a while because there is a theory that running can cause anemia in runners. I started taking huge doses of iron and got my iron levels up a bit. I had a tolerable level of anemia, but never got back to the higher hematocrit and higher hemoglobin that I needed to be a functional runner. We didn’t know why.
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| GCR: |
How did you find out you did have colon cancer and what was the process to select your surgeon?
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| BD |
It was suggested that I do a stool sample. I did and there was no blood in the sample so that was good. In the summer of 2016, just before the July fourth holiday, I was feeling very badly. I had a pain in my lower abdominal area that we thought might be appendicitis. We went to see my general practitioner’s office and the doctor ordered some scans. He told me that my appendix looked okay, but there was a mass on the colon. Our mood dropped because we knew what that meant. It's not good. I had been race walking instead of running and was coping with my changed exercise program. A couple of days later we were timing two July fourth races. We got the first race started and the second race started. Then I was feeling so badly that I lay down on a stack of mats that we had. There were some issues with the racecourse, and someone said to me, ‘I don’t know how you deal with this.’ I said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be dealing with it much longer,’ because I didn’t know If I was going to be around. We hadn’t done a colonoscopy yet, but that was the next step in a couple of weeks. My former doctor saw how I was doing and called in some favors to get me in for a colonoscopy two days later on July 6th. Amie and I were not too sure about the future of my life. The colonoscopy showed it was a very high tumor and it was a big one of about ten centimeters by two centimeters. The next step was to schedule surgery. We met with our surgeon two days later and he couldn’t perform the surgery the next week because he was going to be on a bike trip in wine country. I felt good to have an active guy as my surgeon because he understood my fitness passion. He was back on a Monday, and we had surgery on Tuesday, July 19th. So, from the problem in late June to surgery was about three weeks. The surgeon initially thought he got it all. There were also two lymph nodes involved which made it a stage three cancer instead of stage two.
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| GCR: |
Can you take us through how it was going through chemotherapy and working to get back moving and walking as soon as possible and return to running?
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| BD |
I started chemotherapy in August. Once I was in the system, I went into a Zen state since things happened around me and I had no control. Chemotherapy is not much fun. The first chemo session was about a month after the surgery, from the 19th of July to the 15th of August. They put me in a chair and infused me with a bunch of chemicals. The first session is longer because the medical team wants to see how the patient will do. I wasn’t feeling great and was nauseous, but I had to go pee since they were pumping me full of a lot of fluid. When I got up and walked, I started feeling better. I had a hanging bag of fluid with a device that was controlling the flow that I pushed along. There was a battery in it, so I could unplug it, go to the bathroom and return and plug it back in. As I was walking along and feeling better there was suddenly an epiphany – I had to keep moving to feel better. I didn’t move that much during the infusion sessions, but I moved much afterward. After every infusion, there was a device I wore for forty-eight hours when I went home that continued the infusion. The little device has batteries, and the chemo goes into me through a port in my upper chest. I had to sleep a bit funky. About 11:00 that night there was an alarm that went off on the device that it was failing. We called the phone number on the device, and they tried to get it to work which was unsuccessful. So, they had us turn it off and we went in to get a new device the next day which they adjusted with an increased dosage for the time I missed. Even then it took them two tries to get a device that worked. Chemo went on for six months every other week. I increased my exercise and after four months of chemo I ran and walked a half marathon. The week after chemo ended I ran the whole way for a half marathon. I did what I could do which started with walking and then progressed to running a minute out of every five minutes and then two minutes of each five minutes. I did what I could do to keep moving. I always found that, if I was feeling rocky when I got up in the morning, when I started moving, I felt better. That is what I tell people who are going through this. When people feel badly, they want to lie down or take a nap. It’s not obvious to people that the best thing to do is to get up, move around and get their blood flowing.
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| GCR: |
When you came off the chemo, how different was it mentally? You always enjoyed running, but did you appreciate it in a unique way after six months of chemo and getting back to what you loved doing?
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| BD |
I suppose I did in a sense, but when I had the prostate cancer, that was the first scare that brought me back to my running. Before then I hadn’t been running much at all. Post-chemo, that was a feeling that we beat this and could get back to our life. We had won the battle. I did struggle though because one of the chemicals in the chemo made me very sensitive to cold. We didn’t have a treadmill at the time, so I would walk and run on a treadmill at one of the local running stores when it was very cold outside. It was too difficult for me to be outside. Even the skin on my face would hurt if it were exposed to the cold. Once all of this was over, it was easier because I didn’t have to go through these extra steps to get in my walking and running. I realized that I could do walking plus running. Before this time, I wasn’t counting walking as part of my exercise. During this time, my initial exercise was only walking. That was a transition when I decided that walking was an acceptable form of exercise. I would go out and walk fifteen minute or faster miles and count that as part of my daily routine. I would walk for a bit and then shift into running. Getting back to racing was good because that is our social outlet. That is where we get to see people and know people. I got back under four hours in my first marathon. At the Yakima River Canyon Marathon on the first of April in 2017, I ran 3:59:58. It wasn’t a fast course, and it was a nice feeling to know I was back.
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| GCR: |
Let’s discuss further your racing in 2017 as that was the first race I wanted to hear about. The next month, in May 2017. You ran three marathons on successive days in Dallas in 4:29:42, 4:23:06 and 4:08:53. You’ve done high mileage, but how was it running marathons back-to-back-to-back?
