August 6, 1979 (Monday)

From running log:
Ran about 4 miles at 7:00 pace on trails and sand roads near Brule, Wisconsin. With Nellie and Joe Canepa. Right knee still sore. I love running in the woods, it's so peaceful.

30 years later:

You've met Nellie before in this blog. I first met him in 7th or 8th grade, when our public school played his parochial school in basketball. I was assigned to guard him, but our coach told me to leave him alone and double-team the star player on his team (and it slips my mind now who that even was). Of course, Nellie scored some points, because he was a pretty darned good basketball player himself. Controversy: He and I still disagree about the outcome of that game to this day. You see, we played them for five quarters. That's right, five. The way we approached the game was to play a full game (four quarters) with our best 10-12 man rotation, and the score at the end of the four quarters was the official score (we were well ahead). The "fifth quarter" was meant for all of our other players, let's call them "the deep bench", to have a chance to play too. Now, we must have had 25 guys on our team, maybe more. Some of them could barely bounce the ball, much less actually take a shot. As I recall, Nellie's team had less than 10 players in total, all of whom had decent skills. You can just imagine how they absolutely slaughtered our deep bench during that fifth quarter. To us, that was just extra time for our scrubs to get a chance to be on the floor in front of their proud mothers. However, to them I think they assumed that the final score, at the end of all five quarters, was the score that actually counted. So their starters ran up and down the floor at will against our hapless fifth and sixth stringers, easily wiping out the lead we had at the END of the real game. Nellie, my friend, we won that game!

Joe Canepa would not run cross country that year, but he was a friend who came out to jog around with us on this August day anyway. His extended family had a connection to an old cottage along the Brule River, near a fish hatchery. In fact, before the construction of Camp David, some American Presidents had actually vacationed in that very spot of the country. It is beautiful there, the fast-running cold waters of the Brule feed inumerable ponds and lakes that are crystal clear and home to a variety of fish, but especially brook trout.

I remember two things clearly from this day: (1) paddling canoes around those lakes for hours in the hot sun, then jumping into the ice cold water to cool down, (2) staying up late that night listening to the album "Breakfast in America" by Supertramp, talking and laughing and eventually getting yelled at to BE QUIET ALREADY by some aunt or uncle of Joe's, before climbing into our sleeping bags and finally dozing off.