September has been good to me with my running, first at the Talbot Thrive 5K race I ran two weeks ago in the beautiful waterfront town of St. Michael’s, Talbot County, Maryland, in which I posted seventh with a finish time of 26:38. Then this past Saturday, I took down a 10K race running alongside a portion of the 184.5 mile C&O Canal, Maryland, finishing 2nd amongst the men in the field and third overall at 56:27. You gotta understand, I run quite a bit, always have since my teens, but I’m 53 and I’ve slowed down. I usually place middle of the field these days and am content with it.

This section of the C&O Canal in Williamsport for the Lock2Lock Marathon/Half Marathon/10K event offered a chance to run alongside the re-watered towpath preserving for posterity more than practicality a form of aquatic commerce and travel of long ago. The channels of the Conococheague Creek Aqueduct spool through the Cushwa Basin in Williamsport where fishermen idle and a field is allocated for organized youth sports. Then it thins downstream into the preserved locks once loaded to the gills with cargo boats. Lock 44, for our purposes on this running event. All eventually merging into the grand Potomac River, which swells from western Maryland down into the nation’s capital, Washington, DC.

I was stunned, actually, to be handed this 2nd place for males key (the race is called Lock2Lock, get it?), considering I’d been unaware of a few people who’d been competing with me, as they’d told me in friendly camaraderie over post-race bananas and water. I honestly felt bad for the woman well in front of me for most of the race who tanked with half a mile of the 6.2 to go. I smirked when she suddenly bolted away upon seeing my approach from behind, then running out of gas altogether shy of the finish line. “You got me,” she’d told me with a half-smile and half frown. I tried to give her a fist bump, but I could also sense her personal disappointment. I get it, though I’ve long only competed with myself in fitness events.

Honestly, I never care where I finish in a race; my motto is always to finish and finish strong. I run my race and pull over toward the right whenever I sense someone faster than me is coming up hard or at least can take the pass. Life doesn’t need to get so serious, especially at age 53. The win is just crossing the line with your pride as your trophy. Completing three grueling Spartan and a DEKA event taught me that. I wasn’t beating anyone who wasn’t walking half the time in those sports. Getting those finisher medals and shirts are amongst my proudest achievement totems. You have to finish to earn even the shirts and you learn what grit means then, AROO!

One of the most remarkable structures I found while exploring this canal town after picking up my race packet and shirt (unlike Spartan and DEKA, everyone else gets their event shirt before starting, usually in the interest of promotion and photo ops) was one the few remaining Bollman Iron Truss Bridges left in the United States. Naturally I took two treks across the Bollman as well as the standard bridge where I met a local woman in the dark upon arrival to Williamsport at 6:25 a.m. who was walking her dog. We chatted all the way across to the Cushwa Basin before parting ways. An iron truss “River Rat” in her own right, the senior woman told me she’d just been in the hospital the week prior with kidney stones. You’d never know it by the way she kept pace with me and kept her excitable, barking four-legged pal in check. A Spartan AROO! cheer goes to that old gal.

After socializing with a couple other runners signed up for the 26.2-mile marathon with crickets and locusts greeting us into the marshy realm before sun-up, we parted ways at the Lock 44 lockhouse with wishes for luck and I tramped all around the basin shooting these pictures at the dawn. Consider them my other trophies of the day.

On the hour fifteen drive out to Williamsport, I pulled over at a rest stop at nearby Hagerstown and I’d run across a group of Amish men. They’d been traveling in a pickup truck, not a traditional horse and buggy, and they were all sporting identical white button-down shirts, black suspenders and matching straw hats. Only the long chin wag of the elder differentiated his status. I gave the elder a nod and a “Good morning,” and I’m still chuckling at his thunderstruck expression I’d taken the time to acknowledge him as I would anyone else. Not all of us English are ill-mannered oafs looking for no-no selfies. It doesn’t hurt part of my lineage is German-Dutch who lived deep inside the Pennsylvania Amish heartland.

Sidebar to a most excellent 10K outing was scooching up Doubleday Hill, where Williamsport citizens in 1861 found themselves on the cusp between newly entrenched Yankee and Rebel turf as Virginia declared itself seceded from the Union as a sister Confederate state. Major Abner Doubleday, a hero at the beginnings of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, was assigned to Williamsport, where he ordered the station of three siege gun cannons once skirmishes over the town’s resources and rights to the canal erupted. While the view is overgrown today, I put myself in the moment, thinking what our ancestors saw from that spot overlooking the river and the town. Doubleday only had a short stint in Williamsport after being transferred to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, but the hill retains his namesake today.

As ever, it’s more about the journey than the destination, this thought posed on a 10K trail more shaded inside the woods than out, but the Lock2Lock was one of my absolute favorite races I’ve ever done. Coming across the finish line to a crowd of supporters and a DJ welcoming all finishers with the splendor of Lock 44 to the right, the towering electric plant to the right was sheer gratification. How I finished was irrelevant by comparison.

–Photos by Ray Van Horn, Jr.