actually, i've been running a lot, now that i'm hear to talk about it. i've been been running three days a week, but i've also run three of the last four days.
one of those days it POURED and i was running with my iPhone so it kind of turned into speed work. with an awkward hand-held-over-camera-hole look. (for a time afterwards it was scaring me by taking tremendously misty photos, but the next morning it had magically dried/sorted itself out.) since that run involved a beeline home, i ran the next day to complete the first one, but then i kind of wanted to run longer so i did. came home a goddamn sweaty mess, but.
another one of those days was tonight, when i ran over an hour and also lost a bunch of time to various wildlife adventures. to wit: 1. giving a wide berth to a skunk, 2. playing chicken with a deer till i managed to convince her to run back into the woods and not onto the road, 3. leaping into the air a little higher than planned when a frog did its own leaping. despite these distractions i managed to run about 7.5 miles, sometimes even hilly ones in something like 70 minutes, so that's not terrible.
it's also humid as fuck; really, i have to start running with water even when it's not hot, because half an hour in i start hallucinating water fountains which turn out to be garbage cans (talk about disappointing).
the only snag lately is that after hurting one of my groin muscles the other weekend, i managed to fix it quickly, only to pull THE OTHER groin muscle at an exercise class -- c'mon, body, this is ridiculous. apart from this nonsense, i have been doing a bunch of crosstraining, which is wise; not much swimming but you see the rain? yes.
anyway, i think everything groinal is back in order; today's running felt if not beautiful then at least consistent. although my Garmin refused to get a satellite because the sky was made of clouds or something, i felt like i was keeping a consistent pace... although now as i write that i remember i was chasing two undergrad girls for three miles, so actually rather than averaging 9 minute miles i was probably flailing for a bit and cruising the rest of the time. oh, well.
overall, i'm feeling pretty good about my running, and i think it's a lot to do with running at night. summer night running is kind of my favourite, even when it's humid. tonight i ran without music or podcasts, and i missed neither. there's that floating, gliding, automatic feeling, and when the sky is quite black it somehow feels like you're swimming.
have i tried describing this before, the feeling like i'm at the ichthyosaurus exhibit? er, well. so: when i was growing up, the Royal Ontario Museum had this dinosaur exhibit, and my favourite bit was this weird little underwater corner, which illustrated some underwater big animal (maybe a whale or something) getting attacked by two or three of these underwater dinosaurs, called ichthyosauri. (were they really dinosaurs? for all i know they were actually fish. this is not the point. it's a running blog. let's move on.) ... the point is that to make it look underwater, they had these blue black lights aimed at the back wall, constantly moving in a gently undulating manner, to simulate the quality of light underwater. right? and it was SO COOL. ... i mean the ichthyosaurs were also cool, but what i loved best was that quality of light. like being bathed in a serene and liquid witching hour.
and THAT is the feeling i get now, as a grownup, when i run in the summer at night.
plus, much less chance of getting ichthyosaured.
i assume.
... run on, folks.
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