We were ring-around-the-rosy children
They were circles around the sun
Never give up, never slow down
Never grow old, never, ever die young.
— the prophet james vernon taylor
—

She’s not worried about pace. She just wants a popsicle.

She doesn’t have a heart monitor or a tech shirt or carbon-fiber high-rises. She IS pretty excited about her shoes, though. She says they light up when she walks. Why hasn’t Nike discovered this as a way to add another fifty bucks to their shoe price?

We are hiking to The Top of the World, but she’s undaunted by the climb. She alternates between walking and sprinting and walking again, then hitching the occasional piggyback rides with Mom and Dad.

Still, she loves to run. She takes off on a manic sprint from time to time, leaving her older sister behind before pausing to let the group catch up. It’s all about the simplicity of motion, the exhilaration of blasting down a single-track on a warm day in the desert, rocks be damned.

You can see that someday she’ll be tearing up the trails. In the words of Cassidy, it’s hard to resist the siren song to “become legends in our own time, strike fear in the heart of mediocre talent everywhere! We can scald dogs, put records out of reach!” But for now, it’s just a love affair with life. And she hugs the dog a lot.

Old runners should be required to hike with young ones now and then, just to remember  the point of this stuff. It’s not about pace and suffering and PRs and maximum heart rates and finish lines.

It’s about joy and exploration and flowers. Why would you ever want a finish line for that?

It’s easy to forget what’s important as you get old. Stop looking at your watch. Start looking at the world. Life is not a training plan.

Afterward, we sit around a picnic table, eating popsicles and laughing. What more could you want in life?

Stryd wants me to do a five-minute maximum followed by a 30-second surge today so it can compute some random number I don’t even care about. I think Stryd will have to wait.

I’m not worried about pace. I just want a popsicle.