I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods to my kids before bedtime. It is a wonderful read, partly because Bryson goes off on all sorts of tangential commentary. For example, his thoughts on moose:

A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “Hey—woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety.

Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly-blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on.

Last week, the second soft launch of The Moose was my inaugural F3 fartsack. I was not going to let that happen again, so when Subprime said he was unable to Q, I stepped in.

Warmup: dynamic stretching—high steps, toy soldiers, fellowship lap around the parking lot, stretch-whatever-you-need-to oyo

The Thang: We started off going east. There’s a bike path that leads to a tunnel under 54 and north into Meadowmont. My plan was to run to Rashkis Elementary and turn around. That would be a great workout! Not having checked the actual distance, it appears I overestimated how far that would be. We rolled by Rashkis in less than 20 minutes. After taking a brief stop to greet our fellow PAX at Orange County Line, we continued on weaving through Meadowmont. A couple of out-and-backs in the vicinity of Fresh Market had us back with only a few minutes to spare. In all we did about 10 k.

Mary: nope

Announcements:

• Wuerffel’s bands are playing at the Kraken this Friday, May 18 starting at 8:30 pm
• Evening of June 9 at the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill is Cocktails for Kids to benefit the Malawi Children’s Initiative, a nonprofit started by our F3 brothers Zika and Homes. Several other PAX will be there. It is a great 2nd and 3rd F opportunity, and maybe even 1st F if you do some burpees on the dance floor…. https://www.malawichildrensinitiative.org/cocktails-for-kids-2018

Moleskin

Thoughts are with the PAX set for the Mountain Heavy and Star 50-miler events this weekend. We hope these are safe and enriching experiences. DFQ!