"Time, time, time, it's on my side," or so claimed the Stones back when it was on my side, too.

The night before I turned five, my last thoughts weren't on my upcoming birthday party; they were, weirdly for a child my age, contemplative. As fast as I had become five, I thought, that fast again I'd be 10. Snap, five. Another snap, 10.

I lived with my grandparents, and Nana used a sand-filled egg timer to make me the daily soft-boiled egg she, a Scottish immigrant, was sure was the key to survival.

I pictured the sand running out of the egg timer and thought it a metaphor for life. I didn't know what a metaphor was, but I thought very clearly that life was like that sand coming out. Seemingly slow at first, a little bit at the bottom, then piling up, then suddenly the last had slid through the hole. With an egg, it was time to eat. With your life, time was up.

I drew a breath and thought, "That's one less breath I have to breathe." And I took another breath and thought it again: each breath taken, one less to take.

I wasn't a morbid kid; quite the contrary. I woke up happy on my birthday, got a scooter and we played pin the tail on the donkey. I still have a picture of me at my party, wearing a sailor cap and a matching shirt and shorts, the shirt white with little navy fish and the shorts blue with white fish.

Fast forward 30 years to early fall 1983. I was in the Anchor Bar in downtown Detroit, a favorite hangout of writers and folks from radio and TV. My girlfriend at the time had been a barmaid there when I met her, and I managed the bar's softball team, the Anchor Barbarians. The bar was our version of "Cheers," where everyone knows your name and pretty much everything else about you.

One of those I tipped many a beer with - and with whom I had ingested by several means substances of various degrees of illegality before we both cleaned up our acts, our noses and lungs by taking up running - was Mike O'Hara, then and now the Detroit News football writer.

He had this idea: Why not run a race downtown on Thanksgiving Day? It was a natural, he said. You'd have a huge, built-in audience. And runners would welcome the chance to burn off some pre-turkey calories.

Talk was cheap over beer at the Anchor. It struck me as a good idea too, but I never thought anything would come of it.

Next thing I knew, the Detroit News was running ads, WJR's Frank Beckmann was plugging the race on his "Sports Wrap" show, and fliers were showing up at running stores all over town.

Thousands showed up, on short notice, for the first annual Turkey Trot 10K.

The night before the big race, Mike, a friend who'd helped him, Anchor night manager Vaughn Derderian (son of Leo Derderian, the bar's legendary founder) and I were drinking beer and wondering what was in store.

"Do you have change?" asked Vaughn.

"Change?" said Mike, thinking dimes and quarters. Change for what, the phone?

Vaughn wasn't thinking phone calls, nor dimes and nickels. "You've got late registration tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah."

"So, do you have change? You going to be able to break twenties for people? How many ones and fives do you have?"

Hmm, Murphy's Law avoided. Mike didn't have any ones and fives, other than those he was using to pay the barmaid. He hadn't thought about 500 people showing up, many of them holding twenties for the $12 registration fee or whatever it was.

Vaughn went back to his office, pulled rubber-banded bundles of ones and fives from the safe, and chaos was averted on Thanksgiving.

Flash forward again, to this year. I read on the Turkey Trot entry form this was the 22nd annual race and it hit me: 21 years have come and gone. As many years as I had to wait from the time I was born until I could buy a beer legally. Lots of breaths taken, a lot less yet to take. Another 21 years - snap - and I'll be 77, older than Jim Ramsey was the first time I interviewed him.

After three years, the Motor City Striders took charge of the Turkey Trots. They did so until this year, when Ed Kozloff decided to quit putting on races on his own terms, before ill health or other sad circumstances might force him to do so.

Doug Kurtis and Alan Whitehead, founder of the fine Solstice 5K in Northville, took over this year's Turkey Trot, did a great job and drew a record field of 5,800. Congratulations.

Here's to the next 21.

~~~~

"Time flies" has been the theme. But it doesn't always take its toll. Or if it does, it does imperceptibly.

I've been seeing Maggie Zidar at races since the mid-1980s. We ran in the Metropolitan Beach Metropark races Wednesdays each summer from then through the early '90s.

There would rarely be more than 50 of us, often just two or three dozen. The course was as flat and fast as they come, as long as rollerbladers weren't hogging the one-mile bike path that went to the end of a short peninsula. The races were two miles, three miles, 5K and 4 miles long.

If no real studs showed up, I had a decent chance to win, back when I was running a 5:30 pace for two miles and a 5:40 pace for 5Ks. Maggie won her share, too. Another thing we had in common was running a lot of marathons, four or five a fall.

These days, I can still run 5:30 pace - I just can't hold it anywhere near a mile. But Maggy hasn't lost a step. If you've seen her run, you can tell it's Maggy from far away, from the side, from behind. She has the tiniest stride and the quickest turnover, just this Energizer-bunny, super- efficient way of running. Her form and pace have remained unaltered for 20 years, as has her ability to run marathons here, there and everywhere.

One day this fall, she ran the Big Bird 10K in the morning and The Burg 5K that afternoon. Small potatoes compared to running, in her 50s, three marathons under 3:45 on three consecutive weekends in October - Columbus, Detroit and Grand Rapids.

That got her to marathon No. 99. She takes aim at 100 in London this spring.

Another 3:42, no doubt.

~~~

One thing we runners - at least, many of us - have in common is how natural it seems. When we are in shape, miles seem close to effortless and being out there, say on trails through newly-green woods on a blue- sky day in May, is about the closest you get to transcendence.

It defines us, literally. All runners describe themselves, first and foremost, as runners. They never say "I'm a driver" or "I'm a reader," though driving and reading may take up more of their day than their daily run. Running is what we were meant to do, we think. And our non- running friends and family think we're nuts.

We've been right all along. A cover story published in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Nature, by University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble and Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman, says running may by the single thing that helped us evolve from our ape-like ancestors.

Humans evolved, the authors say, because they needed to run long distances, either to hunt animals or scavenge carcasses on Africa's savannah. The more they could run, the better they could eat - and the more they ran, the more their anatomy was shaped.

"We are very confident that strong selection for running - which came at the expense of the historical ability to live in trees - was instrumental in the origin of the modern human body form," says Bramble.

"Running has substantially shaped human evolution. Running made us human - at least in an anatomical sense. We think running is one of the most-transforming events in human history. We are arguing the emergence of humans is tied to the evolution of running."

That is contrary to conventional wisdom, which says running was simply a byproduct of the human ability to walk. The ability to walk upright on two legs evolved in ape-like creatures some 4.5 million years ago, while they retained the ability to travel through the trees.

Modern man did not evolve for another three million or more years, so the ability to walk cannot explain anatomy of the modern human body, Bramble says.

"There were 2.5 million to 3 million years of bipedal walking (by australopithecines) without ever looking like a human, so is walking going to be what suddenly transforms the hominid body?" asks Bramble.

"We're saying no, walking won't do that, but running will."

Part of the press release trumpeting the article was titled, "I Run, Therefore I Am," which would serve as a motto for many of us.

Bramble and Lieberman examined 26 traits of the human body that helped the ability to run. Only some of them were needed for walking. Traits that aided running include leg and foot tendons and ligaments that act like springs, foot and toe structure that allows efficient use of the feet to push off, shoulders that rotate independently of the head and neck to allow better balance, and skeletal and muscle features that make the human body stronger, more stable and able to run more efficiently without overheating.

To read the press release and to see a high-resolution image of the Nature cover, go to http://www.utah.edu/unews/ releases/04/nov/ runevolve.html. MR