Back in the day, as they say, I ran cross-country at the first of three high schools I would attend during my tender teen years. My dad’s career was in rocketry and we followed the Space Shuttle program from a dry lake bed in California to the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C., to another dry lake bed in Utah, all during those short years I was in high school, a fantastic recipe for the expansion of adolescent angst. It was during my brief tenure at my first high school in Cali that I met and ran with my buddy Tara. Her dad was our track coach and Tara was a ton of fun.