A DANGEROUSLY nice January day for a run

I may not always emit sunshine, but getting some almost every day may have helped preserve my immune system in recent years

It was very cold here in Boulder right before Christmas, when we also got about a half a foot of snow. Like 11 below zero (in American degrees) cold. That immediately turned not just the road but almost every surface underfoot into a frictionless enemy.

We’ve gotten two snowfalls since, one of them followed immediately by a bright day of warming that created a lot of slush over the existing ice on the mostly under-plowed city streets. Then it got cold again, freezing the slush in place.

All throughout, the days that have been mostly sunny haven’t been warm enough to precipitate much dissolving of this mess, which resembles a grayish-white, above-ground fungus, while the days climbing into the low forties have been uncharacteristically cloudy. So I feel like I am back in generally far colder and more humid New England, where snow doesn’t really melt for months after the first significant dump in November; it just gets pushed around by plow blades until late March.

I’m not complaining. When the complexion of the roads and paths changes, yet the weather itself is favorable, the complexion of the local runnership changes with it, and that makes running more interesting.

One thing about my persistent walking and jogging habit is that it is necessarily associated with getting a lot of sunlight. It’s almost never cloudy here for very long, and even on days when I wind up saving my run for after dark, I try to get some sun exposure. This has nothing to do with trying to tan my skin and everything to do with the belief that this invariably influences my general mood and ability to sleep for the better.

Between February 2020 and the time Anthony Fauci retired, he had ample opportunity to mention how much worse cigarette smokers, the overweight, and the vitamin-D deficient suffered if they got covid. (Come to think of it, there are few scenarios in which any of these statuses confer health advantages.) He never did any of that, because his mission was never making anyone healthier.

Lockdowns caused so many problems that few people seemed to notice that a lack of sunlight was one of them. Perhaps this is because people who were already exercising a lot didn’t stop, while those who weren’t getting out much as it was stayed inside even more. Whatever the case, this journal article from August 2020 (Pleistocene times, in other words) outlines the role of vitamin D in immune-system regulation and the suppression of inflammatory responses in respiratory infections. (Zinc supplementation for symptom relief in upper-respiratory-tract viral infections is supported by clinical evidence.)

The role of sunlight in vitamin D is basically whipping it into useful shape. When ultraviolet type-B rays strike molecules of the direct chemical precursor of vitamin D, sitting under your skin in the presence of cholesterol—vitamin D is a fat-soluble compound—it is rearranged into its metabolically active form.

I have not had any symptoms of so much as a cold since at least 2019. I’m pretty sure I have been exposed to every possible coronavirus variant out there by now, and each time my system, quietly administered vicious beatings to whichever ones tried to gain purchase in my constantly snorting nose and ever-bellowing mouth. My ears are usually smoking, so no luck there either.

I have become so pissed off about the various fulminating deceptions surrounding the various potions categorized as coronavirus vaccines that I sometimes forget I’m vaccinated. But not with an mRNA vaccine. I got the Johnson & Johnson “one and done” vaccine, which used an enfeebled cold virus as a vector, in June 2021. These kinds of vaccines have been around for a while and have been used against other viruses (e.g., HIV) as well as bacterial invaders (e.g., the mycobacterium that causes tuberculosis).

Rather than consider again how everyone I know fared after getting each kind of shot how many times, because that’s honestly infuriating, I will count myself as lucky, in more than one way.

I was lucky to have shorts weather yesterday morning when I headed out. It was close to 40, so not shorts-plus-T-shirt weather, shorts and a windbreaker. I usually overdress slightly in the winter when running with Rosie in case we wind up stopping to sniff patches of piss, or stare at unreachable squirrels for unreasonable lengths of time, or argue about whether to go yinder or yonder with the route forks.

I drove us to the solar-panel array at CU East Campus. Not because I needed to be empowered, or because I needed to drive at all (we’ve been over this) but because this is a great access point for the Boulder Creek Path, wider and marginally freer of ice and guck than the other paths in the network.

When it is sunny and calm and in the forties but the footing is treacherous, it’s easy to get into trouble because the glory of a day like this in early January makes it easy to simply ignore what you can see about to confront your feet in front of you. I can’t decide if me being extra-careful while running with Rosie makes our whole two-mammal assembly safer than my one-man show in the same conditions, when I am less careful but more cautious than I used to be. Probably not.

As Rosie and I accessed the BCP from the Skunk Creek Path and headed east, I saw a gaggle of hotchicks trundling along the path in the same direction, now about 100 meters behind us. They looked like they were moving pretty well, around 7:30 pace, but with women (as with older children), it’s hard to gain a sense of their pace from their cadence alone because they’re usually shorter. And when runners are not trying especially hard, which these hotchicks didn’t appear to be, that throws more uncertainty into the guesswork.

I have fun trying to guess whether a group of runners newly behind me will overtake me or at least gain ground based on a flash estimation of both our paces. If I feel like I need to speed up or slow down to maintain the same gap, I resist this because this would be cheating. And someone might find out.

I was either wrong about these hotchicks or was running faster myself than I thought, because we pulled away with ease. I only learned this because it took them a while to catch up. They only caught up because Rosie wanted to stop and cool off in deep creekside powder for a minute. She does by flopping around on her back, leaving a crude snow-angel to warn any prairie dogs in the area that she’d be back.

This put us right behind the hotchicks. I thought Rosie would be content to stay there, but in what I believe is a first, she made a calculated move to get around people who were running and technically in our way. So, as kindly as possible, we dusted them. I think they were actually running closer to 8:00 pace, at least by the time we were stalking them instead of the other way around.

We ended up running for about forty-five minutes and wandering around by some small ponds on the campus, where Rosie carefully inspected some geese meandering about on their half-frozen surfaces. She’s funny about those bastards. We can run through a huge group of them spanning both sides of a path ten times in a row without her so much as looking over at a single one of them as they grudgingly make way, and on the eleventh time she’ll make a lunge as if she wants to eat one. I saw a goose bounce off the side of an Amazon truck recently at a decent speed, and all it did was bellow and keep flying, poorly. That’s where we are with environmentally friendly mega-commerce, I guess. (Well, the goose lived.)

My thoughts drifted to a run I remember doing in Ontario in 1995, one of the coldest and quietest runs I have ever done. I dated a nurse from Toronto for a few years and used to head up there from New Hampshire about every two months. I remember her remarking with amusement one time that Americans seemed to have opinions on almost everything. I assured her that it was just me, but no, she meant that Americans just liked to talk and emphasize what they felt about things. She didn’t see it as impolite, just odd.

I have always regarded most Western, capitalist-style countries as functioning very similarly to the United States, obvious differences like specific languages aside. One of those perceived similarities that actually is not there, and never really has been, was free speech. Canada doesn’t have a governing document remotely like ours. I don’t think any countries have anything remotely resembling our First Amendment.

I have railed about how this is all going down the drain now, and it probably is. But I am lucky to have been born in a place where I at least enjoyed the illusion of expressing ideas without fear of government or corporate retribution for a very long time. It is an amazing, precious privilege, like dodging hotchicks on the ice on a warm January mid-morning.

(Appendix A: I have been following this runner on Twitter and slowly grown numb to the boggling mileage totals she is racking up in her “ultramarathon streak.” As this guy says, Candice Burt is getting almost no recognition. She has now run at least 31.5 miles in one shot every day for over two months in a row. Two thousand miles in one year is a worthy mileage total for most runners, but getting there in two months is probably going to remain rare for a while.)