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| BD |
The chemo line in the sand partially shifted our focus from being racers to being runners. Amie had done some multiple day races. I had done two in a row back in 2014, so I wasn’t unaware of how my body would feel. So, I decided to see if I could run a marathon on three successive days. I started off cautiously with the 4:29. That year we were also helping setting up cones for the race. The woman who is race organizer is our friend. They were doing construction along the racecourse. It’s around Bachman Lake and is normally on a bike path around the lake. She had to switch the course to a road because they were doing work on the bike path. Every morning we would go and put out cones for the course, run the marathon, and go back to collect the cones and put them away. We would take a nap in the afternoon, go out for a run/walk to loosen up, go to bed for the night and do it over again. It was quite bizarre. I’m unsure if I could do a hundred miler, but it was similar in that it was a true ultramarathon experience. You run, you eat, you sleep, and that’s about all you do.
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| GCR: |
You ran the Full Moon Midnight Marathon in early August of 2017, and it was different as you paced Amie and she ended up with a 4:49:25 finish. Was this the first time you raced an official marathon together?
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| BD |
That was the first time. It happened partially because I was slightly injured and not at a hundred percent. We had wanted to do that race as we had planned to race there. We wanted to get Amie a little bit better performance and it was fun. There weren’t many aid stations at that race, so I was Amie’s sherpa. I had a running vest for the first time and had fluid bottles all over me. Plus, I had quit worrying about getting the fastest performance I could, so that wasn’t going to bother me. I ran along and every so often I would have Amie drink fluids. The course is such that you run uphill for thirteen miles and run back downhill. After about twenty miles, you go past the finish line, run about 5k, turn around and come back. It is also in the dark though dawn is starting to approach in the last few miles, and you can tell day will break soon. When we were running in those last few miles, Amie was racing, and I was trying to pace her. She left me behind and ended up beating me by a bit. It was the same thing that happened in Manitoba, but this time it was because I wasn’t racing and just ran in.
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| GCR: |
You mentioned briefly about the Texas Quad which was three months later in November of 2017. How cool was it to be first overall at the Texas Quad the Waddle in 3:58:11 with nearly forty-one years between your first and last overall win? And did it still give you a feeling of exhilaration crossing the finish line first?
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| BD |
It wasn’t a huge fan environment because it was mostly the people who were out there running the half marathons and marathons. There probably weren’t more than a couple dozen spectators there when I finished. It’s a bit shorter than a 5k loop and we do an out-and-back stretch beforehand to make it a marathon distance. They knew what was going on and that I had a chance of winning. Each lap the people were cheering me on. It was mentally exciting. I knew that by winning I could reclaim a piece of trivia that I had had a few years earlier. In 2013 I ran the Nutmeg State Marathon in Connecticut in 3:56 during another of these multi-day events. It was day three or four of a six-day event. I won that race and then Ken Young contacted me to tell me I had set the record for the longest duration between first marathon victory to most recent marathon win. I had no clue that anyone kept track of that kind of stuff. Sometime from 2013 to 2017, I had that title taken away from me. So, I knew that it was possible for me to reclaim that. I had the record at thirty-six years, but someone else now had the record of thirty-eight years. As this race was going on. It was going through my mind, ‘maybe I can get that record back.’ It was kind of cool as each lap I got more focused and was running better. Also, I hadn’t run under four hours in a while, and I saw it was becoming a possibility. The first few laps it wasn’t promising, but I was getting back in that sub-4:00 pace. For someone who has run under 2:10, the changeover to trying to run under four hours is a strange transition. But whatever gets you running and training and ‘riding the horse,’ you go with it.
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| GCR: |
Can you tell us more about that transition from being an elite marathoner to a recreational runner, enjoying the process, trying to be healthy and having fun with running?
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| BD |
There were days in my early master’s running days where I struggled with the transition. I quit racing and didn’t run a marathon for fourteen years because I wasn’t coping well. I got hurt, it wasn’t worth it to try and train and I quit running marathons. The prostate cancer reminded me that I enjoyed running marathons and it didn’t matter if I ran fast or won races or was near the top and a competitor. But I am still competitive. I ran the Bolder Boulder 10k a couple of weeks ago and still tried to beat every breathing body that I could. A lot of people are going to beat me, and, at the end, the younger runners can change gears. I change gears as much as I can, but not how I could years ago. It is still fun. I still have the same experience. I have the dread before the race. Then the race starts, I’m in the race and I feel better. Then there are the feelings we all have after the race. I’m sure you went through those emotions. We commit to a race and then think, ‘Why did I want to do this?’ We are afraid of failure, then the gun goes off and those feelings go away because we are in the moment of being a runner. When we walk, run, or get other exercise, we are there. We aren’t thinking about the political world or other things. We are right there. There is pleasure in being active and that is the reason I keep at it.
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| GCR: |
You’ve mentioned how you added quite a bit of walking to your exercise routine. At the Mississippi River Marathon in February 2018, you race walked the entire way in 5:41:20 and were second in your age group. What was it like committing to walking twenty-six miles versus running or interspersing running and walking?
