A Desert Run

Tough medicine

Creosote bush, one of the most common and dominant shrubs in the low deserts of the American Southwest. Drawing by WRT.

            Some people are built to run--- all skinny sinew, wires, and oxygen--- but I am not. For most of my life, I relished the pleasure of churning up mountain trails, chugging like a logging train, and my knees could take the inevitable downward thumping as well, but running---- succinctly stated--- I hate it.  Yet, I ran for over 35 years after a very long, steep descent from the Sierra Laguna Mountains in Baja California in 1978 resulted in a crippling case of tendonitis.  I didn't know what it was at the time, only that the simplest walk was excruciatingly painful.  The podiatrist later declared me to be defective by having a pronated right foot, putting added strain on my knee etc etc blah blah marmalade marmalade marmalade….

            So, I bought some shoe inserts and took up running for the primary purpose of dealing with this tendonitis. From our old house, I could do a three to four mile run with half of the distance on trails, and I liked the unevenness, dodging variability of it, but when we moved to our current neighborhood, the run was entirely on paved streets in the neighborhood, in other words, boring.  The combination of this with the sweaty, boiling Florida summer did not increase my love of running, nor did the hour it took to stop sweating afterwards.

            However, running in the desert of Borrego Springs was a different matter, and certainly not boring.  I simply ran across the desert alluvial flats, beginning at our back porch, and shoes crunching on the gravelly sand, I nimbly dodged among the bushes of grey saltbush dense with seed heads and every time I passed a creosote bush with its yellow flowers and cottony fruit balls I got a whiff of its disinfectant smell.  I could run in any direction, zigging and zagging, as I could see farther than forever and was unconstrained by roads or trails. Often my goal was a tiny grove of palms planted at what someone must have hoped would someday be their homesite. 

View from our back porch in Borrego Springs. I simply ran a direction chosen on the spur of the moment, dodging among the dark creosote bushes.

It took about 15 minutes to run there, and if I ran a little too fast, I then circled and zigzagged among the ocotillos, to bring the time up to 15 minutes, before starting back for a total of 30 minutes and 3.5 miles.  As I tired on the return run, I needed more to distract me.  I sniffed as I passed through the scent cloud of each creosote bush I passed, counted the desert lilies with their wavy leaves and lovely flower spikes, scared up jack rabbits (and waved them goodbye) and mentally censused the size and distribution of the nests of the black harvester ants with their surrounding drifts of spent seeds.  Finally, I was back home, panting and sweating, my running duty done.

The desert lily, one of the late spring flowers I often encountered on my runs in the Anza-Borrego Desert. Drawing by WRT.

The nest discs of the black harvester ant, Veromessor pergandei, surrounded by the chaff of seeds they have devoured. Colonies consist of tens to hundreds of thousands of worker that forage on long trails.

            So, running in Borrego beat running in Tallahassee all hollow, but it was still running, and I never became a runner even after 35 years, and it was always a chore, and I always hated it.

An Update. Strangely, it was only after I quit the boring “distance” running that I discovered that I liked dashes--- brief, all-out spurts at (my) maximum speed. In contrast to painfully tolerating the long plod of a distance run, struggling to keep my mind on something else… anything else… the dash was over almost as soon as it began.  I was certainly far from champion quality, but how many 80-year-olds can dash at all?  It thus became my 80^th birthday wish to run 100 meters in less than 20 seconds.  Sure, the world record for 80-year-olds is about 15 seconds, so my goal was pretty lame by comparison, but still…. Anyway, I did it in 19.40 seconds, which come to think of it is the year I was born multiplied by 100.  Now, if I can maintain this time until I am 95, I will be the world champ.  How hard could it be?

I am grateful to Kim Jones for helping me achieve my dashing goal. With her help, I think I maintained proper form, as well as top speed (for me).