Thursday, August 12, 2010

Morning Inversion

I'm now running more days in a week than I'm not running. I no longer think about having to wake up early to run, but instead think of it as getting to sleep in on days when I don't!

When I first started waking up early to run in the morning before work I would wake up before the alarm and see if was still too early and go back to sleep. I had a recurring dream where I was running effortlessly, the weather was beautiful, and the sunrise would never end... The sun would just never quite make it above the trees and the clouds would stay that perfect, irradiated orange/pink for hours. Of course, that was when the days were their longest and the sky would be getting light before I made it out of the house.

These days are a bit shorter, and the stars are still brightly visible when I step out of the front door to be greeted by mosquitoes in the humid darkness. After yesterday's rain I think I'll have to do lunges inside the house instead of the front porch for a while. The vampires waiting in the shadows aren't as scary as in the movies, but they're much more real and running with itchy legs is not fun. I think they're attracted to pale skin more than anything. I'm so pale that streetlights turn off when I run under them!

Still, the sun does rise and light the clouds up eventually before I make it back home, and it's the kind of long moment that runners really love (or at least I do, hopefully not everybody that runs in the morning is so focused on their activity or jaded not to notice nature's light show). I was almost all the way around my 3-mile neighborhood loop thinking that perhaps today's sunrise wouldn't be quite as nice as normal... the sky getting ever brighter and I was starting to think the family of little clouds overhead wouldn't manage anything interesting today.

Then I came around a curve and saw a fine picture...the kind that makes me wish I ran with our 6-pound DSLR to be able to capture. I decided to try my cameraphone anyway and stopped to fiddle with it, netting a blurry mess and the poor old thing crashed as it tried to save a second, superior photo to the memory card at the moment the music application was trying to load a new song. By the time I got the thing back to the land of the useful, the sun had burned off those little clouds, the favorite song I had been listening to had stopped, and the moment was gone.

So I suppose that's a lesson... when you realize you're living in a perfect moment, maybe you should just enjoy it for what it is. Or put another way... you just had to be there :-)


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