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| BD |
I had not walked much in marathons before then. I might have walked through an aid station because that was what I needed to do. I came down with IT band issues before that race. We were driving down there and the day before I was race walking while Amie was running, and I was staying close to her. I tried running and knew it wasn’t going to happen. I could walk miles in thirteen minutes per mile and that is what that race turned out to be. I decided to do it, get it done and not waste the trip. It was a rainy day, and I couldn’t see too far at times. I was near the back of the race. There were certainly people behind me, but I didn’t know where they were. I did the same thing I always do. There were people running, I would come up on them and try to catch them. I tried to keep my form while I was race walking. I wasn’t only walking but was trying to race walk. I had the straight knee and had my toe on one foot come off the ground as the other heel was landing on the ground. It was cool because I hadn’t trained much for race walking. I didn’t have that many miles of race walking and my body wasn’t that adjusted to that. I was sore when I finished. It was exciting to pull it off.
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| GCR: |
Later that year you and Amie had your big Thanksgiving week of mileage. When we talked about your training in your competitive years, your bread-and-butter mileage was around ninety miles a week with four days of six miles and three days with double runs or a long run that totaled twenty-four or twenty-five miles. What was the impetus for that week where Amie covered 188.3 miles with 160.4 of that running and you went 214.1 miles with 190.2 running?
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| BD |
We had done that a couple of times before without that kind of mileage, but roughly a hundred and forty miles in a week. We called them running vacations. Those were all running, and we didn’t count walking. Those weeks were cool. We got up and ran and ate and ran and ate and sometimes got in three runs in a day. We would watch a movie and take a nap and they were interesting experiments. We hadn’t done that for a while. I’m not sure what made us decide it was something we wanted to do, but we made that decision. We keep looking for challenges. In 2014 I had done an ultramarathon with all walking when I had anemia and kept getting injured. It was the Relay for Life on a track from 6:00 pm to 6:00 am. It was close to twelve hours of activity after they had some speeches to kick it off. I had around eleven hours and committed to walking as much as I could in those eleven hours. I got right at forty-four miles of walking in the eleven hours. So, I knew I could get in a lot of distance in a day by walking. We didn’t do another one of those because the next one was the day I got home from colon cancer surgery. After my surgery, I was walking about a mile in the halls of the hospital. I told my doctor I wanted to do this Relay for Life and walk a half mile because it was raising funds to fight cancer. He thought it might be too far. We agreed that I could do it though because I was walking more than that in the hospital. He may have thought it was further since he was a cyclist. I couldn’t do much and walked a half mile at the start. I sat around and watched Amie. Then they quit doing that event at the track. Over that Thanksgiving week, we decided we would run this time as much as we could. We would try to get in a good morning long run. I think the longest I did was a marathon distance or a bit over. The biggest problem was going out too fast and getting sore around eighteen miles. We’d come home, eat and crash. Then we would try to get in five to eight miles in the afternoon. We wanted to find our limitations. It wasn’t a race. We weren’t trying to compare ourselves to anyone else. It was the fun of doing it.
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| GCR: |
When you were a competitive runner, it had to be all about you. It wasn’t egotistical, but you had to focus on training and getting fast. In this second life of running, how much fun is it to share this passion with Amie, to train with her, to run a marathon in every state and to be there as she hasn’t missed a day of running in over eighteen years? How inspirational is Amie to you as the two of you share running together?
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| BD |
The inspiration from her is bigger than anything. I wouldn’t have done many things we have done. I don’t think I would have been on the fifty states marathon bandwagon. We got on that because I was coaching a woman who was running a marathon in all fifty states, Amie got into it, and I got interested. Amie has been the driving force behind many of these crazy things we have done. When we are doing them, I don’t think of them as crazy. Looking from an outside viewpoint, it’s nuts. It has been good because the last few years running is one of the few reasons to be alive. There hasn’t been much going on.
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| GCR: |
Like you mentioned, we didn’t realize when we got together at the 2020 Olympic Trials Marathon that so many things in our life and our country and our world would change with the covid interruption. How did running hold each day, each week, and each month together for Amie and you as so many aspects of daily life disappeared?
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| BD |
Initially, we came home from Atlanta, had run the marathon and were thinking of what we would do next. I had an okay, but not exciting performance. We started to think of where we would run our next marathon. We went to Costco to buy our normal groceries and supplies. We knew covid was out there and we had been cautious about the trip as we knew it could flare up and air travel might be in jeopardy. We had talked about that possibility and that we would buy a used car to drive home. Our car was an old car and needed replacement anyway so it wouldn’t be important. Nothing seriously happened while we were in Atlanta, so we flew home. At Costco there was a big mob. There was no toilet paper. We didn’t know what was going on. It was a shocking surprise. We weren’t out of toilet paper but wanted to get a little more. Then it became obvious that we weren’t going anywhere for a while. The races we had scheduled weren’t going to be happening. We started having nothing to do other than running.
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| GCR: |
Before that, there were some races that had started the option that, if you couldn’t make it to the race, you could run virtually and get a t-shirt and medal. This seemed to explode then. What do you think about this virtual option helping people to stay together even when they were apart physically?
