Main Street

If there is a street that runs into this town, 4th St or Ave or whatever it is, is it. It's not quite a highway; I guess a good approximation would be Carling or Bronson back home. I was wondering how it would work as an early morning route.

It's not as magical as running down the middle of a quiet dark street, but it was a different spice. It would be good for those days where I need a bit more energy such as perhaps today. I decided to stick to main roads but I ended up with a short residential segment at the bottom because there wasn't a major road where I needed one in terms of mileage.

I woke up at 5:00 am and semi-dozed until my alarm went off at 5:30. It'll probably take me at least a few more days to get fully coordinated. At 5:30 this morning, getting up seemed like a horrible thing to do, but I was already in the midst of that horrible doze-don't-quite-fully-wake-up cycle that is so unsatisfying: 5:45 wasn't going to feel any better, nor 6:30, nor 7:00....and the longer I slept in, the more mundane the run would be.

It's been about a decade since I've started running and I've never fully understood those people who get up and out before six and enjoy it until now. I felt like crap, frozen crap, until I started running. My legs became incredibly light and fresh. It was an instantaneous change between feeling like a ton of stone-cold crap and feeling like I could skip over thin ice forever. I'm wondering if, in fact, I fell asleep in the backyard and merely dreamt about the run.

There were some harder moments, though. I'm more used to the hills and more used to feeling my breath pushed at times, but the drawback of the busier roads is headlight glare. The footing is so uneven at times that I seem to be adopting a different way of running, a quicker and lighter step, which is fine, but at times this isn't enough and I have to shield my eyes and slow down. Strangely, it's sometimes easier to run the uneven parts in greater darkness: visual expectations vanish and other senses are more enhanced. It sometimes even feels comforting. I'm wondering if this is because I grew up with severe myopia: I had trouble seeing my feet even as a young kid and was, still am, clumsy, but after I started wearing glasses, I found I liked the blur. I craved the blur. It's soft fluffy pillows, my own private den of soft fluffy pillows. The darkness is sometimes like that.

Oh, yes, dogs: just five, two outdoors and at least half a block away, so not disturbing at all, and 3 indoors. This is similar to what we are used to, and better: we don't have any dogs running up to us. I used to get so annoyed by some dog owners' type of "socialization": letting their dog go where it pleased, and now we're experiencing the other side of the coin: frustrated dogs that don't get out much. Somewhere, perhaps, there is a uneventful medium where all the dogs on the street quietly go about their owners' business.

3 miles this morning.
I had to run an errand yesterday mid-morning: another 3.28 miles.

update; I had to run another errand today, 4.25 miles total. Some of this was walking: I went to confirm garbage pickup by turning in a card, and it turns out that the city provides garbage bags, a good solid roll of garbage bags. Running uphill on grass with this tucked under my arm felt a bit excessive.