The dictator

I have certain misgivings about how much running I do on sandy surfaces. Certainly it makes you a stronger runner, developing both robust ankles and the patience to endure moments of slog, which sometimes seem interminable. But it probably isn't training me to be a faster runner. You lose the bounce in sand that comes with running on harder surface, and so, in sand, you're supposed to lean forward, engage your calves more, and lift your knees instead--great exercise, I suppose, that could pay off. But should it be a focus of marathon training, where efficiency is everything? I find that on a road like Goat Ranch Cutoff I weave restlessly back and forth from one tire track to the next in search of the most compact line (which often doesn't exist to my standard). At times, I feel like I'm grinding to a halt, but step sideways can get me going again. And I have noticed that the footprints I leave--some from weeks before, layered with tire tread, and the tracks of rabbit (a constellation of pads), deer (cloven), and snake (long-intestinal)--rock a bit too much. Dastardly heel strike! If I were smart, I'd make a point of running longer, harder efforts on pavement, since ultimately that's what the race will cover, and focus on my form on the sand for easy/"maintenance" runs. But, we'll see.

In any case, it's a good reminder that Mono Lake is always affecting me. Often it seems so distant, just a mirror reflecting islands (I never run right along the shore, though I'm planning to, soon, up at ten mile beach). But of course it lay down the old lake bed I run across day to day. It sits there, at the center of the Basin, and from eons ago dictates my training.

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15 mi, 105 min; Conway Ranch loop + some ever sandy Goat Ranch Cutoff O+B, and a mile more through Mono City

Several erratic thoughts, as usual

Tired today, after a late long run last night and an early-ish morning in town. Took a nap in the afternoon before an evening jog. Some days the legs are simply content to rise and fall (all I do is lift), and this, to my mind, is the difference between a run and a jog. When you run, you push forward, purposefully, with each stride; when you jog you lift your legs and let them end up where they may, which tends to be forward. Runners usually try to finish each run at the same pace or faster than it began, and, as one maxim goes, to finish at the same pace, it has to feel like you're speeding up.

But, I pretty much went jogging today. Let gravity carry me down the old 395 to Thompson Road, to Cemetery Road... I noticed the ants busy around the cracks in the retired 395, and wondered what kind of kingdom they've built below those fissures, with old pavement for a roof. I thought then of the fissures atop Black Point, which I've explored, which were formed when Black Point, a volcano, erupted under the ice age lake; and of how the earth's crust, just like our roads, breaks down, and things descend, or push up from below. Up the hillside, meanwhile, lay the moraine south of Lundy Canyon, buggy-sized erratics--granite boulders with flat faces, left at the toe of the ghosts of glaciers--speckled over the hillside. Mini monoliths, they reflect the western light amid the sage, creatures beached far from the deep from which they came. Later I found myself looking at the lip of rocks and sand the glacier-esque Mono County graders/machines had created at the side of the road--a mini moraine full of fist-sized erratics, and who knows what small bones.

I'm not sure what it is about this place, or running--maybe the views--but I'm often sucked into a bottomless whirl of scale-play (just as I'm often sucked into word play here). Forgive me. At Cemetery Road and Wilson Creek, I ran out and back on the Black Point Rd 10 minutes to make it an easy 10 miles by the time I got back to the house in Mono City.

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10 mi, 70 min; Old 395-Cemetery Rd-Mono City Rd loop

Time to make strides

I decided to take it pretty easy today, because though the landscape never gets old for me--it always look different, new, though it's wave, after scraggly wave, of sage--the length and cadence of my run does. Monotony is the bane of creativity, and perhaps fitness. I'm looking forward to throwing my first, short tempo run into the mix, in two weeks. I'm also going to institute a genuine long run.

And, oh, it was refreshing do some strides today on E Mono Lake Dr. The first of many. In between my easy dashes, I watched a silhouetted kestrel, perched on a telephone wire over the sage. It dipped its long tail for steadiness, swiveled its neck-less head. Then, it sprung backwards, beating fast and low across the brush, gliding in to another lookout on a bush (and flushing a pair of watchful Say's phoebes, which flew to where it had been on the wire).

There's release in a burst of speed. A sense of intent, maybe hunger.

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8+ mi, 60 min, + 4 easy strides; Rambling on roads around Mono City