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| BD |
We became virtual racers ourselves. I have a course about a mile from our home that is about a 5k loop. Its not a perfect 5k and it drifts a bit every time we do it because we track it with our GPS. We have done some long virtual races on that 5k loop. I ran a very low twenty-two-minute 5k on that loop. We started doing all kinds of virtual races. We were paying for them. The reason we were doing this is that we had friends in the timing business that were unable to have an income. We were fortunate that we were both on social security already. So, it wasn’t a huge sacrifice for us not to be able to do our race timing business, which is what we were doing for a living. We were able to hang in there. Many of our friends were making a living with these virtual races. Some of them did give us free entry into their virtual races. We had one series of races that was crazy. It started with a downhill mile, and I ran sub-six minutes. I think it was 5:41 on a downhill mile.
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| GCR: |
There were big virtual racing efforts that brought many people together. First, can you give us insight into your running the GVRAT, Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee?
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| BD |
The GVRAT was a way to get in a bunch of miles. We started doing that and ran hundred-mile weeks. We had a stretch of about a year where every week was about a hundred miles. It wasn’t all running. We were running about sixty miles and walking about forty miles a week. It was something to do and a challenge. The beauty was that each day we would post our mileage from our Garmin watch, and it would tell us where we were. We would look on Google earth and where we were. Some people were physically running the GVRAT in Tennessee at the same time. We got to know some of the people who were running. The Barkley Race is organized by the same group that produced the GVRAT. We finished the Race Across Tennessee and got a sweatshirt that is one of my favorite sweatshirts. Even for a runner who had been at the Olympic level, it was cool to do this. That was our first exposure to the crazy, virtual races.
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| GCR: |
Next, Amie and you were on a team for the CRAW – the Circumpolar Race Around the World where teams of ten runners complete a relay race of 30,167 miles through twelve regions of the world. What was that like, who was on your team and how did that go?
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| BD |
Amie found this after we ran the GVRAT. She saw there was going to be this Circumpolar Race Around the World that would be the same procedure of logging our miles as a team. When we left a region, we would get a medal for that region. There was a big three feet by two feet map of the world where we attached our medals which were magnets. We tried to get on one team, but it filled up. Then we started recruiting people and ended up with four Canadians, four of us from Boulder, a friend of the Canadians from Atlanta and another friend. The guy from Atlanta used to be our next-door neighbor here in Boulder and he recruited his Canadian friends. It was a snowball effect of building our team. We initially were doing this for the sake of doing it. Then it became competitive. We followed what other teams were doing and watched where they were. We would try to finish ahead of another team and try to move up in the standings. We ended up around sixth place out of over a hundred teams. There were various categories. We were in the ten-person running and walking category. So, we did the distance of over thirty thousand miles as a team in three hundred days. Afterward the race organizers added some new regions, but six members of our CRAW team were done. Four of us recruited some other people and we went into the open category where participants could run, walk, bike, paddle, rollerblade or use whatever means or activity they did. They could even use their rowing machine activity. We had some cyclists who could do forty or fifty miles a day and we got the extra medals.
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| GCR: |
Another fun virtual event you have been doing for at least two years is your virtual birthday party via zoom meeting on August 28th. I’ve been to them and it’s a lot of fun. It’s also a special day for me because my grandpa, who has passed away was born on August 28th in 1909. How much fun is that to see who shows up and to have fun for a couple of hours?
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| BD |
We’ve done those and more than just my virtual birthdays. We have also done ‘Rambling Runners’ and talked about a topic. We should do that again before the World Championships. The virtual meetings are lots of fun. Ron Tabb and I connected in Atlanta and talked more on a zoom on May 24, 2020, which was the fortieth anniversary of the 1980 Olympic Trials marathon. Ron was on that one because he finished fourth. It was fun talking with Ruth and Tom Wysocki as it had been years. Billy Rodgers showed up to one of them and Craig Virgin showed up. We connected and talked to people I hadn’t seen in years. It’s a shame that’s the way it was since we could only meet virtually due to covid. But we wouldn’t have all spent the money to get together in person. We have done six or seven of these meetings. We picked topics that we would talk about for a while. Then we would drift off about the state of the sport.
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| GCR: |
What is also neat is how social media has brought together so many of us in the running community. I see people commenting on my posts and some of them I have interviewed like Morgan Growth and Tracy Smith. And others comment like Ralph Serna, who I haven’t met. How much fun is it that Facebook and other social media have allowed us to be in closer contact than we were before?
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| BD |
It has been lots of fun. There are guys I considered to be stars of the heavens that I thought I would never have any contact with, and we are Facebook friends. Bobby Hodge is a good Facebook friend. I wasn’t aware that John Dimick was such an artist, and I didn’t know his history as an artist. We raced each other and went places together like Amsterdam but were out of touch. Without places like Facebook, we wouldn’t have any connection at all. I’ve got to know lots more about Gary Tuttle whom I’ve known for decades. I’ll see posts by Herb Wills, and he’s out there taking pictures at races. These connections are cool. There are people I was aware of but didn’t really know, like you, that I am actual friends with. We were aware of each other’s existence and now we are actual friends. There are times I get annoyed with Facebook for other reasons, but the friendships are the reason I haven’t left.
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| GCR: |
We talked about the colon cancer you faced in 2015 and your recovery into 2016. Can we talk about your most recent cancer bout with lung cancer in 2021, selecting your surgeon and how that operation went?
