APR-A-8
THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS, EASTER ON THE EASTERN
SHORE,
AND THE CHERRY BLOSSOM TEN MILER RACE
THE BOOK OF “GEELHOEDS” ARRIVES,
WITH THE GENEOLOGY FROM THE
1500’S TO THE PRESENT
April 1—7, 2002
It is “Spring Forward Day” today, so the cold spring light is persisting to the present when ordinarily I would be turning on lights in the evening. It was rather cold and dark this morning when I got up and it stayed cold all day. I called up Joe at 5:00 AM since he had said all along that he wanted to run the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler with me as he has in previous years, but his wife Betty would not like it since it was their eleventh anniversary. She would not be out of bed by the time he returned, and they had no specific plans for the morning, but she said that the very thought of it, that he would be running with Glenn on their anniversary made her upset. So, Joe said he would need some additional time and diplomacy to work on this one and that he would need to get back to me on this one. When he had not after my Saturday call to him, I waited through until 5:00 AM Sunday morning, and thought that I should not disappoint him if he was already dressed ready to run as he always is when I come by early, so I gave a call which Betty answered. Joe was very apologetic, and still eager to go, but said that he should have to give it a pass this year, and I understood, in no way eager to get in between this one. So, off I went in the 32-degree dark spring forward morning to line up alone—and felt lonesome on the takeoff of this run.
I have run in shorts and singlet often this year already, but not this morning. I wore a long sleeve tee shirt from the Army Ten Miler from last year—they were giving them away at the Expo when I picked up my packet for the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler yesterday—since they have an abundance of them for all the wrong reasons. The Army Ten Miler is the largest Ten Mile Race in the World (by contrast, the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler this morning is a classic, big-money race, attracting all the Kenyans and Ethiopians and the runners from all over the world, but is limited by the NPS to 6,300 finishers to avoid crowding the DC streets.) The Army Ten Miler this year would have been about 20,000 strong, but had been threatened by a bomb scare last October three weeks after September 11, so it was cancelled with almost no notice. It is one reason that the subsequent Marine Corps Marathon was such a triumph, since it went on as scheduled, despite the earlier threat the Army buckled under.
This week also marked the significant milestone from the Marine Corps Marathon. They sent me an official certificate for having completed SEVENTEEN Marine Corps Marathons, which was the first race I had ever entered. The MCM Running Club sends a patch for every five years of running, so I got my fifteen year patch, which also guarantees me an entry into the next one, for which I signed up for the 27th running on the 27th of October—a very busy time of year, which will have me flying in the night before from Colorado—which I may reach by way of Bishtek Kyrgistan and Panamik, respectively!
For good measure, I also signed up for the 3rd Marathon In The Parks November 17, and also for the 2nd DC Marathon on March 23rd 2003. I have been in argument with the AMAA for an entry into next year’s 107th running of the Boston Marathon, for which I should get a complimentary registration at the Boston meeting, since I had recruited a sponsor that will be exhibiting at the meeting this year (NutramaxLabs) which messages the AMAA has been scrupulously ignoring each time I remind them of their promise. I finally sent them an email which should not be ignored, saying this must be cleared up by the Boston meeting this coming weekend, and I certainly will report on their welching out on their offer after I had secured the sponsor for them, and let the others know that it is not worth it to try since they are not going to honor their promise. Both The Steamboat Marathon (run as I am out, between trips in Nepal and Spiti) and the Bighorn Ultra, which I have run each year of the last four, are out this year, since I will be gone in the Himalayas around the time for each.
So, it seems, I am now wanted to lead tours of South Africa and China with pre-medical students for the NYLF (the subject of Apr-A-6) on multiple other trips next summer in 2003, and have had a request for each of the Himalayan trips I am doing this year with the addition of two more in Sikkim and Bhutan, so my next year is already supersaturated. I had then seen that Sikkim is off for this year, and it is during that precise time that I had been invited to do the hunt for giant Ibex in Kurdistan by George Sevich when we had met one night this week, so I tried to put that trip in between two others, coming back to Colorado, for the elk hunt that I am booked to do just before the night return to do the 27th MCM on October 27. As soon as I had tried to arrange that, Ravi called to try to add a trip to Panamik for the two weeks that follow the Kyrgistan dates of September 25—October 5. If that can be done, it will have to be done by my going on to Panamik through Delhi after Kyrgistan through London or Moscow—and that is being looked into now. The sticky part of this would be that any trophy or especially my rifle (see below for the new firepower I have now got for really big game) would have to leave Russia with me, and it cannot get into India, so it would have to come back with whatever partner I can talk into going in with it with me. The overlapping layers of multiple trips are starting to catch some serious interference.
