Running commentary

I grew up in a small town surrounded by farm fields in the Willamette Valley, so my running routes often included gravel roads, dirt paths, and pastoral scenery. My college years featured the extensive trail systems in Eugene and runs up through Hendricks Park.

Sisters, of course, offers an endless variety of trails, Forest Service roads, and backroad byways through the pondersosa forest.

As I ran here this morning in Daejeon, South Korea, I needed an alternate to my typical route down to the river on the bike path, so I went the opposite way, crossed under a busy road, and ventured onto the farmland that sits adjacent to our apartment complex.

There is nothing like this scene anywhere in Oregon. Before me is a mixed-use farm with fruit orchards, rice paddies, greenhouses, chicken coops, and fallow crop rows. Behind me are 12- and 14-story apartment buildings as far as the eye can see, housing thousands of people.

Before me, a solitary farmer is pruning the fruit trees by hand, gathering the wood in a wagon behind his small tractor to burn in his stove at home. Behind me, I can hear the early morning traffic, including the big blue metro buses that run like clockwork through the area from 6 a.m. to midnight every day of the week.

The juxtaposition between old and new is stark in its contrast, but I am thankful deep in my heart, because I need some sense of the tranquil, the older ways. I continue on the dirt path, further from the modern, and turn onto a paved lane with family homes on each side. I expect a dog to run out at me at any minute, but all I get are barks from inside the houses, where they are out of the cold. This is good because I am in the worst running condition of my life, moving at such a slow pace that even an elderly, three-legged dog could have me for breakfast.

The run has the desired effect. My brain switches from tasking to just free-thinking. I consider my slow pace and remember a time four years ago when my daughter Claire convinced me that we should run the Horse Butte 10 Miler outside of Bend. She was in fantastic condition and went on to win her age group and place among the top women overall, while I experienced what felt like the Horse Butte 20 Miler.

She teased me afterwards unmercifully for finishing near last, just behind two "old ladies." I told her that I spent the last 40 minutes of the run scanning the horizon, dreaming of a horse to find to ride to the finish.

"They shouldn't call it Horse Butte if there aren't any horses," I complained.

Back in the present, I turn around to head back past the rice fields and the farmer, still diligently pruning. I want to go over and talk to him, to tell him that his careful, methodical work reminds me of watching the farmers of my youth, whose hard-worked fields took on artistic beauty as they changed from furrowed brown dirt lines to waves of wheat or crops of corn "as high as an elephant's eye."

I run on home, thankful for the peace the run has given me.

Stepping into my apartment, I tell my wife, Deirdre, of the run. Motivation is returning to me and I invite her to join me on the next outing.