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| BD |
I mentioned earlier about how my sister had colon cancer. Well, she also had lung cancer. There wasn’t a good reason for it – she just had it. I had had follow up scans after my colon cancer every three months for a while, then every six months and finally once a year. There was a small spot on my lung they had been watching. In late January or early February of 2021, the doctors suggested a biopsy or one more scan to make a decision. We elected to go with one more scan even though I knew my sister had lung cancer. There was no other history in our family. Plus, the covid situation was still affecting us and we wanted to wait until it had settled down some more. Going into a medical environment was unhealthy or risky. In early May they did the scan and the doctors thought we should do a biopsy because it looked like the spot was changing. Then we had a guided biopsy where I was lying in a prone position face down. They ran me through the CT scan, saw where they needed to go, put a needle in, put me back in the scan and repeated the process. They did the biopsy and, yes, it was cancer. We had to go through the complete process again. They said it was a small cell cancer that wasn’t growing very fast. They weren’t very worried but needed to take care of it. We began the process again. They thought surgery was appropriate rather than chemo. We started interviewing surgeons. There was one we liked and, initially, we were hoping she would do the surgery with the help of a secondary thoracic surgeon. The second surgeon told us he had a team that he wanted to utilize. The first surgeon was more of a general surgeon anyway. Doctor O’Hara was confident in his team because they knew what he wanted and when he wanted it during a surgery. We went with him even though we liked the personality of the first surgeon. They discovered that my lung had adhered to my heart. It was very good I had a thoracic surgeon as they had to carefully remove that section of lung from my heart. They took out the lower left lobe of my lung. The nodule was very small, but there was no way to remove just the small tissue area around it. To try to remove the area of cancer, which was very small, about a centimeter by a centimeter, wasn’t practical. So, they took out the lower left lung and, once again I went through recovery.
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| GCR: |
How did your recovery progress, were you able to regain your fitness, were there side effects and what is your outlook?
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| BD |
I was accustomed to surgery and recovery, so it wasn’t that hard for me. Because of covid, I didn’t get to walk around as much as I would have liked. The day after surgery, they let me walk around just a little bit. Normally, I don’t take many opioids after the initial doses, and I switch over to ibuprofen. This time they kept me on opioids the entire time I was in the hospital, and I didn’t get to move as much as I like. When I finally was ready to go home, I had constipation from hell and didn’t want to go home until that was relieved. We did everything under the sun – prune juice, all kinds of laxative - and finally they needed the room and moved me to a less intensive care room. I started to walk there and walked about three miles in that room. I walked a whole bunch that day to get my body moving and it did in the late afternoon. That was the worst part of the whole experience because the opioids clogged me up in addition to my eating more than I should have because I was feeling better. I got home and went back into my routine. I started walking, then alternating walking with running and, eventually, I got back slowly but surely. I’ve got a nice scar on my back. On my chest there are some areas where the nerves are screwed up a bit, but they are improving. I have chemo scars and numb fingers and tingly feet from the chemo back in 2016 and 2017, but those are side effects I live with. By December, I was back. I was two minutes slower for a 5k than I had been the previous December, but I was back. At the Bolder Boulder 10k this year, I was three minutes slower, but I was back.
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| GCR: |
After your latest cancer situation and with covid sidelining your race timing business, what was the process of transitioning away from your business?
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| BD |
Initially, we didn’t know how long covid would stop races from occurring. We thought we would resume timing when racing started back. There was lots of virtual racing, but those were conducted by race organizers, not timing companies. A sizable portion of our race timing business had been for cross country races. That was our major focus. We had the finish line cameras and reusable computer chips for the runners to process results quickly. CHSAA, the Colorado High School Athletic Association, wasn’t getting anywhere near a reasonable idea of what they were going to do in the fall of 2020. They were planning to limit the size of fields. Since we used recoverable chips, this was an issue since people weren’t supposed to touch anything. What would be our protocols? Did we have to soak the chips in bleach when we collected them? There were many questions without answers. Previously, we had thought about retiring in 2021, so we decided by July of 2020 that we were retiring. We sold all our chip equipment, our van and most of our finish line equipment, except I still have the IdentiLynx front cameras. We used them even when we weren’t using the side cameras. After that, we became professional sleepers and runners.
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| GCR: |
Let’s talk about how certain aspects are different now compared to when you were a competitive runner like your training pace, diet and ancillary items. Back in the day you probably ran six-minute or seven-minute-mile pace on most runs. What pace do you run now on the roads or trails?
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| BD |
It depends on the day. I don’t run on trails too much except one trail that I run on frequently is a flat trail called South Boulder Creek Trail and there aren’t many rocks to trip on. I stay away from the more technical trails around here because I fall down and go boom! That was another symptom of the colon cancer. I fell down a lot before it was diagnosed. I think my body was weak. These days I’m running around 10:30 pace unless it’s a speed session. I’ll start off as slow as twelve-minute pace or thirteen-minute pace uphill and gradually get moving along as I warm up. Typically, the way a workout goes for me is I’ll walk at least ten minutes and then I will run a set time like an hour and a half or an hour and forty-five minutes rather than a set distance. Then I’ll walk to complete a set distance. A few days ago, we did nine and a half miles. I walked ten minutes, ran an hour and thirty-five minutes and walked two or three minutes at the end to finish the nine and a half miles. We did the GVRAT again this year, and we are tried to keep our miles the same for each other, so we finished together. We ran a little higher mileage than on our easy days and just finished it on Sunday, June 19th.
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| GCR: |
Do you have any certain workouts that you build into your training regimen?
