Ken Bob Saxton | Psycho Herman

What Is Ken Bob Up To Lately?

I’m basically getting old, and enjoying it!

I haven’t run a marathon in a decade or two, and I’m quite happy about that – they kept getting more expensive and more work as I aged, and I’ve always been opposed to unnecessary work. That’s also the reason I retired from work about 7 years ago. So I don’t need to go to work for 8 hours every weekday 🙂

My wife and I have been doing some 5K events since adapting Kay (Siberian Husky) 7 years ago. We soon discovered that if we didn’t slow him down for the first mile, we had to drag him for the remaining 2.1 miles. And we don’t want to do that. So we walk the first mile to keep Kay from running like crazy, then we walk (mostly) the rest of the way, because Kay’s is then too tired to run like crazy. Then came Covid, and we weren’t doing any walking or running events for a while. Saved even more money 😉

Now I still do a lot of walking a few times a day with Kay.

This morning, Cathy, Kay and I went for a walk at the Balboa Island Art Walk.

Then Cathy and Kay dropped me off at the far end of Huntington Beach and let him walk home.

With the 4-mile walk at Balboa (we went around more than 2 laps) and the 7+ miles walk home, I walked 11+ miles.

The good news is that I didn’t have any sharp or unbearable pains – other than those that went away as I adjusted my technique according to instructions in my book – bent knees, posture, relax, Relax, and RELAX!

I haven’t walked (or run) this distance in a decade or more. The running just became too much work after I turned 50 or so. And I didn’t feel like walking extreme distances because it takes a lot of time. And as I get older, I simply don’t have as much time left – no need to feel sorry, or insist, “yes you do!” because it’s just a mathematical reality – X being the number of years I will live, Y being the number of years I have lived up until now. X is currently an unknown (until I die). Y keeps getting larger (started at zero in 1955 and reaching 70 next year), X-Y= the time I have left, which is obviously getting smaller as Y grows. No amount of positive thinking will change that! Welcome to math 😉

Last year after her open-heart surgery, my sister talked about going to Portugal and Spain to do the Camino De Santiago walk. I asked if she wanted some company. She didn’t immediately vomit nor even gag a little bit, so I decided to invite myself to walk with her and her friend. My brother-in-law (my sister’s husband) will be our chauffeur to shuttle us to and from hotels along the way (no need to do this too humbly).

My sister chose the flatter route. Presumably she wants to test her heart a bit, but not too much. So we’re taking the route from Portugal to Spain along the coast so it won’t be as hilly or mountainous as the more extreme route from France over the Pyrenees Mountains. So I figured this would be fairly similar to the climate I live in on the coast of Southern California – though I was recently informed by someone who has done the walk a few times, that it’s more like the climate of the northeastern states -a bit more humid than our coastal desert climate.

Anyway, now that I just completed a somewhat long walk without any severe wear and tear on my body (just a bit of muscle fatigue, and my soles being sensitive after stopping – that’s all quite normal when pushing one’s current limits), I figure I can continue to build my distance until we leave for Portugal in September and so I am ready to commit to doing this thing!

Why didn’t I take Kay (our Siberian Husky) along on the 7+ mile walk (after the earlier 4 miles), he is a husky after all and bred for long distances?

The answer is, it wasn’t 20 degrees (F) below zero! In fact, after the morning 4-mile walk, Kay slept most of the few mile drive to drop me off (and probably after dropping me off too).

Anyway, so if you’re in the area of Portugal and Spain late this coming September come and join us for a few (or a couple hundred) miles or a few (or few hundred) kilometers.