While it’s hard to remember last Fall during this scorcher of a Summer in Louisville, this forgotten post ,that lingered in my draft folder, is a shout out for cooler weather and turning leaves.
As soon as the play button was touched the crowd noise came though my headphones, when my watch started tracking time a young Bruce Springsteen yells to his band and audience “Lets Go!” and off my feet start for a 15+ mile run. The path will wind along the banks of the mighty Ohio in downtown Louisville heading west toward 100 year old Shawnee Park and back. Along the way my feet pass the new development of Waterfront Park, the Belle of Louisville Steamboat with her recently damaged red paddle wheel, the McApline locks that sit at the 604 mile mark of the flow of the Ohio and are responsible for 50 million tons of movement of the basic materials that keep our energy, food and manufacturing capabilities moving from the East to the Mid-West. Shuffling on through a couple of streets of the old Portland neighborhood, under the Sherman-Minton bridge and on past the backside of Shawnee Golf Course towards the turnaround at the western edge of Shawnee Park the high sets in. As I run along the sites and sounds bring up many reminders, thoughts that just don’t seen to rise to the surface if a person doesn’t allow themselves the opportunity to put all the issues, to-do lists and urgent action items on the back burner for awhile. The concert flowing through my ears was from September 19th, 1978 where Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band were back in New Jersey for first of a three night stand at the Capitol Theatre. Springsteen was not yet the massive success we would become within the next 5-10 years he was touring for his life after legal issues with a former manager had left him on the road for two years and fallout from expectations put on him from his breakout Born to Run album had him literally on the run. 
That night on stage and this morning of running made me think of some of the continuing themes and lessons that running teaches. Endurance, pushing yourself to limits and beyond, setting goals and not putting them aside for the sake of taking the easy road. Springsteen’s early music was full of hard knock stories, driving that old beater of a car and yourself to better places, memories, experiences and people from his past and this run was bringing up similar thoughts for me. After awhile my legs seemed to move on their own, the motion handled independently, fluid. The point where effort, planning and desire to accomplish burst through to results and you experience something that was harder than you thought it would be to achieve but with greater rewards than you believed possible…now if only I could tell it as well as Bruce explained the story of how he wrote “Thunder Road”…