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| BD |
We have a four-workout cycle. We have a long run of fourteen or fifteen miles that should be longer than it is. Occasionally we run sixteen miles. We should be running more like eighteen miles. But we aren’t running marathons often enough to convince ourselves its worth the trouble. We also have a threshold day where we run five minutes or more at a time that is at a faster pace. We will total between fifteen and thirty minutes of running that are faster. We have a hill running day and have three types of hill repeats. We do two-minute repeats and do four to six of them. We do thirty, sixty and ninety second repeats with a recovery back to where we started. We will do three sets. We have a couple decent hills we run depending on the time of day or if it is windy. We do hills on this one bike path and one day Amie was back to the house after running and I was out about two and a half miles form our home starting my repeats on the hill. She was calling me at the same time I was calling her because there were two Sheriff’s cars that came over the top of the hill so fast they became airborne. They were in a hurry, and we had no clue what was happening. I stopped my hill repeats before I even started and got on my phone with Amie. We were trying to figure out what happened and then heard a shooting had taken place at King Soopers. But I did my hill repeats and watched the vehicles. I’ll bet that seventy-five or more police and emergency vehicles came over that hill while I was out there running. We have a short speed day and the difference in our speed on the threshold day and short speed day is often hard to determine. We do one-minute to three-minute repeats of various combinations. On my speed day, I’ll try to run eight flat pace, but I do more like 8:10 pace. Sometimes on my threshold day I’ll run 8:30 to 8:45 pace. If its windy, I may be slower and over nine-minute pace.
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| GCR: |
I sometimes go to the gym and, after a mile warmup on the treadmill, will do ten times forty-five seconds at 8.5 miles per hour which is seven-minute-mile pace. Then I will do some walking and some jogging for seventy-five seconds to complete the two-minute cycle. Do you do anything like this workout, either on the treadmill or the roads?
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| BD |
Before covid, I was going to the gym. We have a rec center that has a circuit of outside exercise stations that I do. I’ll walk there, do the various exercises and then an easy workout. I like the idea of what you’re talking about, but we haven’t tried the treadmill unless its very bad weather. I have found that virtual racing is the best way to get me to do true speed. If you tell me I have to report my run to somebody, I’ll run harder.
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| GCR: |
How has your diet changed?
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| BD |
I ate everything in my prime just to keep up with calorie needs. I began to slow down on that approach as I aged, and in 2003 I quit eating red meat. I try for balance but must admit I could improve my diet.
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| GCR: |
As of next January, I will reach fifty years since I started running and I know you have run longer than that. Sometimes people will ask me, ‘Why do you keep running?’ When someone asks you that, what do you say?
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| BD |
At this point, they don’t ask me. But we can go back to 2003 when I had prostate cancer. I discovered that running was important to me. It was a valuable part of my life. I needed to keep it as a part of my life, and I went back to it after I had ignored it for years. I had been running only twenty miles a week that hurt. I was running out of habit and not because I wanted to run. We were busy timing races and were around the sport. I kept running but wasn’t for any solid reason. Now I run because it is who I am. It’s a part of me. To not run would be heresy, if nothing else.
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| GCR: |
There are so many traits from running that cross over to our entire lives like consistency, overcoming adversity and discipline. What are some of the biggest lessons you have learned from running that have helped you in your life?
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| BD |
Running is very much an activity that helps my mood. If I’m not feeling good and I get on a run, it improves that and has serious psychological benefits. The other big aspect is that I have committed to doing something and I do it. It takes willpower for many people but doesn’t for me anymore. If I have to do something I just do it. I may get grumpy about doing something other than my running if it gets in the way of my running. Years of doing running has ingrained in me that, if you need to do something, just get up and do it. There is certainly discipline in running, but we don’t start off thinking that running is going to teach us discipline. These things happen, but this isn’t why we run. They are side effects of running. Despite all the cancers, I want to be healthy. Over the years I’ve learned, if I’m not feeling good, running makes me feel better. If I have a cold, I get out and run. Everything improves by at least walking. These are life lessons that aren’t easy for people who haven't done it to grasp. Movement is what we are designed for. We aren’t designed to be sedentary. Our culture has begun to look at movement again. For a long time, people have sat in cars and at desks and haven’t moved around much unless they were the nutty people like us that wanted to be competitors. Activity now has lost much of the competitiveness which is both good and bad. Its good because anyone who wants to do it feels they can and are not concerned that they won’t be a competitor. It’s bad in that is has hurt our competitive environment. The people that are competitors aren’t quite the competitors they could be at times.
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| GCR: |
What are your running and racing goals? Are there thoughts about running the Boston Marathon again or age-group track competition or running a hundred-mile race?
