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<\/a><\/p>\nI wanted to believe his reasons were legitimate and not because he thought he should be charging more.\u00a0 I was though (and remain) annoyed that if *I* had cancelled the booking, under the strict cancellation policy the host had, I would\u2019ve been charged the full price of the booking anyway.\u00a0 But I’m not compensated in any way, shape, or form when the monolith cancels on me.\u00a0 It’s the same thing when an airline cancels a flight: I don\u2019t get paid a $150 change fee but if I were to change my ticket you can bet your sweet bippy that they\u2019d be billing my credit card.\u00a0 The consumer is not protected and no one cares.<\/p>\n
Contemplating this as I grabbed my running gear and car keys, I found myself once again wallowing in a sense of hopelessness and ennui.\u00a0 My heart and soul is broken when I think about my country at the moment \u2013 the lies and innuendo, the Nunes memo, the embarrassing grade school level of discourse *on both sides* of the aisle, the threat of nuclear war as an approval ratings grab by the ultra conservative apocalypse hawks.\u00a0 I feel depressed and demoralized and more than anything I feel paralyzed.<\/p>\n
It was in this mindset that I walked out my front door and headed to the car to drive down to Huntington Beach for the Surf City Marathon.\u00a0 I actually contemplated just not going.\u00a0 What does it matter?\u00a0 What does any of it matter anymore?\u00a0 But I had overeaten under the guise of \u201ccarbo loading\u201d when in fact it was just \u201cthe same old, same old\u201d binge eating.\u00a0 I needed to at least TRY and work off SOME of the calories with which I had stuffed my face.\u00a0 That more than any other reason was what compelled me to hop on the 5 South freeway.<\/p>\n
Traffic is the bane of my existence here in southern California\u2026 and really almost EVERYWHERE I go these days.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure ANY place I\u2019ve been recently hasn\u2019t prompted the hurry-up-and-wait start\/stop road rage in me.\u00a0 The one nice thing about 4 AM on the CA freeways \u2013 they actually do kinda work at that hour.\u00a0 With minimal cars on the road, you can actually drive and traverse the distances in something approaching what Dwight D. \u201cIke\u201d Eisenhower wanted for America\u2019s highways post-seeing-the-Autobahn.\u00a0 I made good time down to HB and though wound up parking a bit farther afield than I might have liked, at least the side road I found was free and thus I did not need to fork over the $15 for parking the area lots would have had me pay.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve done this race before.\u00a0 In 2009, I ran a 4:11:20.\u00a0 In 2016, it was a 3:33:47.\u00a0 Tomorrow I\u2019ll login to my photo cloud storage and see if I can\u2019t pull some pics from those years to compare to today\u2019s race.\u00a0 But for now, I\u2019m just going to post some of the very few pictures I snapped along the way.\u00a0 I felt like I\u2019d documented this thing in the past; the course remains the same and it\u2019s a mind-fffff\u2026 a mind-farce that plays tricks on you as you circle back and forth along the Pacific Coast Highway.<\/p>\n
The race went ok I guess.\u00a0 My butt was bothering me once again, that same nagging injury lingering on from my wet leaves slip-and-slide debacle of late 2017.\u00a0 Maybe some day I\u2019ll stop racing for a few months and do a proper rest and rehab in try and get that sorted once and for all.\u00a0 But anytime I\u2019ve tried doing such things it never really seems to work.\u00a0 I do what I\u2019m supposed to do and I wind up just wasting my time, energy, and wherewithal<\/span>; it never seems to work out correctly.\u00a0 That\u2019s been true of house repairs, airBNB reservations, and various health issues amongst many, many, oh-so-many other instances.\u00a0 There\u2019s a reason the clich\u00e9 \u201cdamned if you do, damned if you don\u2019t\u201d still resonates.<\/p>\n There\u2019s an unpleasant story at mile 25 about two beach bum surfer dudes who rode past me on their bikes, carrying their medium sized surf boards.\u00a0 It was as if they sought to use as lances in jousting, hoping to impale me and to get me to move.\u00a0 You think I\u2019m joking or exaggerating but honestly it was an entirely rude, nasty, and mean spirited interaction with these yahoos that made me sink ever deeper into a murky depression.\u00a0 I really thought about quitting right then and there because if these two gentlemen of Huntington Beach were indicative the townsfolk, if their curses hurled at me for not paying attention to where I was going and blaming me for causing them problems on the beach path this morning, if this is how the townspeople of Surf City want to treat visitors and tourists to their town, well, screw them.\u00a0 I don\u2019t recall Jan and Dean singing \u201ctwo dicks for every boy.\u201d\u00a0 I vowed not to return to Surf City Marathon; I refuse to patronize places that choose to patronize, condescend, insult, and generally demean me.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a dark place I find myself at the moment.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s not surprising given the days and nights of the calendar.\u00a0 But, man, what a cruddy day.<\/p>\n And I still have a headache.\u00a0 But that might be dehydration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I woke up with a headache.\u00a0 My iphone\u2019s alarm, the default radar tone, pinged repeatedly at 3:30 AM and I fumbled with it in the dark.\u00a0 I cleared it and saw a notification banner from AirBNB.\u00a0 Apparently my host for my Boston Marathon accommodations cancelled in the dead of night. I wanted to believe his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n