I've been a fool...

This girl, well a woman really, I've spent four and a half years chasing in a fruitless pursuit.

I discovered in a glaring way I have been wasting my time. All well and good I suppose, it makes the task (?) of not calling, etc. easier.

Still, the whole thing is(was) odd discovering I am no longer relevant. It makes me feel strange and small, I'm not entirely sure what I have to offer anybody these days.

I feel lonesome at times, I can never quite predict when and how deep the loneliness will be but I have taken to chatting with myself about being a fool.

Why won't my friends simply tell me I've been a fool? I'm so angry at myself at times. I suppose they wouldn't want me to feel worse.

Here's to not being a fool. My life maybe decidedly more empty under the circumstances but I don't feel insecure any more about being dumped.

Very lonely sometimes? Yes. But I don't feel like so bad now.

Ouch

I am nuked from another heart wrenching break up. I've had two relationships over the last ten years that lasted four or five years, neither ended in marriage, they end in nothing.

My heart feels like it's on the floor all the time and I have no idea what to do. I usually love training but it's very hard to get more then 30-40min in before I feel like quitting, it feels so pointless and empty.

I just turned 38 years old but I feel so old now with these endings, it's like ending a marriage as I lived with both girls and eventually had to divide up the house.

No amount of begging, groveling or any other emotional appeal has done anything, and it didn't last time around either.

The now ex-girl is far from perfect, she's pissy, sort of plain, has the propensity to gain weight and has dumped me on and off for the last two years.

Heck, maybe it's right to stay away? Sometimes I have hope I will meet someone with their head on straight who knows what they want, gets to know me and doesn't leave me.

There weren't any awful transgressions, but some strange stuff. She decided she like girls or wanted to see if she was a lesbian, but vaciliated about it and never took any real action other then visiting support groups.

Three months ago she broke it off again and we have only seen each twice since then. Just lunches... A few days ago she told me she "tried" the girl thing and it was "disgusting" and now she's dating a guy.

I nearly fainted in the parking lot.

I really loved this person for who she was on the inside. We met through something mutual shared sporty interest and the relationship was predicated on a great friendship, I don't think she's my type physically per se, but I grew to think of her as beautiful.

I've run out of coping mechanisms. I can't drink it away because I have a real job, whatever that means and it only makes me feel worse the next day emotionally.

I wake up in the middle of the night and think of what she said in the parking lot, my brain is instantly on the second I'm conscious. I have social outlets, plenty I guess. As deep as the grief is, as much as my heart hurts I haven't shed a bucket of tears, I've felt close but it hasn't happened.

Seems the only way to deal with it is literally one day at a time.

Starting

I was originally born in Australia and lived there as a young child, among a few other places.

I moved to a small town in the Pacific Northwest when I was small boy and was raised in a little town in the shadows of mountains near a near a small college town.

I grew up chopping wood everyday and living like Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn as much as I fantasized I could. I fished out of streams, spent days floating down all the streams in town and lazing around a perfect swimming hole.

That upbringing certainly shaped who I am now.

I've had a wealth of experiences in my life that many take their entire lives to collect. And, that includes the good and bad.

This is a place for exploration of where I've been and where I'm going.

A start or starting over?

What was it like to grow up in this small town I've come to adore and revisit so many times over the years? It was tough at times, just like anywhere I suppose. I had to fight for acceptance among my peers in all the ways kids do. Kids, especially boys, show their competence typically physically, not in the classroom, and although I was bright, I was more often then not mildly bored with my studies.

I was always the smallest kid in class (except for maybe a girl or two).

Each year in the late spring our school would have a "field day" which was a scored day of Track and Field events along with a few non-standard events thrown in for good measure, the kids who would win the competition were usually more physically mature.

We had to pick a distance event, a couple of sprint events, and a handful of field events, usually at least two jump events and two throws.

This all took place on a dirt/gravel track and in my mind my heroes the studs of our local university; Joaquin Cruz, Dub Myers, Salazar, Mary Decker (nee Slaney) were always running with me.

