In the first weeks of summer of '03 few members of the DGN team had worked their way up to high mileage. A few soldiers (although it cost me in the long run; no pun intended) had already started to log some heavy mileage. One of our longer loops that was somewhat of a secret to most of the team, was a loop around the Morton (?) Arboretum. This loop, run through a scenic, expansive, and uncrowded forest preserve came with a catch, actually a couple catches as it turns out. First of all you have to cross a bridge on a highway with an extremely narrow sidewalk, then you have to hop a 10 ft fence, but after that, your set. So Duke, Kindra, and myself set out on this loop and got into the Arboretum unscathed. When we started we realized this loop was going to be miserable. Unfortunately, it had rained for the past few days, and couple that with the swampy make-up of a few sections of the Arboretum and the hot and humid weather and you have a mosquito paradise. So within five minutes, all of us had been victimized by these [insert expletive] insects repeatedly. DK and I had had enough, but Duke, being the mile-eating machine that he is (he ran 1000 miles two summers in a row) decided to press on. This raised a conflict. Although I had run the Arboretum loop in the past, there are about 100 different paths and I didn't know that many of them and of course, we had ended up on a path that I was unfamiliar with. As usual, DK was no help because he had never done an Arboretum loop so he unofficially designated himself to the role of Official Bitcher. Meanwhile, having already run over five miles in the summer heat, we were growing thirsty, and we quickly came to learn that the drinking fountains in the Arboretum are few and far between. So then our run became a two part quest: find some water/get the hell out of the Arboretum. As we found out neither of these would be accomplished easily. One would think that two able-minded high school seniors would have figured to retrace our steps, but by now we had weaved our way throught the maze that was the Arboretum, so that option was out the window. We ended up wandering through the jungle until we heard the sound of cars in the distance. We followed the sound until we found ourself on the side of a highway on a big hill. I roughly recognized the surroundings, but that wasn't a good thing being that I recognized them to be extremely far away from where we wanted to be. So we ended up putting in about four miles on the side of the highway on this hill that somehow expanded the whole length we needed to go. Even more bizzare was the fact that the grass on the hill was freshly mowed, posing the question: why would they need to mow the grass on the side of a hill along the highway?, but we were to tired and thirsty to have a deep philisophical debate about lawn maintenance along interestate highways. Eventually we dragged ourselves back to the school and decided to never return to the Arboretum without a detailed map and a mosqiouto net.
An Old Lady, a Sewer, a Mockery:
One would think from the name of this story that it would be some complex senario that involved the intersection of three seperate plots through a bizarre series of events, but things like that don't really go down with the MGRC. We like our stories simple and crude. As indicated by the title at the top of the page, this story occurred on a loop as is the case with many other strange occurrences. In the early evening of the summer of '04 Barron, DK, and myself decided to put in a easy seven miler to DGS from DGN, but as we usually do we decided to spice it up and take a different path than the one established by the DGN coaches that we were so used to running. So we took the begining the loop backwards from what we usually do. We came to a good point to stop and stretch so we did so. This particular spot was in a remote parking lot that only had two or three cars in it at the time. From the parking lot, there is a small access to a subdivision where many of our loops pass by and we even run halves there during the winter. But anyway, we usually see the occasional pedestrian walking their dog, but for the most part it is pretty much a quite area where not too many people are out and about, but on this day, to my dismay, this was not the case. After my stretch, I decided that it would be best for me to lose some excess liquid in order for me to improve my running eficiency so I found myself in a postion many runners find themselves...where to go? Being the respectful young man I am, I decided against tainting the fine landscaping of a nearby lawn, and there was no way I was going to put my own holy water on a nearby house of God, so I went with the most reasonable option, a sewer in the corner of the parking lot right next to the sidewalk that leads to the subdivision. You can probably figure out where this story is going, but I'll continue for the hell of it. So I began to go about my business, taking special care to aim for the holes on the sewer grate as to avoid the feared "splash back" on my running shoes. Although I was able to accomplish this fairly successfully, I failed to make sure "the coast was clear" (to steal a line from Scooby Doo). Realizing this, I looked up and to my utter shock, I found myself about 15 feet away from an equally astonished old lady with a full frontal view of my biznass. I immediatley did what any sensible runner who just accidentally showed his biz off to an old lady...I ran like I've never run before. My suprised running-mates immediatley called out my name to see why I was running, and their question was answered shortly with the arrival of the (I'm guessing, but I don't think I'll be to far off with this assumption) alarmed and disheveled old lady. From what I hear, Barron somehow carried on a short conversation with the lady, who went along on her way. I returned to the scene of the crime after about five minutes, filled with shame one can only feel after being seen half-naked by an old lady. We continued on the loop, but to this day, I still don't think I'm the same man.
The Ondrovy Loop '02
Alright, if you're reading this Onrovy, don't get offended this isn't personal, as a matter of fact we consider you an honorary member of the MGRC and we want you to run any races you can. With that being said, this stands as probably the worst loop I've ever done. That summer members of the DGN team were supposed to design their own loop to change up the monotony of summer running. In Ondrovy's defense, hardly anybody even made a loop, but this one was brutal. It started out on the side of a busy street uphill, made a turn onto an even busier street with no sidewalk that was heavily travelled by semitrucks. So the five or six runners who did this went along for about four miles dodging cars and trying to balance on the top of the sloped hill that we were running on. When we finally got to Ondrovy's house, he had a water cooler set out, but for some reason he went inside his house for like five minutes. Meanwhile, some guy was rummaging around in his garage a few houses down, and called us over. We went over and he said he needed to move a tanning bed into his truck and asked us if we could help. That request raised a number of quesions and concerns, and the only thing I could think about was the scene in Silence of the Lambs where Buffalo Bill gets that girl to get in his car, but that's neither hear nor there. Luckily, there was a group of us so a couple kids agreed and helped the guy who gave us each a dollar, which was kind of bizzare. We ended up going back to Ondrovy's house and discussed how Saturns are made out of recycled milk cartons, and then we made our way back on that awful loop. Not really that good of a story, but it was a weird, miserable run.