47

It's hard to find good things to say about a year in which the chief memory is having major surgery. But all in all it was a relatively smooth year and if you subtract the hip replacement and the end of my running days, it wasn't bad. Though for some reason 47 seems much older than 46, much more on the verge of 50.

I did a decent birthday ride this year, about 80 miles up through Camp Pendleton and back with my friend Cathy. We got rained on riding through the community of Vista, which was actually kind of fun (especially since it eventually stopped). It's nice to ride through Pendleton, but they limit the roads you can ride on to just what you need to get through the base to parts north. When i drove on the base prior to the Hard Corps marathon in 2009, i saw much more of the base and i wish i could ride through it.

It was a pretty leisurely ride and we did a lot of chatting. Although i'm not in very good shape by the standards of some previous years, i'm in decent bike shape, since i've done more mileage this year than any in recent memory. So I had expected to ride 100+ miles, but we realized we were going to run out of daylight so we stopped in Rancho Santa Fe at the golf shop run by Cathy's significant other Tom.

Running was the unifying force in my life. I planned my days around it, and to some extent my year. It helped me sleep and eat better and helped me de-stress. I'm still trying to figure out what to replace that with. Biking, swimming, tai chi are options, but none of those have quite the same qualities of convenience and simplicity. I hope that by 48 i will have at least figured out this one aspect of my life.