11/8/2022: 3.82 Miles
When you run around the same streets that you both grew up in for 18 years and have run through multiple times over the course of the last eight years, you tend to have a lot of overlapping memories of all the times of years past. The memories are actually inescapable; every intersection, building and garbage can contains at least a memory or two, even if I can’t actually remember them all at once.
Today I chose to stimulate some more untapped memories with an unorthodox route that I never would have taken while training more seriously, if only because it wasn’t routine or efficient enough for me to scrounge up all the necessary miles. This turned out to be a good choice, as I went down new roads that left me guessing which houses used to belong to my elementary school friends and classmates, and wandered past the temple where I had a piano recital one year.
These aren’t life-altering memories to reminisce on, but they’re memories that I encounter less often, and when you’re spending time in your childhood home for a couple of months between jobs and everything feels the same even though so much has changed, anything different from the norm is very much welcome.
Running at home in tandem with blogging about it has also helped incentivize me to write more about my history with running; I’ve drafted a couple different stories of my earliest running days, and I am excited to continue editing those pieces before eventually publishing them here. I don’t want to post them right off the bat as I have done with these, because I want to ensure they’re at least somewhat thoughtfully written and revised. Those stories will be posted as part of the “Flashback” series, so keep your eyes out for that.
Anyway, let’s wrap up for the day with our second piece of Dunkin’ Donuts Trivia, as mandated by the Massachusetts government. The Dunkin’ Donuts fact of the day is that Dunkin’ customers are pissed that the company recently changed their rewards program to make it much harder to get enough points for free drinks and other goodies. This is leading to many customers boycotting Dunkin’ Donuts, but that probably won’t matter because Dunkin’ Donuts is a massive corporation that will still probably get a large influx of customers every single day. I am gravely hurt that Dunkin’ Donuts, a corporate monopoly in capitalist America, could ever be so disloyal to it’s customers, so I am going to rebel against the Massachusetts government by changing the topic of our weekly trivia to Tim Horton’s, which I am sure is a completely innocent company because it is from Canada. Hopefully I won’t have been taken away by the DDBI (Dunkin’ Donuts Bureau of Investigations) by then, but even if that were to happen, I can assure you that Tim will definitely still be running. Most likely running away from the guards who are wielding pistols in one hand and medium iced coffees in the other. Pray for me.