My freshman football coach was so hardheaded it blocked his hearing. I recall when Biff Rankin showed up for practice one day in street clothes. "What's the matter, Rankin?" the coach demanded.

"An inter-muscular bruise," said Rankin.

"The inter-muscular BLUES!? Why, you (expletive deleted)!" Not long after that Rankin quit and I decided my days as a 140-pound tackle were over too. I took away memories of fighting for valor beneath the insignia of the Red Devil, our school mascot, and an excuse that would serve long after my masochism evolved from its football form into running.

Aches? Pains? General malaise? The inter-muscular blues is culprit! I picture myself in a juke joint with Robert Johnson, wailing out our litany:

My baby left me

Drowning in my tears.

Ran a 32:20 5K,

Now I'm downing beers.

Too tired to run

And hide from slow, sloe gin.

I got those

Inter-muscular blues again.

My football career was as undistinguished as it was brief. My prep running was even briefer.

I went out for track one spring on a dare. "Run some warm-up laps," said the coach, who I'd seen back his car into Harry Vogelsong's MG - and he, like most coaches at our school, was a driver's-ed teacher ...

Thus I daydreamed as I ran, underneath the Red Devil, on the quarter- mile cinder oval. "How hard can this be?" I thought. "If someone is beating you, just speed up."

My lungs were screaming after one lap. After two ... well, I'll never know. Feeling like Harry Vogelsong's MG, I made a beeline to the showers and did not come back.

I had lost a dare but found something better: an excuse - the I-M Blues - that would serve for years.

Running later "caught" me like a discovery or disease. Did it hurt? More than I could appreciate as a teen. Did it occupy time I might spend being useful? Yup. So what was there not to like?

The aches, pains and down time. We have Descartes before de horse when we say, "I think, therefore I am."

We should think of the I-M Blues instead. MR