I like the hard way. Skills gained through years of practice, sweat and pleasure, along the way.

This summer we were riding bikes home from the beach, and I stopped to help Neve with something. I reached back to scratch a bug bite behind my knee, looking down behind me. I was shocked.

On tiptoe, flexing to balance the bike and scratch the bite, the back of my leg formed the strange pattern of ridges, valleys, and hollows I’d seen on other people. On the kind of people who sprinted by in papery thin short shorts, who were obviously hard-core.

I discovered I have runner’s calves.

My first reaction was slight horror that this deformation of my body had gone unnoticed until now. But then I thought back, and looked at the record:

• 2017 – 1.65 runs / week (86)
• 2018 – 2.23 runs / week (116)
• 2019 – 3.73 runs / week (194)
• 2020 3.79 runs / week (197)
• 2021 – 3.94 runs / week (130 so far)

In the past 5 years I have run 723 times. I guess, maybe, perhaps that makes me a runner.

As uncertain as I feel about why I’m writing this blog – every day of my 40th year – I know that I want to develop the habit, do the work, commit to the practice and see what happens.

I wonder what the writer’s equivalent of runner’s calves might be?