I remember seeing Cruz at the mall when I was about 9 y/old; he looked like a horse. I started running local road-races at age 9, so I was 11 and was a fit skinny kid; just not a future bruiser in football games.

One day a month before "Field Day" I looked up at the Track and Field records posted in the gym and decided I could break the 880yd run record; It was 2.55 I'm not sure why but I thought that if I could run a lap around the school in around 1.17-20(the PE teacher said it was about a 440), then I could do two and have my name up there.

I told my Dad about the goal who wrote up a training program that I followed, it was pretty light compared to what jr. high kids do now actually, and set about training.

What made it more interesting is that the class bully, a bruising physically mature kid whose older brother was the star running back for the HS football team had started working out with a private track team in Eugene; ultimately he'd be more of a 400m type later, and I'd run the 1500m in college and at NCAA Div II XC Nationals, so I guess we spilt the difference!

Anyhow, said class bully didn't pick on me; guess he must have respected my athletic talents then or just picked on kids that were more a challenge w/the fisticuffs.

Needless to say, this was *the* match up, because all the kids in school, in my class and outside of it knew I ran road-races in Eugene, and knew the bully was training in track spikes and doingjr. olympic stuff after school.

There was tension everyday in PE; I lost sleep.

The bully and I didn't talk. I kept my record-breaking ambitions to myself.

The week before the event my Dad came over my house and we ran a time-trial at the track, he led and I just followed for two laps at record pace. I went under the record by a second.

It was very, very hard; it was like the one-lap around the school sprint times two. And, my Dad paced it evenly.

Field day came and the 880yd dash was later in the day; I set about scoring as many points as I could in Field events I had a fighting chance in.. Events like the high-jump were good because I was small, light, could jump and wasn't afraid of the bar.

It was all a prelude to the big showdown. David vs. Goliath in a sense. I wasn't a prodigy, just a tiny lightweight kid. I just knew my strategy had to be to get out in front and just run at what felt like the pace I'd done w/my dad a week before and hope that the bully couldn't hang on..

I wasn't sure if he could. He was plenty fast in the one lap around the school affairs, but who knew about the longer stuff.

It was May, and it was a hot day, the track was dusty; the starter's pistol went off and I flew over the first 200m just the way the guys in a fast international 800m do, hard and fast; just a hair off red-line.

I couldn't hear the bully behind me. I came through the first lap in about 1.26-ish.

At this point I didn't care about the competition, the effort was hard. And the entire school was watching; potentially surprised at my lead, I was never sure how close he really was incidentally.

Heading into the first turn of the second lap I started to get that tell-tale middle-distance runner slight lung burn, but I knew what that felt like already; This was different than the time-trial with my Dad, I'd gone a little harder from the gun and was just hanging it out there.

Heading into the final turn I knew that unless something weird happened I was going to win. That feeling when you know you're going to win is intoxicating, it's the light-headed, "did I really do it? Yes I did!" sensation that I was heightened because this was in front of a crowd.

My language arts teacher who watched meets at Hayward yelled at me as I rounded that last turn, "Dig, Dig!"

I didn't know what that meant, but I went harder, or least felt like I did!

The last hundred/seventy-five yards or so were an eternity, I didn't hear anyone, it was tunnel vision all the way to the line; I crossed the line not being sure of whether I had the record, not caring and knew I'd beaten the class bully who had special training and shoes. I was so small that I still nicely into my purple crushed velvet soccer shorts from second grade.

How it ended- I tied the record, 2 min 55 seconds for 880yd. Because I'd done well enough through a combo of scoring a series of first place ribbons, seconds and a handful of thirds I'd outscored everyone and I won a small medal with a ribbon which I still have to this day in my dresser.

It's more important to me than any other medal, including Ironman.

I walked on air the rest of the school year. The time in 880yd would have placed me against 7thand 8th graders that year, something that had made its way around the school.

I'll never forget it, and I still drive to that small town every couple of years to walk around the track and tell the story to who ever will listen as I hear the gravel crunching beneath me.