Elementary, my dear Elissa!

I am a great admirer of Arthur Conan Doyle’s super sleuth, the incomparable Sherlock Holmes. And, by all accounts, I am not alone. There are apparently fan clubs devoted to his fictional detective all over the world. I am sure that the principal attraction for most people are his astounding displays of deduction: breaking the alibi of a murderer for example, by measuring the depth to which the parsley sank in the butter on a hot day; or determining the character of a prospective client from the walking stick he left behind. The original Strand stories with Sidney Paget’s dark illustrations, the numerous film and TV adaptations of his adventures, I am mad for them all. Even the pastiches that vary from the original stories: Billy Wilder’s excellent “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” complete with German spies disguised as monks and featuring a Loch Ness monster being a good example. I would also mention in that vein, “Murder By Decree” - an intelligent take on the Jack The Ripper legend starring Cristopher Plummer as the super sleuth in a dark story far removed from his usual association with singing nuns! But you get the picture. I was put in mind of Sherlock Holmes this morning when Elissa presumed that I had missed my run this morning. Her deduction was based on the fact that the shower did not contain traces of the mud that usually accompany my runs. Normally my morning runs are on woodland trails so mud is inevitable. On this particular morning however – and now until the spring – my run was all on road. Why? The daylight hours are now so scarce that streetlit roads are now my only recourse. A fact that Holmes would have easily deduced.

Anyway. This mornings run was a medium effort, 4.26 mile, base run which I clocked at 31:55. As Holmes might say: “the game’s afoot”.