Runners put up with a rainbow of abuses, most self-inflicted.

* Eighty-mile weeks don't hurt enough? Try 100. * Last week's marathon didn't kill you? Try an ultra. Prove your devotion to fitness running until you drop.

We're such originals the only way to describe ourselves is cliches. The way we "think outside the box" and "push the envelope," we should open our own mobile stationery stores.

All to "follow our bliss," it seems.

The late mythologist Joseph Campbell urged students to chase bliss as part of their "hero's journey," braving dangers, deprivations and what we claim to want (but in fact fear) most -- self knowledge -- along the way.

To know light, pass through darkness. To achieve greatness, know you're tiny. Lose your base self to find your exalted self.

And if you run out of patience, sue.

I was mulling my own hero's journey the other day when I heard howling. The winds of fate? Sirens of Ulysses? Finest minds of my generation destroyed by madness?

No, my daughter Flannery, 3, had draped two of my running medals around our dog, Tia. Another of the indignities dogs endure to be our best friends.

Back when I was half-fast, I hung medals I'd won on door handles, ledges and sneaker stacks to show all the blood, sweat and sanity I'd shed training were not in vain.

Every ache and injury was a punch-hole in my ticket to bliss, if these trinkets were any clue.

Flannery -- too young to grasp such logic, but tall enough to pull down my medals -- had not stopped with Tia. She had also festooned our other dog, two cats and three bunnies with old medals. She was trying to open the birdcage, several more in hand, when I arrested her in mid-act.

As I followed her, trying to rectify what she'd done (as she'll follow me someday), it occurred to me that heeding advice of a dead man, whose wisdom was based on myth, might be backwards.

There in front of me was my trickster daughter, beaming. She'd given new energy to inert tokens from old races. I should be proud.

I could understand why our howling critters were less enchanted. You never saw me wearing umpteen medals, like some tinhorn dictator, till my neck snapped from either their weight or result of some other public hanging.

But by unbestowing the beasts and explaining such honors are not meant to be inflicted, I could teach Flannery a lesson. That, or she'd shun my medals like they were cues for another lecture, a fate worse than broccoli, thereafter. I'd hate to follow my bliss so much I forgot she was following me. MR