Wild Ivy Ranch

When I moved to Oregon I was given the choice of a room in the house or into a travel trailer I jumped at the chance to move into the trailer. It’s really nice and it’s great doing pretty much everything on my own schedule. I’m really grateful to Brandy for inviting me to move up here. 

What I meant by “pretty much my own schedule” is that whenever you live on a ranch with animals they have to be taken care of. With three of us living here I don’t have a lot of responsibility I just try to help out with feeding, watering and clean up in the morning. 

One of the downsides of owning animals is when you lose them whether it’s from illness or old age it’s never easy. Since we moved up here we have already lost Oliver our goat, Ella the Corgi who passed away overnight with no warning sign, Stoli the Malamute who was just to tired to go on and Bea, one of the Saints who died from cancer. None was any harder or easier than another. Basically it just sucks to lose pets. 

In the meantime with 8 horses, 2 donkeys, 2 pigs, 1 goat, 9 dogs and 7 cats there are plenty of animals around to keep us busy and provide lots of love. I’m not going to try to show every one of them because one of our cats Penelope is a recluse and I’d be sure to miss some but here are a few. 

July Racing - “Not so Great”!

Three years ago when I was in Eugene for the Olympic Trials I ran the Butte to Butte 5K and then joined Smitty and some friends and he cooked blueberry pancakes in the Park on the river, a tradition they have had for many years. I signed up to do the 5K again this year and again we had breakfast in the park. 

The race itself was going really well and I was on pace to run my best time of the year. Unfortunately at two miles I tripped and went down hard. While I still finished the race the fall and subsequent injuries took a lot out of me and the time didn’t come. 

Yep! I wound up going to the ER in Cottage Grove after all was said and done to get an X-ray of my elbow and get the wounds numbed so they could clean the gravel out. 😳

For my second race inJuly I drove to Mazanita, Oregon a nice beach town north of here to spend the night and run a 5K on the beach. Another small town race with a lot of tradition. This was the 39th annual. Despite still having bruises and soreness from my fall I was feeling really good. The weather was beautiful. The wind was down and we ran on the hard pack with the tide out. 

The race was an out and back past the start line to another turnaround and then back to the finish. I felt really good when the race started and felt like I would have a good time. What could go wrong? Simple! They didn’t have anyone at the turnaround and nobody knew the turn was only .55 miles out. At 1.7 miles the people I was running with said their GPS said that’s how far we’d run. Needless to say the 5K results were unofficial! 😳 

My next race I ran with my niece Brandy in Cottage Grove with an 8:00 start time. Unfortunately three different locations gave three different start times so the settled on 8:30. My first struggle was mental because of paranoia about falling again. It was getting dark, I don’t see well at night and the quality of the roads was horrible. To compound that I also felt lousy physically as soon as the gun went off. I had received a shingles shot a couple days before and afterwards I had flu like soreness. It was still fun and the free beer was good. 

Then I decided I was done racing for July until I was healed up and feeling better. Next time I’ll race will be after I turn 71. A new year. I did a total of 36 races since turning 70. 

Back in Oregon - One Month Six Races

When I got back to Oregon I was looking forward to running some new races. I joined the Oregon Track Club and found Eclectic Edge Racing a company that puts on fun and unique races as well as providing race management for other races. The first race I did was Taco Tuesday 5K at the Eclectic Edge office. The race was good but the taco bar after including beer and soda was amazing. 

The next three races were all local with one at Alton Baker Park, the OTC monthly race in Springfield and the Father’s Day 5k and brunch back at Eclectic Edge headquarters. They were all different except similar in that they weren’t overly large and they felt like small town racing. 

Then my final two races of June actually were small town races north of Eugene. The first was the Brownsville Dam Run and included free breakfast in the park after if you were interested. You could tell that the majority of the runners were locals just from their interactions. 

The final race was the weekend before the 4th of July and was held in Harrisburg pretty close to Brownsville actually just on opposite sides of I-5. It was another well organized, friendly small town race. 

It was a. busy race month. A good way to get right into the running community.