Run, Run, Run

5K race bibs

A few years ago I ran in several 5ks.  The passage of time and lack of activity had packed on the pounds and I had to do something to chase them away.

I've never been able to do something without a purpose; there had to be a goal in mind and it had to contribute to something more than just the activity itself.  Thus, 5ks, an activity that would contribute to weight loss and provided measurable benchmarks of improvement.

The best I did in any of the races was 41 minutes.  Since a 5K is 3.1 miles, I managed to do about a 13 minute mile.  Not stellar by any means, but an achievement for me, someone that spent my required time in P.E. classes volunteering to keep score to avoid any exertion.

In June of  2012 I took a trip to Aravaipa Canyon to a B and B with my BFF.  We hiked the canyon and I remember feeling strong and confident as a result of those races.  I'd been wearing a step tracker for a long time and tracking my food intake.  On that trip I was unable to connect to the tracker and broke a streak of consecutive days of tracking. Funny, it was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing. I ran a couple more races the next year and then gave up, adding back some pounds and losing flexibility in my back.

In 2014 I tossed all my bibs, thinking I'd still remember those accomplishments but in reality I think I was getting rid of the evidence of having given up.  See, running in races is not like taking a college course or completing a project.  It's a continuing test of your abilities and it can be a celebration of just living, without a goal, without judgment, without an end.  It might be time to revisit the outdoors on foot.

World Travels

When I worked during the 80's, 90's and up until 2001, I got to travel internationally - a lot.  It started when my company wanted to install ATM machines in airports all over the world and later wanted to have banks sell their product.  I was lucky enough to be the person that explained how it was done to the bank's business and technical personnel.  Then, the financial industry wanted a standard way of talking to the ATMs and sending transactions so I met with international banking organizations and we hammered out standards.  Of course, this worked best face to face so I racked up thousands of airline miles, meeting up in a different host county once or twice a year.

So here I am years later digging through memorabilia and I find my foreign currency change purse. Back before the Euro, each country in Europe issued its own currency.  When I travelled, I would buy some of the local currency when I arrived in a new country and try to spend it all before I left.  What didn't get spent ended up in my stash at home. I spent a couple of hours sorting out the coins by country of origin, including a little surfing to identify some of the tricky ones.  Here's the list of countries:

coins from my travels

• Austria
• Belgium
• British Caribbean
• Canada
• Costa Rica
• Denmark
• England
• France
• Germany
• Hong Kong
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Portugal
• Singapore
• Spain
• Taiwan
• Thailand

Okay, some of those were vacations (British Caribbean, Costa Rica, Mexico) and there's some missing (Australia, why don't I have any from there?)

My son has a coin collection so these will go to him with the countries identified.  Time for this traveler to make new trips!