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5/3/6

I've brought home a lot of great memories from my recent week in the Midwest. Brought home a bit of a limp as well. I was running in the woods near Madison, Wisconsin Friday afternoon when I took a spill and sprained my left ankle. I was three or four miles from the house where I was staying and without any way to call for help so I decided that I'd just have to get back as best I could. Forty-five minutes of very slow, very painful jogging later- actually what I was doing more closely resembled a Native American dance -  I realized I was completely lost. One of the  trails I had taken on my way back had clearly been the wrong one. Locomotion was becoming more and more problematic and  a sense of anxiety mixed with the increasing discomfort in my ankle as my mind began to manufacture all the possible scenarios I was looking at- ranging from embarrassing to downright distressing -  if I didn't find my way out of the forest quickly. It was at this point I heard a calming, somewhat familiar voice  and realized that I'd begun talking to myself.  The voice told me to carefully retrace my steps to the place where I'd been injured. It then told me to stop and think - recreate the first half of the run in my mind and picture the paths I had taken. I sat down on a nearby stump and mentally retraced my steps...  then I climbed back on my wounded horse and yelled, "Charge!". Of course- there's no suspense to this story whatsoever. I'm here typing so clearly I made it out of the woods okay. My cowboy boots still don't fit too well over the swelling so I'm wearing the rubber clogs (Crocks?) I bought at the local drug store where I went to pick up some Ibuprofen later that afternoon. (Pat Humphries of Emma's Revolution kidded me about performing all weekend in sexually ambiguous shoes!)  I guess the moral of the story - I'm aware that there is more than one here- is that sometimes you have to make the mental journey before you can make the physical one.