Yes, that’s me. Yes, it is what it appears to be. I’m running on a track. I know, I know. It sounds crazy. But there are reports out there that getting regular exercise is good for you. And, get this, running counts as exercise. Me, I thought running was something you did when you wanted to get away from an uncomfortable or scary situation, some kind of human reaction called “Flight or Fight.”

Scared as I’ve been, I started running away from bad health a couple of weeks ago, long enough to feel like I could make mention of it here. My M.O. is to jog around the Hippodrome trotter track once or twice on my way home from having gone with Ella to school each weekday morning. But that’s been a little hard on my knees so today I went for a mile jog around this track that belongs to the University of Nantes. For you statistical types, I ran the mile in a little over 8 minutes (to put that in perspective, the four-legged Simply Majestic ran a mile at Longacres racetrack in Seattle in 1:33 4/5).

Part of the fun is that Melinda has started joining me and took this picture of me this morning. We are getting so serious that this afternoon we went to the store and got me a fancy pair of running shoes to replace the very cheap high top basketball shoes I have been wearing. We’ll see if these new shoes help with my knees.

One of my favorite singers is a man named Mickey Jupp, an English contemporary of Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. In 1982 he released a wonderful song called “Joggin” that included this memorable line, pretty much summing up my mission, “I’m going to get healthy if it’s the last thing I do” (read all the lyrics here).