This is dg’s brother, rg, who can be pretty funny about his catastrophic sports endeavors. He neglects here to mention his epic road race (many years ago) one hot July in Brantford, Ontario, when he fell over from heat exhaustion and was found by the EMS crawling on his hands and knees in hot, oozing, fresh road tar — towards the finish line. He was taken to the hospital without being allowed to complete the course. In the photo below, blown up, you can see the blood dripping, but it’s blurry — I will spare you the vision. Another important piece of context is that Rodger is actually too gimpy to train for races. He just runs a lot of races without training. What follows is his email report.
dg
So at 62 I thought it was time to branch out from road racing — too much same old same old. So on Saturday I ran the Iroquois 7K Trail Run at Crawford Lake. We set off through the woods on the Bruce Trail. We ran up the escarpment and down and up. I hit a nice flat run at about 4.5K and cranked it up. A rock leapt up out of the trail and tripped my right foot. I grazed my left knee and head. I got up to run and realized I couldn’t see. Fortunately the guy behind me had picked up what was left of my frames and the lenses and gave me his paper towels. His opinion was that I was bleeding pretty badly. I picked up the pace. There was a longer race looping back on the same trail. Some runners asked if I was OK, others just gasped. I went on up the escarpment — by this time we were walking a lot. As I went by, runners whispered to each other, “He’s bleeding.” As I came around a corner, a volunteer suggested I see a doctor, and I shouted back, “I am a doctor.” Into the home stretch — more checks that I was OK and reassurance that the finish was near. As always, a patient of mine happened to be running in the race, and her mother, a nurse from Oakville-Trafalgar Memorial Hospital, snapped pics at the end. I was disappointed that there was no award for the runner sporting the most blood at the finish. I was 19th overall and to my surprise 5th in the 51+ age group, which shows there are a lot of vaguely crazy older guys out on the trails. I took my glasses in today, and because I’d had them for less than a year, they are replacing the frames and lenses for free. I was surprised that the warranty extended to demolishing your glasses doing a face plant on the trail. I think they may just be giving me a break because the last time I got new glasses was after I did a face glide along the road falling off my bike. I’m searching for my next trail run.
—Rodger Glover
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Rodger Glover is a Family Practice physician in Oakville, Ontario, a multiple dog owner, and, apparently, an extreme sports enthusiast. He appears here (right) on a better day.
>As I came around a corner, a volunteer suggested I see a doctor, and I shouted back, “I am a doctor.”
A shining example of the typical Glover arrogance that makes life for us so entertaining.
Nice Jonah. 🙂
I actually fell twice. The judges awarded a 7.6 for the first fall. Although I broke my glasses and drew extensive blood from 2 sites they found my form to be lacking. The Russian judge refused to vote on the basis that all 62 year old trail runners are gay and should be in jail, So about 100 yards on a threw myself on the trail again, doing a nice roll on my shoulder. This borught the judges to their feet and even the Russian changed his mind admitting that anybody that stupid could not possibly be gay, and was infact probably descended from Stalin. A 8.7 was award which I took to be a good efffort for my first trail run.
You’d think a doctor would know the symptoms of neuro-motor degeneration. I think you have an advanced case of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy or its human variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Just saying.
Also your perception that the rock “leapt” out at you could be a sign of paranoia. I am not the doctor in the family, but….
HAHAHAHAHA!
This is great! I think seconds if not minutes should be deducted from your time based on the amount of blood you lost. We could always make the argument that with a normal amount of blood, the race would have been yours.
That said, the Russian judge was clearly a fraud. I heard he and a certain Dr. Sergei Molochov worked for years on training Canadian red squirrels to throw rocks at runners in sunglasses. It was part of an early effort in an animal soldier program.
It is strange how seemingly random events commingle and make sense. I have heard rumours of “The Molochov Program” but thought that it never got off the ground. Then there is an article in the Toronto Sun last week about 22 Toronto police taking down a red squirrel in High Park wielding an acorn. Suddenly you see the pattern of events and it all becomes obvious.
The Molochov Program is a well known and oft debunked internet legend, like chem trails and the Mexico-Canada Superhighway. The editors would prefer that you keep the comments focused on literary topics and not drift toward the lunatic fringe (as is habitual in your family).