I have always been an admirer of runners, primarily because it has been something I've never been capable of. Even at my thinnest, back when I was a gym rat, my knees would scream whenever my late, great friend, Harry Klessen would coerce me into taking "a bit of a jog" around the track.

Harry was a wonderful teacher and talented sculptor here in Sioux Falls, as well as an inveterate runner. He believed if I took up jogging I could stop working out so long and hard and we could chat more often.

My arthritic knees disagreed. But I always admired my septuagenarian buddy's physical aptitude.

Harry did run outside when the weather was nice, but he was much too intelligent to run north on Western Avenue in wintertime, in the dark, into traffic at 5:30 in the morning, with only a pinbeam light bouncing on his forehead, like the idiots I almost ran over this morning! If there had been an oncoming car right then, I would have had no choice but to crash into them to avoid these two nimrods.

Which is the reason I began writing this piece in the first place! I don't begrudge runners their space to run, but honestly running in the middle of a traffic lane, on a busy street, seems to me, anyway, to be counter intuitive to the desire to continue living.

But maybe that's just me.

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