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| BD |
I would like to see my limits and how far I can take myself. I would like to go back to Boston next year because it will be forty years since I ran my 2:09 there. I haven’t made any efforts to make that happen, but I need to start. I want to go to Honolulu this year because it’s the fiftieth running of their marathon, and it was one of my first very good national level races when I got second there. I would like to get under four hours in the marathon again, but I don’t know if its physically possible, especially since I have less lung. That is a goal. Many times, when I have goals, they keep me out there running. Some goals may not be achieved, like breaking four hours. I don’t think a hundred-mile race is physically possible. But I would like to do a twelve-hour race on the track, or a twenty-four-hour race. Or it could be a race with support on a one-mile loop or three-mile loop. I would like to see my limits and how far I can take myself. As far as competitive goals, there was a time in my fifties when I thought that I could chase down some of Ed Whitlock’s times. But now its obvious that is not going to happen. My body isn’t the same body as when I was in my fifties. I’ve lost bits of it. I’ve come to terms with that. I did run twenty-four minutes for 5k in December, so a goal is to get under twenty-four minutes. I got close to fifty minutes for 10k at Bolder Boulder this year and want to get under fifty minutes. It shouldn’t be that hard but, at the same time, it is. I keep adjusting the benchmarks and I go after new benchmarks. I wouldn’t mind running a marathon with some of my old competitors. Even Billy Rodgers doesn’t want to run a marathon anymore. Kyle Heffner picked me up at the Atlanta Marathon in 2020 at ten miles and ran sixteen miles with me. He’s still running well, and his body is working. It was an easy run for him while I was doing everything I could to get to the finish line. It’s exciting he is still hanging in there. Tony Sandoval focuses on his medical practice, but it would be cool if Tony, Kyle and I could get together and run a 5k and not race, but just run and talk about old times. Those are some objectives. I thought about a year ago of going to the World Championships and hanging out with some old friends and running on Pre’s trail. But it isn’t easy because of covid and the tight housing situation. I would like to get to a hundred fifty total marathons, but don’t know if I will due to how little we travel any more.
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| GCR: |
The last time we did an interview, I wrapped up by asking you about your philosophy of running and life and you said that people need to enjoy running and enjoy their various pursuits in life. Seven years later, do you have anything more to say about running and life and aging and your thought process as to what is important as we go through each day, each week and each month?
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| BD |
You need to be doing things that you like doing. You’re not going to take riches with you into the next life. It’s not going to happen. You can’t take it with you. If you are constantly pursuing things that aren’t making you happy, then you can’t be happy. You can’t be thinking, ‘If I get this, I’ll be happy.’ You must be doing things that make you happy. Not everyone is going to be happy running. I have friends that are happy biking or climbing. If those make you happy, then do them. We also need to remember that we’re not made to sit in front of the computer, and I do more of that than I should. We’re not made to be sedentary. We’re active creatures. Find an activity that makes you happy and be active. Also, try not to dwell on things that make you unhappy. It’s hard these days because of what is presented to us all the time. It seems like the purpose of social media is to present us with information that keeps us inflamed. Sometimes that inflammation is positive because it gets us to do things that need doing. But we can do so all the time.
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Inside Stuff |
| Favorite Laugh-In Character |
I liked Artie Johnson. He would ride out on his tricycle and fall over
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| Snack food you can’t resist |
I have Costco jars of peanut M and Ms and very few days go by that I don’t have peanut M and Ms. But, hey, peanuts have protein and aren’t that terrible for you. I also like to get dark chocolate peanut M and Ms, but they are hard to come by. I found them recently at a Walmart down in Texas. Here is an interesting story about moon pies. When we finished our first GVRAT race in Tennessee, we ordered some moon pies because they are a Tennessee favorite
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| Pre-race music |
Initially, before it was worn out, was Vangelis and his ‘Chariots of Fire.’ That was a good one. Of course, I like ‘Born to Run.’ Eventually I got to where I disliked having music when we were timing races because we couldn’t talk to each other as the music was so loud and annoying rather than pumping me up. I went the other direction when I raced. I wanted to be calm. I didn’t want to pump up because it got me starting out too fast. I would do the opposite and be more Zen and introspective. I would calm down and find my center before the gun went off
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| Last movie which made you cry |
Les Miserables, the staged concert movie, which was the last movie we saw in a theater before covid. I got into watching Ted Lasso and we did a marathon of those shows which was quite emotional at times. I have a fair amount of empathy and it is easy for me to get caught up in stories. These days, we look for humor
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| Favorite Saturday Night Live Characters |
John Belushi’s Samurai character. The priest, Father Guido Sarducci. I liked Chevy Chase’s News. He would say, ‘I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not’
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| Most annoying habit |
Procrastination. I sometimes delay until three or four o’clock to do my run because I’m busy doing nothing
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| Favorite birthday memory |
I don’t celebrate birthdays that seriously. It’s just another day. My sixty-fifth birthday was the day before my second chemo, and I had some chocolate cake
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| Interesting television pleasures |
We watch West Wing on an annual basis. We do a Christmas theme every December and watch several Christmas movies. One is from a guy named Terry Pratchett who was a fantasy comedy performer and he had an immense wit. He would write about a place called disc world where magic works, and science doesn’t. He would do some wonderful takes on the world in which we live. He had one called ‘The Hogfather,’ who was basically Santa Claus. Death was a character in disc world and was the the grim reaper with his scythe. For some reason, The Hogfather didn’t show up one Christmas. Death was out there doing his job while they tried to figure out what happened to The Hogfather. That is one of the movies we watch every Christmas
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| Best prank played by you or on you |
