Mess not with a Hughes, Part-2:

Back in the ‘80s I was running footraces.
Not marathons.
Five miles or 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) or five kilometers (3.1 miles).
The longest race I ever ran was over seven miles; I had to pace myself.
Back then I weighed about 60 pounds less than I do now; about 130+ instead of 190+.
My running slowed, mostly after my stroke, which occurred in late ’93, and I recovered fairly well.
Maybe four years ago I was down to about 3-4 miles per run.
My last race was in 2010, a 5-K.
By then I was 66, but I could still run.
I started running perhaps two-three years after I started driving bus in 1977.
I kept at it because it was lopping off flab.
My running fell apart after my stroke, because an antidepressant medication had me down to almost a walk.
When I stopped the antidepressant my running picked up.
But I never got back to as good as I had been.
I had to stop altogether when my wife died. She used to take along our dog at a walk while I ran.
Not too long after I started running I started footraces.
I even won my class once because no hot-shots were in it.
My wife did all the winning. Usually she was the only entrant in her class, or one of few.
I never was that good. A race usually divided into three groups: the hot-shots, the mid-packers, and the stragglers.
I was usually among the mid-packers.
My best average was 6:27 per mile; not that fast, but fairly fast. (My wife averaged around seven minutes per mile.)
Not long after I started racing I tried a 10-K at my alma mater, Houghton College (“HO-tin;” not “how” or “who”) in the Genesee (“jen-uh-SEE”) Valley below Rochester (NY).
By then I had been an alumni around 17 years. Other alumni ran too.
By then Houghton had got into intercollegiate sports, although not football. Only soccer and lacrosse and track and maybe a few girls’ sports like basketball.
When I was at Houghton intercollegiate sports were Of-the-Devil.
The sports teams named themselves “the Highlanders,” in honor of the college’s Christian heritage.
They would open each competition with a word-of-prayer. And then get soundly trounced.
Highlanders were running this 10-K, track guys dressed in kilts. I often was faster than them.
That 10-K was the toughest race I ever ran.
Houghton is on the western slope of the vast Genesee Valley.
The race went down to the valley-floor, then up the western slope.
It was awful. I had to stop numerous times on that hill.
I don’t think we climbed the whole western slope, but quite a bit of it.
Some of it was on grass.
I remember running down the runway of the Houghton International Aerodrome, a single runway grass-strip, uncontrolled, that could only accommodate small private planes.
There was a student whose father flew her in in a twin-engine Piper Apache.
I remember hoping nothing landed as I ran down that runway.
Then it was back down to the campus, over twisting footpaths, up to what was then the college athletic-field at that time.
That athletic-field is now something else, and a new athletic facility is being built north of the old campus.
That old athletic-field had a quarter-mile track, and the race finished on that track.
As I rounded the final bend toward the finish, it looked like I could beat the guy ahead of me.
So I kicked into passing-gear.
The guy I wanted to beat tried to trip me.
I got mad.
Never in all my years of racing have I encountered such nastiness.
And Houghton was an evangelical college.
I kicked the guy in the shins, and shoved him aside. I wasn’t taking that kind of crap, biblical or not.
And I beat him.
It was probably the slowest 10-K I ever ran, but also the toughest.
But I wasn’t taking no nastiness from some Bible-beating zealot.

• “Hughes” is me, Bob Hughes, BobbaLew.
• For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and environs. My stroke October 26th, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability. I recovered fairly well.
• My beloved wife of over 44 years died of cancer April 17th, 2012. I miss her dearly.
• “Houghton College” is from where I graduated with a BA in 1966. I’ve never regretted it, although I graduated a Ne’er-do-Well, without their blessing. Houghton is an evangelical liberal-arts college.
• The Genesee River, a fairly large river that runs south-to-north across Western New York through the “Genesee Valley,” also runs through Rochester, including over falls, and empties into Lake Ontario. Houghton was not far from the Genesee River.