All this week I have been in Deer Park, spending time with my family and celebrating my Mom's Birthday. Mom is 84 and going strong. It was good fun hanging out with everyone this week. I did pretty well with staying on track with training and diet. Naturally, it was not strict sticking to the schedule and I did not eat as well as normal but all in all, did well.
On Thursday evening, I went for a run through the neighborhood that I grew up in. I lived in Deer Park from about 7th grade up until we moved to Austin, so I am very familiar with the area. I did about a 5-6 mile run through Deer Park. As I ran and passed different sites in the city, lots of memories came back to mind. A city warehouse now sits where the Rodeo Arena was. I used to sneak in there and watch rodeo on Saturday nights. I passed over the drainage ditch where I played around as a kid. Later as an adult, I would use the drainage ditch as a way to ride with Kelly. The ditch snakes its way around the city and it had a service road built on the side of it. I would ride my bike with the kiddy seat and pick her up from daycare, then ride the ditch to get back home. I never had to worry much about traffic, just riding straight and having to explain what certain graffiti meant.
One thing that struck me as odd was seeing a utility pole guy line. Those heavy cables that run at a 45 degree angle from the ground up to the pole to help stabilize it. We see these everywhere and we do not even notice them but this one had some significance. I am sure everyone has a special bond with a guy wire. As I ran by the guy wire, I thought back to Halloween when I was 13. Two friends and I were out raising as much hell as 13 year olds can. Old Man Harston was the neighborhood crabby old man. He was the one that yelled at you to stay off his lawn. He would glare at you when you walked in front of his house. His house and yard were always perfectly maintained. Well on Halloween night, Jay, Gary and I decided that Old Man Harston needed to sell his house and that we should be his realtor. For this, we needed a lot of For Sale signs. We started running through the neighborhood, pulling up all the "For Sale" signs we could find. We would collect them all in a pile near Old Man Harstons house. When we had a huge pile of signs, we started deploying them into Harstons yard. We were sneaking back and forth, giggling as we put the signs in his yard. The yard was transformed into a forest of "For Sale" signs. I had the last sign and was cramming it into the ground, when all of the sudden, a flood light came on. Jay took off to the right side of the house, away from the floodlight; Gary followed him and then me. This is where the guy line comes in. Jay turned the corner, headed towards the street when in the dark, he ran up to and on the guy wire. When I say on, I mean he ran up the wire and was straddling it. Jay's feet were just barely reaching the ground. Gary was not more than 3 feet behind him, when he too ran up and straddled the wire. Now Jay's feet were airborne and Gary's feet were just barely touching. Gary had hit Jay so hard that he drove him up the wire about 6 more inches. And then here I come. I repeated the collision so now we had three people straddling the wire. We looked like a bobsled team because no sooner had I hit them when in unison, we all flipped to the right and fell on the ground, our left feet hanging from the wire, our bodies on the ground. In our minds, Old Man Harston was still chasing us so we scrambled to get untangled, nurse our injuries and get out of there as fast as possible. Despite some superficial groin injuries, nothing happened. No one was chasing us. We never figured out why the floodlight came on. The following morning we rode our bikes past the house and started laughing because not only were our signs there, but someone else had picked up where we left off. The yard was full of "For Sale" signs. They were everywhere. We laughed so hard we almost fell off our bikes.
And now here is the part about the trip. As I was running down Center Street, the main street of Deer Park, I was passing in front of a car wash. The driveway exiting the car wash was drenched in water and Armour-All. You could actually see the white / gray of the sidewalk turn into the shiny black of the driveway. As I crossed over the driveway, I lost my footing and started falling. I clearly saw the ground coming at me. I have no idea how I did this but I avoided doing a full on face plant. I put my hands out and caught my fall. As I hit the ground, I dropped my left shoulder and rolled onto my back, did a complete roll and landed on my back. This was not intentional like I planned any of this. Something happened and instincts (not that I fall a lot), just took over. I am fine, my hands are really sore but nothing else. The bad part is I did this at the peak of traffic , on the main drag of Deer Park and the guy's working at the car wash gave me a 8.5 score for not sticking the landing.
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