Just before the Thanksgiving holiday in 1959, a federal official announced that the nation’s supply of cranberries was contaminated with a cancer causing pesticide. The alarm spread quickly as the public reacted to widespread reports on television, radio and in the newspapers. Cranberry sales plummeted and millions of families went without the traditional dish.

The alarm was unjustified. A few weeks later, scientists explained that laboratory rats had been given megadoses of Aminotriazole, amounts equivalent to a human eating 15,000 pounds of cranberries a day for many years. The public apologies came too late for an industry nearly ruined by the bureaucratic decision to save the public from an exaggerated hazard.

When the hysteria faded, one thing had become crystal clear. Our ability to disseminate information exceeded our ability to assess its accuracy. And our capacity for alarm exceeded our ability to assess risk. We had taken our first steps into a vast unexplored region, into a wilderness without signposts or landmarks, into a chasm between what we perceive as the truth and what is true……….Read more

Read more http://www.scribd.com/doc/30250504/Chicken-Little-or-Paul-Revere

I KNOW I SHOULD BE WORKING OUT, BUT I NEED ALL MY ENERGY…
for my job, to keep my life going, just to get up in the morning, to make a living, to raise my family, to clean house…. It goes on and on. We all need energy, everyday.

But have you ever known someone who seems to have an excess of energy? They get everything done and you still see them going to the health club or on the tennis court or running down the road. Where do they get all that energy?

Here’s the secret. Physical activity, working out, uses energy but it grows energy too. Tired after a run? Of course, yet you have built stamina and endurance into your system. With each succeeding work-out you become stronger and more energetic. What an amazing pay-off for the investment of a few hours a week!

In a few weeks you will begin to see an increase in your energy level. Try it!

That spring night, my friend Bill parked on the tracks in front of a speeding freight train.
He was a sweet and sensitive man who chose to end his pain and the life that had betrayed him. Bill was the 6th grade teacher at Marine Elementary School during the 1970s and 1980s, a magic time for the school.

Days of gladness
Years of glee
Like torrents of spring
They flee, they flee. …Russian poet

Have you ever wished you could freeze a time and place? Keep at least the memory of it ever alive? I mean the colors, sounds and events, but mostly the people from a certain time in your life? If only we could have sprinkled some golden dust to keep the world as it was then, when it was in perfect balance. ……..Read more……

READ MORE AT http://www.scribd.com/doc/28827426/In-Praise-Of-Teachers

The Crabby Old Runner celebrates ONE YEAR of posts today.

BEYOND BEYOND ©Dennis Leger
-I want to see beyond beyond
-The things I’ve never seen
-In the misty distance
-Where I have never been.
—-I long to go beyond beyond
—-Over the far horizon
—-To a land of wonder
—-Where I have never gone
——-I need to know beyond beyond
——-The dark mysterious fear
——-In the dangerous unknown
——-Past the last frontier.

Still free downloads of “The Milk Market” (a thriller) for military personnel deployed overseas.

It’s called Operation ebook drop. At http://www.smashwords.com

I like this short video called “Runners Creed–The Road to Peace.” It’s from New Balance, but it’s not an ad. It says what I know a lot of runners feel. Well done. http://www.newbalance.com/?cmpid=07620100308

After your run, READ. I recommend a thriller: The Milk Market at
http:www.themilkmarket.com

This old writer’s tale is about “but first” distractions. It applies to running too. And all procrastinating.

Big writing project ahead. Where to begin? Well, first, let’s get everything organized. Clean off the desk. Pay the bills. Everything ready? I better sharpen these pencils. Let’s see, where’s the pencil sharpener? Where’s the battery for the pencil sharpener? Oops, I think there are more pencils in the other room. I wonder if the neighbors have any pencils that need to be sharpened. There! All the pencils are sharp.

Better check the e-mail. I’ll get a cup of coffee while the computer boots up. Coffee anyone? I better make a pot. Was that the mailman? I wonder if he’d like a cup of coffee. Oh well, he’s gone. Now I can let the dog out. Oh, poor puppy, do you need to go to the park? Where’s your leash? Well, get in the car. We have to go get you a new leash. Groceries? As long as we’re going, where is the list? I better start a list.

Oh shut up! Start writing. Right! But first the dog park. Writing or running! They are the same when it comes to distractions. Don’t let it happen to you!

Estimates vary, but if you do the math you have about 2.5 billion heartbeats available in your lifetime. Based on your current age, you can guess at how many of yours remain, give or take a few million.

