Classic Chonicles - Archives

Each month as a new Classic Chronicle is posted to the main page, the previous Chronicle will be moved here, to the Classic Chronicle Archives.

Classic Chronicle - #1
Looking up, I see the finish banner and clock. I pick up the pace, releasing the energy I’ve been saving for the final kick. I am gasping for air; my heart is pounding. I am going to have a PR. I am going to break 30 minutes for 5-K. What?

Classic Chronicle - #2 The Metamorphosis
I wasn’t always a penguin. I wasn’t always as slow as I am now. I used to be much slower! It took 40 years to become so overweight and out of shape that running a mile and running a marathon were equally unthinkable.

Classic Chronicle - #3 Waddling Through History
Yes, I was there. Through the most unlikely cosmic hiccup, my name was drawn in the Boston lottery. I ran the 100th not because I possessed the talent, but because I had the audacity to put my name on a postcard. Destiny, it seems, has a sense of humor.

Classic Chronicle - #4 Survival of the Slowest
Steven Pinker, in The Language Instinct, suggests that if language didn’t exist, people would be so driven to communicate that they would create a language. So strong is our instinct toward communication that there are almost no recorded instances of groups of people who have not developed a means of talking to one another.

Classic Chronicle - #5 Embrace Your Local Penguin
Of all the changes that running has brought to my life, maybe the most important one is my awareness of my need for people. Having spent most of my first 40 years as a musician, I became accustomed to spending hours alone in a practice room. The practice room became a sanctuary, a safe haven from the pressures of work and relationships and family.

Penguin Thought of the Day
"I will waddle on. Slow but sure I am finding out who I am, and who I am not. And that is reason enough to keep me going."