Good Heavens!

I’m still running less frequently than the VW Jetta I owned in High School but I think I might be starting to get some motivation back. I don’t have any humorous running related stories to regale you with so I’m resorting to posting excerpts from my grade school writing assignments. Like all of the others that I’ve posted this particular piece was written in my ‘news book’ which was intended for reporting factual stories, and like all of the others it contains no punctuation whatsoever (you’ve been warned, Kristina). All of the entries in this book are mundane chronicles of what I did over the summer or the previous weekend. All of them except the one that follows:

It says:

Good heavens said the postman as he emptied the letter box there is a tiny little letter so he picked it up and it started to grow biger and out poped a cooking pot

No commas were harmed in the creation of this article.

I guess I got tired of just retelling what I did over the weekend, or perhaps I’d had a particularly dull and boring weekend and decided to liven things up a bit. My favorite part is when the cooking pot ‘popes’ out. I wish I knew what it meant to Pope Out. Is it a greeting that you tell someone when you leave, kind of like saying peace out?
“Hey, I’ll see you later man I gotta’ bounce.”
“Alright man, Pope Out!” *thumps chest twice and gives the peace sign*

Or, since the Pope often wears a funny hat, do you Pope Out by wearing a ridiculous hat or by wearing your hat crooked?
“Hey have you seen Brian?”
“Yeah, that’s him over there with the Poped Out hat.”

Sometimes I forget to zip my fly and my junk popes out of my shorts. Whatever the meaning, I’m going to try and use it a lot this week to see if I can figure out the most appropriate use for it.

Housekeeping - “... you want me fluff pillow?”
A couple of housekeeping matters. First, the new Laugh Tracks Podcast is available featuring me, Raz, and Nitmos. You can check it out at Runners’ Lounge or on iTunes. Second, don’t forget to enter the contest for a free pair of Pearl Izumis in the post below, right now your odds of winning are somewhere around 1 in 100, which is better than your odds of ever finding a tpyo in a post here at Half-Fast. See how easy that was!

Cheating in Sports Exposed

Since I haven’t run at all since the marathon (did you guys know I ran a marathon?) I thought I’d use this post to give you another peek into the formative years that molded me into the outstanding individual that I am today. I had previously posted an excerpt from some of my grade school writing that talked about my first (perhaps) running experience, and I’ve got another one to show you today.

It says:

June 23 Ian
Yesterday it was Sports day and a ribbon told you if you won or not a red ribbon was first blue was second and green was third and I did not win a ribbon and Tim in blue won the skipping but I saw him cheating and Richard in blue got disqualified because he held it on his head and the second got first and third got second and foreth [sic] got third

Once again I don’t remember much about this, I certainly don’t remember the talking ribbons that told you if you won or not and you would think that one wouldn’t forget something as cool as that. As a point of clarification, Richard was holding a beanbag on his head which was cheating because you were supposed to balance the tiny beanbag on your head while running 100 meters, I don’t think that came through in the story. Also, it appears that this was written sometime before we learned any form of punctuation whatsoever, I’m sorry if you had trouble following it.

I think you can see that even at an early age I was already starting to make excuses for why I didn’t win, obviously I was not winning because everyone else was cheating. Little Timmy and Richard probably thought that they had already suffered enough for their crimes, but they didn’t realize that I was going to re-publish this after all these years, causing them to relive the shame of their youth. To put this in perspective, Tim was my very best friend back in those days, we were as close as brothers and yet I still had no qualms pointing out that he was a cheater. I’m sure that I did it out of love, Jay McGwire and I both know that sometimes a brother needs tough love, especially if you think you can make a fortune by publishing the story. Now where’s my book deal?

Also, skipping? Seriously?

Where It All Began?

I was recently at my parent’s house, lamenting all the cool toys that they’ve bought for my children that they never bought for me and generally being an ungrateful son when I came across a box of some of my old school work. One of the items in the box was my old ‘News Book’ where we kept a record of the things in our lives that we deemed newsworthy. I’m not sure what grade or age I was in when I wrote the entries in this book, but clearly it was sometime before they taught us punctuation or appropriate sentence length. You may catch some distinctly British phrases mixed in because I grew up in England and also, you should probably be reading it with an English accent.

It says:

June 6
In the holidays was when my daddy took me out for a 1 mile run and I went to Village day and I tried to win a football lots of times but I never did get one and I went on the merry go round and then I had a go at throwing a ball at the can and I got a key ring with a cat on it and my worst thing was when I got a pain in the neck and I got sun burnt.

Now, this brings up some interesting questions like; what on earth is Village day? Was the pain in my neck from the sunburn or in addition to it? Was this my first ever run or had we done this before? Did we run any intervals during that mile? What was the elevation profile like? How do you stretch one sentence out over 2 pages like that? Because seriously, that would have been a useful skill to have remembered in college. And finally, why the hell was I in school on June 6th? That’s practically the middle of the summer. These are all things I’d like to know. I wish I could go back in time and grab that little boy who wrote that by the collar and yell “be more specific,” while shaking him violently, because I think I’d be the better for it.

There were a number of other entries in the book that were a lot funnier than this one, but I found it interesting that I apparently started running and writing about running a long time ago. Check it, I even got a comment on it.

It’s also kind of neat that even at a young age you can see my writing style starting to develop into the complex style that I still use today on my blog and I still run just like I did in the holidays and I even ran last night on the treadmill and I didn’t want to because of the pain in my knee and then I did and soon I’m going to run a marathon and I’ll probably write about it too and I’m going to be fast and I hope that my knee doesn’t hurt and soon I will learn about punctuation and appropriate sentence length.

Exciting Podcasty Update: The new podcast is up, download it here or search for it on iTunes.