CHERRY BLOSSOM TEN MILER RACE
Our spring has been colder than our winter. Despite this, the cherry blossoms came out and I ran a few times around the tidal basin to check on their progress. When I saw more people than blossoms, I knew that both the cherries were in fine form and that the weather was such that people wanted to go down and see them despite the cold breeze, so I directed my running route elsewhere from the Fitness and Wellness Center, which I have begun again to use as my base. As I did so, I invited Craig and Carol Schaefer to come over to see hem as they had last year, and they came on Good Friday afternoon, as I was assembling the last of my completed photo albums and essays and trip narratives in order for my students to present a special program on Malawi and Ladakh. At that time, who should call but Paul Antony, who had been my protégé and is now the WHAMO officer (White House Medical Officer) and is not only an F-18 Tomcat Fighter Pilot, and MD and an MPH and having done a few of my foreign electives, wants to get into a career like mine, now alternating his time with every high risk (usually foreign) presidential trip and learning helicopters at the Navy Air base here. He came by to get inspired again in what he would like to do for a career, and also since I had talked him into his first Marine Corps Marathon, and he wants to get ready for another. Since he had come to my office between presidential trips (although he is a Democrat and came in during the Clinton White House, he thinks George Bush is the most personable, humble and nicest man he has met in this close responsibility) I suggested he shuck off his jump suit and get ready to accompany me and the Schaefers on a brief Cherry Blossom stroll at the Tidal Basin and then come to dinner. The dinner was at Pulcinella’s in McLean, where Chona’s husband works and by prearrangement; he had carried in some medical supplies for me to pack up for the next trip. It was a good dinner in a nice place. The Schaefers and I went home to Derwood, and we got in late for my very early start, when I went on a twelve mile run with Joe from 6:00—8:00 AM, seeing all the Ken-Gar runners starting up as Joe and I had finished, even before his wife Betty had got out of bed.
When I returned to Derwood, the four MAP boxes of medical supplies arrived for the next two Himalayan trip (now how am I going to get all six check-in bags put in on this coming trip?) We talked about the last two medical missions, and awaited a surprise that they were eager to pull on their daughter Cindy who was coming to Derwood by prearrangement, not knowing her Dad would be here.
Cindy and I had worked out by pre-arrangement in emails that she could come and interview me for her class in her Masters degree in Publishing. She needed to have an official interview with someone who had written a book (she had got “Out of Assa” from Border’s—the same price as Amazon, but with no shipping and handling charge, I learned) and read it carefully. So, she had a notepad full of questions and a tape recorder with a few hours of tapes. So, we went through the interview filling several of those hours on the tapes. She needs to distill all of this down to 1600 words, and will send me the edited copy. This was a pleasant favor to do and she was good at her job. I asked her if she would like to edit a large pile of completed books in manuscript from! All week, I have been collating and assembling a complete description of each of the trips I have taken to each of the venues, and have field copies of all of this material in the Deans’ Office to be available when I am not here, so that no student can get into one of my trips without knowing all about what they are getting into. I also put together the “Year of Fulbrightness” and the essays written while in Africa, and they are also ready to be put together in a book. Ideally, this could be done on the web, but the web master and my web site just do not work, and the web gurus I have tried to retain just do not make any effort to make them work. Since I have done all the work in putting together all of the manuscripts, and they could even be posted in real time from the field in live action, the guru has not posted ANY of the material I have sent from abroad this year, and to date 2002 consists of the Jan-A and Jan-B-series which are erroneously the Dec-C-series triple posted. No numbers of corrections that I have sent have been corrected, and the Nepal trip which is forthcoming next month was taken off just when the students were consulting tit to see what they were going to be experiencing. So, the revisions and the constant effort have been total failures in that the web simply does not do what I had designed it to do, insofar as I am dependent upon anyone else. So, I have come back to the idea that it must be done by paper kinds of publication. With that, I see Kurt Johnson appearing announcing that Three Hawks Publishing is bankrupt, and has a number of bills I must pay to finish it off as a business failure. I have been sending people to the Three Hawks web site to buy the book. This activity of mine has been the only publicity or promotion of any kind, and I just learned that the web site has been defunct for two years with no one of those orders ever being received. So, the Borders or Amazon kinds of orders are the only ones that still can be processed.
