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September 7, 2006
Puttering Along
Do you recall when you were a kid, learning how to drive a manual transmission? It took all the concentration in the world to successfully navigate a stop sign or a slow turn without any number of embarassing results, including stalling out in the middle of the road. Stalling out happens even today, even to the best of us. You get a little inattentive, or you're trying to do seventeen other things besides driving, and you come dangerously close to that infamous stall-out. Which of course inevitably happens in front of someone you know or an attractive person of the opposite sex.
That's me. I feel embarassingly close to stalling out, however unintentional. Two recovery runs in the books this week, and I can only call what I was doing out there puttering along. 30 minutes yesterday and 60 minutes today on trails. I'm stiff. This stiffness is most evident going downhill. To be perfectly honest, going downhill hurts. Running uphill and on the flats actually feels good, though, so I'll take my small victories where I can get them.
It's fall here in Yellowstone. I can't deny it anymore. The elk have wandered into the grassy plazas of Mammoth Hot Springs, my home base. It's a rather exciting scene currently. The females come here with their calves because we keep the grass green. Elsewhere nearby, the depths of later summer drought have browned anything that isn't artificially irrigated. What I'm saying is that there's good food here.
Because all the female and young elk are here, the big bulls, with their 5-point, 6-point, and occasional 7-point antler racks, also show up. They come here to duke it out with the other males, to form their respective harems of females with which they breed. The male elk stomp around with gusto. They sharpen their racks on trees. They charge tourists and their cars if the tourists approach too close. They duel with other bull elk. This is the elk rut. The female elk are in heat, and the male elk are resultingly ravaged with testosterone. I guess it's not all that different from the rest of the animal kingdom, but being in the middle of it all is quite interesting.
The most notable thing that the bull elk do is that they bugle. A bugle is a guttural noise that begins from deep within the chect cavity. It comes out sounding hollow, ghost-like, and powerful. Males bugle at each other as they stake out territory and their female claims. From late afternoon to early morning, the bugling goes on, and on, and on. In the Mammoth area, there are about 4 bull elk who take turns bugling through the night. At this stage in the fall, it sounds wonderful. The sound reaches a pitch that just gets to you in the strangest way, makes you feel the bugling inside your own chest cavity. As the season progresses on, the persistent bugling will wear on most of us, and I will tire of hearing it, especially if I'm trying to sleep. The noise is unreal and almost indescribable. It's about as influential as hearing a lion roar, a wolf howl, or a zebra bark.
Posted by Meghan at September 7, 2006 8:18 PM
Comments
i seriously need to get out of the city!
Posted by: Audrey at September 8, 2006 5:22 PM
-- "To be perfectly honest, going downhill hurts."
-- "Two recovery runs in the books this week, and I can only call what I was doing out there puttering along."
Wonder-Meghan: what did you "honestly" expect after the recent conquests? Doing a pike barani vault off a balance-beam??
If you could find a way to channel the bugling away from your chest cavity down to the lower calves or quads (is that where it is most stiff?) it might loosen things up a little... yet another wacky metropolitan, urban thought...
Posted by: Anonymous at September 9, 2006 11:38 AM
ooops, forgot to sign above; take care, bests for recovery, corrado
Posted by: corrado giambalvo at September 9, 2006 11:55 AM
Congrats on the marathon! I read the recap with baited breath - when I got to the part about you seeing the shadows off to the side I thought "oh no! The third place woman caught her! Oh. It's just a moose and her baby. No biggie." *Just* a moose? I guess I was a little caught up in the suspense.
I can't wait for you to do another trail race!
Posted by: jenandmats at September 10, 2006 10:28 AM