You would be wrong if you said you didn’t want to use those heartbeats up in aerobic exercise. Fear not. Although your pulse, beats per minute, can easily double during exercise, doing the math shows that it is a good investment. Actually, the long term effect of aerobic work-outs (like running) is to slow the heart rate. You make the heart stronger and more efficient. It then has to work less often, slower pulse, to do the same amount of work.

Doing the math, a few hours a week of elevated metabolism results in hundreds of hours of easy work for the heart. Resting pulse rates for aerobically trained athletes are often in the 40s. That’s amazing leverage in the use of your lifetime of heartbeats!

It’s easy to do the numbers with the heart. But your muscles, lungs, circulation and the rest of your system enjoy similar benefits, except there is no way to quantify them. Runners know those benefits. Their life clock beats slowly and they feel better.

Wanted—readers! Visit http://www.themilkmarket.com

Whether you run five miles a week or train for a marathon, you face the same issue. You are asking your body to do something it would rather not. At any level of training, as you run your body is learning stamina. Your muscles are learning to store more glycogen. There will be a direct relationship between the number of miles you run and your muscles ability to go the distance.

To me, stamina and endurance are not the same. It depends on the level of your training, of course, but at some point, at some distance, you will run out of fuel. As the glycogen levels decline, you will ask your body to keep going. Yes, you will use all of your stamina and you will need something more to finish the race or just to keep a training promise. When your body runs out of gas you can ask it to keep going, to use the last gallon.

When your legs and lungs are ready to quit, you need endurance, the ability to endure pain. Fortunately, as you train your body to go the distance, you are also conditioning your mind. You learn that going on won’t kill you. You are learning to endure.

Stamina=physical Endurance=mental

“Life is action and passion. It is required that you share the action and passion of your time, lest you be judged not to have lived.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Civil War Hero and Chief Justice of Supreme Court.

Clearly life is both. Passion without action is wasted. Action without passion is aimless wandering.

We don’t run because it is the passion of our time. We run because we find joy in using our bodies, we find solitude on the road and we get the benefits of more fitness and less fatness.

In my 20’s my friends and I spent as much time as possible at the beach. Lake Calhoun, in Minneapolis, is about 3 miles around. An elderly gentleman in great shape used to run around the lake. He was tan and healthy, but so old. Now, I estimate he was in his fifties. Back in those days, there were few recreational runners. If there were running events available to the general population, they were not publicized.

I began by thinking if that old man could run, so could I. Then, every fall I went into a hell bent program to get in shape for the downhill ski season. And if I wanted to be hired as a city firefighter I would have to pass an agility test. So my first runs, off and on, were around the beautiful city lakes in Minneapolis.

The hook was set a few years later in a citizen’s cross-country ski race. A local girl, about 14 years old, kicked snow in my face. That spring I started a running habit that I’ve never regretted.

I don’t know what the average cost of entering a marathon, or half marathon, is these days. I know the marathon I run each year has increased the entry fee by about 300% in less than twenty years.

As in any other business, costs go up and they have to be passed down to consumers. Running events have gotten so big that everything about them is big. Apparently there is no economy of scale in the promotion, advertising, security, facility rental, permits, staff, medical, legal, printing, mailing and all the other expenses of an event.

That leads me to the $100 T-shirt. My wife would gladly help me find a nice T-shirt for less than $10. And she wonders, correctly, why I can’t just run 26 miles on my own, without 7000 other people. She could also point out, with appropriate sarcasm, that I usually run for solitude.

Well, I train without 7000 people. I put on the miles on my own. And I do enjoy solitude. But ultimately, the marathon is the goal I work for. I could do it all without that goal. But I don’t want to!

I wear t-shirts a lot, all summer anyway, and I like to say I don’t wear one unless I ran the race or walked the walk. (Celiac walk, a fund raiser for Celiac disease research. Good t-shirts!)

The $100 hamburger is common in general aviation, flying small airplanes. The cost of firing up the bird and flying to a nearby airport for a meal far exceeds the value of the meal by itself. It is flying for fun that just happens to include a hamburger. These days, when a lift ticket at a ski area or a round of golf is nearly $100, I guess a marathon or two per year is not a waste of money.

And I get the neat T-shirt.

NEED A BREAK? Read “The Milk Market” See reviews, a short summary, buy in print or ebook at
http://www.themilkmarket.com