I’m somewhat of an introvert and, because I grew up as an Air Force brat, I didn’t develop the kind of friendships many kids did. After the first couple times I started to develop friendships and then we moved in a year, it got to where I didn’t do that so much. I did a few pranks. I remember putting menthol shaving cream in a friend’s jock strap. The concept in most pranks was better than the reality. I heard about many pranks, but didn’t do that many
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| Most useless talent |
It’s gone now, but I used to be good at the Rubik’s Cube. I could solve the Rubik’s Cube in under a minute. Right now, I have over a hundred days in a row of solving Wordle. That’s useless. I play some other trivia games that I have played on my phone for ten years. I’m capable of doing these stupid puzzle games but I don’t know why anybody would care
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| Best music concert you ever attended |
It was a Cat Stevens concert at the Omni in Atlanta when he had released the album, ‘Teaser and the Fire Cat.’ That album had just come out. Before Cat Stevens and his band were to come out, we were sitting in the theater and were watching a video of ‘Teaser and the Fire Cat’ with music playing. It was a five or ten-minute cartoon and, as it began to fade out the screen went up. All that time we had been listening to Cat Stevens and his band playing the music. There were no missteps at all at that concert
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| Favorite cartoon |
Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner
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| Dumbest way you’ve been injured |
The blood blister that I had at the Boston Marathon when I wore a pair of shoes that had a wrinkle in the sock liner, and I didn’t realize that. It was stupid. If I had not worn that shoe, it would have been a different race. That was also the injury that ended my career. That was dumb
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| Favorite ice cream flavor |
Rocky Road. We have a place here called ‘Sweet Cow’ that does ice cream, and they have great flavors. Right now, they are only in Colorado, but hope to expand soon. They have some sherbets that are very good and an orange creamsicle flavor that is great. But, if I must get one flavor, it is Rocky Road
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| First thing in the morning |
If I haven’t finished my daily games the night before, I finish them. I have my games on my phone and I want to keep my streaks going
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| Worst cooking experience |
I’ve burned a few things over the years when I was distracted. The worst one I experienced was when we were in Louisiana when I was eight or nine years old. We were eating rice that was spicy. It had little specks in it. It was much spicier than when my mother usually cooked rice. Finally, it came out that ants had gotten into the rice. She didn’t have any more, so she cooked it anyway. I ate ants. They have bodies that make them hot. My mother was embarrassed but we couldn’t afford not to eat
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| Phobias |
High places. Amie still gives me grief about one time. We went to the Grand Canyon in 1984 and we got a camping site. I went near the edge, but not close to the edge so I could look over into the Grand Canyon. I was about twenty feet or so from the edge. I could sleep hardly at all that night at our campsite which was a half mile from the edge. I wasn’t comfortable a half mile from the edge. Another was in 1983 for the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta and they put me up at the Peachtree Plaza. There was floor to ceiling windows. There was no ledge. The floor went right to the windows. We were in the hotel and ropes came by the window. Then this body came by the window. There was a guy doing a Spiderman routine. I crawled on my belly over to the edge to look out and peer down. But I had Amie hold my legs at the back to reassure me. I’ve gotten a little better over the years at altitude and high places. I don’t get on roller coasters. That is a real phobia
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| Chore you hate doing |
I guess I should talk about a chore that I do. So, it’s got to be one that I do, but hate. I don’t hate cleaning and emptying the cat litter box. I am not very thrilled about cleaning the toilet
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| Always in the fridge |
Some form of cheese. There isn’t necessarily a specific cheese, but there is always some kind of cheese in the refrigerator
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| Unusual item in your car trunk |
Most of the time there is a bag of generic cat food. The reason for that is we feed the trash pandas
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| Favorite Christmas memory |
We spent a Christmas in Yellowstone back in 1996 or 1997. It was back when they still had the old Snow Lodge that was originally employee dorms. There was a Christmas ceremony for those in the lodge. On Christmas Eve there was a nondenominational service at the Visitor Center. We cross country skied the night before Christmas. It was peaceful. It was away from the world. Yet, it was very Christmassy with lots of snow and a cloudless sky
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| Pet update |
We only have four cats now as we lost two of them in November
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| Time machine travel |
I’ve thought about this one a few times and I never produce a complete answer. There are so many choices. I could go back and warn Abraham Lincoln. There are things I could do if I could go forward and come back. I could find myself a few years ahead and see what I needed to know. Or I could go back and tell myself what to do. It’s a conundrum because anything I do is going to change what happened. If I could go back to 1983 and tell myself to wear a different pair of shoes at Boston, I would do that. Would it really matter? Would it be that big of a deal? I could go back to when Christ was crucified and see what happened historically. I wouldn’t be able to speak the language and might not survive the trip. My immune system wouldn’t be used to what I may run into. (Interviewer interlude – maybe the way to look at the question is to be like the character ‘The Watcher’ in Marvel Comics in the late 1960s who was from a race that had tried to change history with bad results, so they became a race of ‘Watchers’ who could observe but not interact, so let’s rephrase this question so that you can only watch and observe). With the President Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, it would be interesting to go back and walk around and see what happened. Was there anything going on at the grassy knoll. I could go up into the building where Oswald was. If I had enough time to see. It would be interesting to find if there were people behind the scenes pulling strings
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| Final words |
I thanked Benji, with Amie’s assistance on some details, for providing this valuable information and spending two hours doing so. I suggested he go for his run and then have some Rocky Road ice cream. Amie chimed in, ‘We have Chocolate Malt Ball, Peppermint Patty and Orange Creamsicle.’ Those sounded like three good reasons for Benji to hit the roads and complete his daily run!
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