So, Kurt, with a mountain of my completed work, is out of the “trade book” business, in which we had no friend or helpful review or any kind of publicity that could sell the book. I must have an agent or promoter, and I need an editor to get the manuscripts lying on the garage floor in Alexandria out of their entombment. So, I will need someone somewhere like Cindy whom I had just been interviewed by, as I continue to write large volumes of work into oblivion. At least the files I had produced in these last weeks in the Dean’s Office may be read by a few students to get them ready to go to some of the same places for similar experiences.
When Cindy completed her interview, we went to the Bugaboo Creek restaurant for lunch, and then in convoy drove over to the Eastern Shore. I arrived in time to see the second final game of the Maryland versus Kansas, that put my native state of Maryland, the Terps, in the finals against Indiana (the Hoosiers) to win the NCAA basketball national championship. I also went out for a Mexican dinner with Craig and Carol and Bill and Kim Behr his partners in the Cambridge practice, which seems to be going along well. Craig still has a condo on the Church Creek, and is trying to sell the new house in Carolina, but without success. To finance his last year’s taxes, he is finally selling the Viper, and then wanted to sell the superb rifle that I carried on the Kamchatka spring bear hunt in 1990. I bought it along with two scopes.
The new rifle is a very powerful flat-shooting heavy caliber. It has the trajectory of the .270 (my Browning deer rifle that I had discovered last fall is such an accurate tack driver), but the bullet it delivers is twice as big when it gets out there, for much greater energy. (The destructive knockdown power goes up arithmetically with the mass, but logarithmically with the velocity, and this .340 Weatherby delivers a heavy punch at a distance.) In addition, it has a quick-release mount, so that the two scopes can be quickly interchanged if there should be any trouble with either—as happened so famously when I missed the Dall Ram the back end of the scope had been jarred off from the mount in the rigorous climb. The first is a Shepherd’s scope that has 24-inch circles aligned for the trajectory of the Weatherby 230 at distances marked out to 1000 yards at 200-yard intervals. The second is a Leupold 10 X scope like the one on the .270. Since that is the kind of shooting at big Ibex or elk that I anticipate, this should work well for that. But the cartridge is bigger than almost anything on North America, and it would also be a powerful African sporting arm, stopping anything that moves up to and including elephant charges. So, I am now sure that I do not need any more really big game rifles, since I have the full spectrum covered and can use the ones I have on an all-family and friends hunt, with me supplying all the shooting hardware.
Easter morning, I ran along the banks of the Choptank River along the old historic area of Cambridge MD, in a light drizzle, then came back to an all-Schaefer family brunch while playing “Kingers” with colored hard boiled eggs.
I drove back across the Bay Bridge while watching gasoline prices rising five cents morning and eight cents evening for the next week. I celebrated Match Day, with my protégé student Elizabeth Yellen pulling down the prize plum of the year—getting a straight categorical pediatric residency at Boston Children’s’ Hospital at Harvard—the highest goal to which she timorously aspired. I helped Elizabeth Yellen and John Sutter (who have each been with me on each of the Ladakh and Malawi trips) put together a presentation of my prints from the albums that will be scanned in to disc and power point presentations both for their show on April 10 for the other student “Wannabes.”
THROUGH WASHINGTON UNDER THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS IN THE COLD, WE CROSS THE
FINISH LINE OF THIS RACE—THE LAST BEFORE
THIS WEEK’S DEPARTURE FOR BOSTON
I met Charlie and Cindy Clark and Imme Dyson at the conclusion of my race, and stayed through the Awards ceremony to catch a photo of Imme winning the first in her age group. I have a new age group in this race also, and I looked around at my competition—they are tough. The race has a few seventy year-olds who run under eight minute miles! I will go up to Boston for the 106th Marathon—my seventy fourth—and shuffle along.
I return to visit my friends Lee and MJ Dutton in Providence RI as I drop the rental car and catch a flight there, then go to Charlottesville the next day to conduct Medical Ethics Grand Rounds in the University of Virginia. I then tussle all the medical packs and backpacks for the next two consecutive trips—to Dharamsala for two weeks, and then on to Kathmandu and two weeks in Nepal—and take off through Frankfurt and Delhi to arrive on the next sequence of multiple Himalayan missions.
The Long Hauls have begun, in both the long runs, and the long travels for treks on the far side of the world!