Author Archives: Bruce

I do not want this to be a cliquish book as I am sure you all have read that running helps for a good night sleep. The fact is sleep is one of the most important aspects in a healthy life as is exercise and diet. All of these are important aspects in health and they usually just fall in place naturally as kind of a domino effect in a positive direction. If you are running daily, one tends to eat more carefully in preparation of how food affects your runs. Sleeping with a good daily run and a healthy diet just comes naturally.

The key element I want to put across is sleep time becomes a time of just unbelievable pleasure for me and most runners I know. With my two daily runs, my water consumption and my light meals during busy hours, I am loaded with energy and my night time leisure hours of a few drinks with a good show or DVD becomes a very peaceful event. When my head hits the pillow, I curl up like a infant and just relish in the good feeling of the comfort and in no time, I’m in that peaceful zone of sleep. And wow is the sleep quality good. Very few daily runners that I know do not sleep well. Some take a nice relaxing early evening run to unwind and that works best for them. For me the morning runs are to wake-up and focus and a late afternoon run to unwind. And wow does it work. So throw away the sleeping pills and get out your running shoes.

As we all know, running is a discipline, yes, but it is also play time. Where I live close by we have a school that mostly has Korean students who are learning English here in the Philippines. Their ages are from elementary through High school and these are serious students as their parents are paying a lot of money to have the kids become fluent English speakers since it is a requirement for admission in Universities back home. Every morning, the students who are living in the schools dormitory hit the streets for their wake-up run and it is done in Military fashion. Well, I felt like I must change this so I started growling when I run up and down our safe quarter of a mile long street. I often run 7 times down the street and 7 times up the street lined with beautiful trees and other nice scenery for a leisurely three and a half mile run. So I am running towards and then along side of the Korean students and high five them and playfully pet their heads and growl like a wolf to get them to have fun. They think I am a nut, but after me persistently trying to take them out of their shell, they caved in and started having fun.

Of course there are those days we run and want to be in our own peaceful world which usually changes towards the end of our runs where we already feel great and then become more social to other runners and people on the street. The point is whether we are twenty years or eighty years old, running is also for fun and therefore is play time, so please have fun!

I was running with a friend in a State Park in Maryland in the later 70’s. He was not a runner but a brave soul that was game for anything. During the run which was less than 50% of my normal speed so Dick Herman could stay with me, nature called. Not a good thing for a runner especially when it comes to a number two-er. Well no choice but to go to an isolated area in the woods and do my thing. No choice but to use the leaves available to me to do what needed to be done. When the nasty deed was done i emerged on the road and instinctively beat on my chest and let out a loud beastly bear growl. Dick immediately followed with a reciprocal growl which was easy for him as he looks like a big bear.

That tradition continues to today, Dick in his early sixties and me in my mid fifties. One day Dick and i decided that the local cemetery was a perfect place for the run. In this case the contour is somewhat circular so i was running and passing by Dick and running my normal pace. Something did not seem right on one of my laps when i did not see Dick but I kept going. Well around the turn Dick jumps out from behind a headstone with the growl in full force and scares the living daylights out of me. A women who was in the area sees Dick with his shirtless hairy chest beating on his chest with full force. Poor woman runs to her car a few feet away and takes off in what seemed like horrible fear.

I use to run with a girl friend down a back trail in a wooded California area just north of Malibu beach. One day i decided to stop and drop my draws and continue to run. Patti could not stop laughing. Every time i did this trail with her, I’d drop my draws, a symbolism of immaturity as it was. I got caught one time by an unusual on coming hiker. We rarely ever saw anyone on this isolated trail.