Shout to my buddy Jeff

A wonderful childhood friend and brilliant writer, Jeff over at the Shape of Days, has been gradually coming out of the closet regarding his running habit.

Quick story about Jeff, and how he’s scary smart. Our high school was a Magnet (or Mag-uh-net) High School, meaning that they grabbed all of the geeks out of the other schools in the parish and bussed us off to a school in a not-so-great part of town (believe it was called “Down Bottom) for, I like to believe, our own protection. Of course, the school didn’t have a football team, since, well, frankly, I think the biggest two dozen or so guys in the school could have been literally killed by any JV squad in the parish. Even if you’d gotten the JV squad to give up their guns, knives, etc. and play a fair game of football. But, you’ve got to have some sports for kids to play to put on college applications – we had, honest-to-god, fencing.

Yeah. Poking each other with metal sticks. Great fun.

Anyhow, Jeff fenced his first couple of years at Magnet; I fenced my last couple of years. Jeff and I were buddies for most of school – we rode the same bus, he lived not so far from my house, we both were geeks even among other geeks. So, when I started fencing, Jeff said he’d be happy to practice with me. As this is becoming a longer bit than I’d intended (mostly I just wanted to pimp Jeff’s recent 5K effort), I’ll come to the point:

I like to lie to myself on occasion and pretend I’m a reasonably bright guy. Yet when I do, I’m always reminded that Jeff managed to get me to voluntarily put on a blindfold and let him chase me around his front yard (yard completely festooned with tree roots and, I believe, dog poop) while whacking me with a metal stick. “Training” he called it…