Threat or a Promise?

Heading to the car for this morning’s workout, a car pulled up behind me and someone called my name.

It was my little stalker.

She’s been travelling, visiting relatives in another state and, as she was still on the move at that moment said something about coming to see me on the weekend.

Not sure if that was a threat or a promise and inasmuch as I couldn't clearly make out what her little voice was saying from the car, I don't know if she’s talking about this weekend or next.

If it’s next weekend, she’s got me.

If it’s this weekend, it will be a miss as I'm off to the races tomorrow.

After a long dry spell insofar as in person races, tomorrow is package pickup for Sunday’s Mission Inn 5k; and because traffic to the site and parking at the site is so cra cra, I’ll be booking myself into a nearby hotel for an overnight.

If "Mission Inn" sounds familiar to long time readers, it’s because that’s the 5k I’ve participated in several years in a row. The same race that, though it’s been in existence for 46 years, was horribly screwed up last year — in every conceivable and even inconceivable manner, by new people after some of the regular organizers did not survive the Pandemic ……

• Start line was located at the wrong spot, ½ mile from where it should have been and had to be relocated.
• New guy on the microphone failed to call which race was up, so most of us went rogue and just took off whenever.
• My back began to ache on the inclines at Mile 2, muscles in my legs stiffened, I could barely walk and struggled to get to the finish line.
• Mile 3 seemed extra especially long, so I'm not at all sure the race organizers didn't make a mistake in calculations there as well.
• Finish line photographer, for some unknown reason, could not match our bib numbers to photos taken, so there were no official race photos.
• Computers went down so results were not recorded.

The race was a complete cluster-you-know what, yet here I am primed and ready to give the 5k another go.

After a year to examine what went wrong, hopefully the organizers by now will have gotten their act together so us participants can get our official photos and results.

Last year was a wake-up-call for me as well. Now pushing 80 years of age, my aging back, hips, legs can no longer handle the steep inclines on their own, so I’ll be using walking poles to support my body on the trek up the challenging inclines.

I’ll be back online Sunday afternoon, with what few photos I’m able to take when my hands are not occupied with trekking poles.