Posted on April 23, 2014 under Storytelling with 2 comments

Charlene and Len – Boston 2011

 

 

If you Google the expression “tough as nails”, you are apt to find a description of Charlene Druhan.

Recently she completed her seventh Boston Marathon and won her age group.  Yes.  She beat every other woman of her vintage who had come to Boston from the four corners of the earth.   She also improved her best time in the marathon by almost ten minutes.  Some things and some people just keep getting better.

Charlene was my running partner for eight years.  It probably felt like eighty to her.  We “discovered” each other through Bernie Bo Chisholm who arranged our first date.  One of our first runs was on Back Road Brierly Brook, a place we would traverse dozens if not hundreds of times over the years.  All I knew was that she was a MacLean from Viewville Street.  The house she grew up in was the first home that my wife and I owned.

On that first run, we talked mostly about families.  We both grew up in large, Catholic households where chaos reigned supreme.  You fought for every morsel of food and came to understand that hand-me-downs were just a way of life.  We shared stories of bedlam and dysfunction, along with tales of laughter, love and learning.  After thousands of kilometers and several marathons, we concluded that every family is weird in its own way.

I learned a few things quickly.  Charlene runs hard … all the time.  She shows up promptly, in all weather conditions, and never complains about our climate or her aches and pains.  She is extremely focused on the task at hand.  While I have always been impressed with her physical prowess, it is her mental toughness that puts her head and shoulders above most women in this province in long distance running.  And, as of last week, she leads women from all over the world in her age group.

If you want to understand tough, just ask the poor pit bull on East Ohio Lake Road.  On one of our long runs from the far end of Lochaber Lake to the church in St. Joseph’s, we encountered this very angry dog.  He was in full snarl mode; baring his sharp teeth and blocking the road.  I picked up a large stick, which is what most mortals would do in a similar situation.  Charlene barely broke stride as she charged straight toward him.  She hurled a few carefully chosen expletives and the dog ran into a stand of bushes with his tail squarely between his legs.

I was fortunate enough to run the Boston Marathon twice and am quick to give credit to Charlene for pushing me every step of the way. Pushing turned to pulling the first time I ran Boston. With about 5K to go, my legs simply would not cooperate.  Charlene had patiently run every step of the course with me so far.  When I gently tried to explain to her that I might not be able to finish the race, she gave me “the look”.  She uttered a few profanities. Now I know how the pit bull felt!  She took me by the hand and dragged me to the finish line.  A fellow competitor, who had followed us the entire route, wondered if we were an old married couple.  This runner found it so romantic that we had crossed the finish line hand in hand.  If she only knew.

I have played a lot of sports and have seen a lot of terrific athletes in my day.  Pound for pound, I will take Charlene as the best all-round athlete I have ever met.  Toughness and tenacity personified.

She is, in the words of Tina Turner, “simply the best.”

 

 

Posted on April 23, 2014 under News & Updates with no comments yet

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Posted on April 22, 2014 under Storytelling with one comment

Pumped. Or Hosed?

 

I’m puzzled.  But that’s not unusual.  I was driving past the gas pumps the other day and noticed that the price of gas had jumped 12 cents a litre.  The previous week it had dropped by 3 cents.  Now, I am not a long haul trucker, so wild swings in gas prices rarely get my attention.  Actually, I hardly notice it now that the kids have left home and we have downsized to one small, fuel efficient vehicle.

I am going to go out on a limb and offer an allegedly fabulous prize if anyone can explain to me in simple English, or any other language for that matter, how the price of gas is determined.

I understand a thing or two about economics.  I have a cursory knowledge of the laws of supply and demand.  I have lived through many wild gyrations in the stock market.  I understand the correlation between bond prices and interest rates.  And when the price of gold whipsaws, I am rarely surprised.

There are other things that also befuddle me.  Our national postal system, in an attempt to attract new customers and improve the bottom line, recently increased the price of stamps by 30%.  Wow.  You should have seen the lineup of small business owners at the post office, eagerly waiting to do a mass mail out to their customers.  This should also enhance business at Christmas time for the handful of people, mostly older Canadians, who still send cards.

Do you understand cable and internet bills?  How about trying to decipher the myriad of phone packages available to a bewildered public?  And electricity rates.  These things are all perplexing, but like lemmings, we simply take our medicine, follow the crowd and pay higher and higher prices for everything.

But how do they calculate gas prices?  I watch the news and when reports come up about a glut of oil on the world markets, I pay attention.  When I hear about the price per barrel of oil plummeting, I rub my hands in eager anticipation of a drop in prices at the pump.  Wrong.  You are so wrong.  This is merely a clear signal that prices will go up.

Having no one, not even an economist, explain to me how gas prices work, I did some study and have come up with my own theory.

You simply take the number of sheiks and divide it by the number of billionaires.  You then multiply this by the millions of the great unwashed masses.  (That’s you and me, by the way).  You toss in a bit of supply and demand, add a dash of the Bakken shale gas find (no fracking way), a hint of El Nino, a pinch of pestilence, plague and polar vortex, along with several layers of taxation and … presto!  Gas goes up 12 cents a litre.

Thankfully, rum prices are not subject to these wild fluctuations.  Admittedly, the price continues to rise, but, as of yet, it has not reached its true value.