Going for the wet spot

I generally have a number of time slots each day in which to stick an hour or more of running, especially on weekends. My "morning" runs are usually at around noon (or later, if I don't plan to run twice) unless I have whole mornings free. I do a fair amount of running after dark, although after a couple of nasty falls on nasty ice within a few feet of the same spot on the Martin Park Path in the winter of 2014, I try to avoid misguided post-crepuscular sorties at that time of year.

In other words, I have absolutely no excuse for running at the only of day it rains with any regularity here -- usually between 4 and 6 p.m. Yet at least three times in the past couple of weeks, including today, I've sat indoors through whole sunny late mornings and afternoons, doing entirely unnecessary things online and glancing out the window to see the day gradually going from bright and cloudless to noncommittal but calm to Boulder's version of foreboding, and realizing that I need to get outside if I'm going to meet my friend by six o'clock like I'm supposed to. This has seen my first steps out the door coincide with orchestral precision with the first few drops of rain from the sky, which wouldn't make much difference if rain in these parts didn't usually spell a chilly breeze even in early May and if I didn't insist on bringing my phone along with me to double as a music player, a habit I'd been pondering letting go of even before finding myself be-bopping down Marshall Road swearing into the wind and trying to protect a very fragile dumbphone from the chortling elements.

Back when I was noticeably faster, I didn't set myself up nearly as often to get annoyed at easily avoided obstacles and trouble spots. If it was likely to rain in a couple hours, I'd get my ass out to run. If there was any chance something I owned might become damaged in transit, I left it at home. Now that I've decided to become more serious again after years of haphazard slogging and my mileage has crept upward, I'm becoming aware of the jogger-like practices I slid into as my competitive side dissolved in a stew of apathy and ethanol in my late thirties and never recovered until lately. I used to see the kinds of runners John L. Parker Jr. called "huffing fatties" in his magnum opus Once a Runner, troubled-looking goofballs fucking around with their music and Garmins and Road IDs and whatever else was needed to shepherd this type of cardio-ingenue through a three-mile stagger without lapsing into multimedia withdrawal, and wonder why they even bothered coming outdoors when it clearly made not a shit's bit of difference that there was a great big sky overhead and lots of grassy and flowery and tree-covered earth about; they might as well have been hopping up and down stuffing clothes into a washing machine, or something. Well, I kinda became that troubled-looking goofball, and hitting the reverse thrusters in a panic hasn't yet set me back on the path of the moderately conscientious athlete type. Oh, who am I kidding...

On to others, a subject this blog is going to deal with more often when I start podcasting on May 18. Yesterday morning, the Colorado Marathon was held up in Fort Collins, or mostly northwest of it, and the top three finishers in the accompanying half are pictured below. The winner in 1:19:00 was woman in the center, Heather Utrata, whose hoodie is of some interest to me because one, I want one of those, and two, having uttered those words more than a few times over the years, I find it funny that I and many others have ascribed agency to an abstract noun in this way. Just as the phrase "science is fallible" really has no meaning, so too is it silly to pretend that it's running, not runners, that has the problem. That said, "I sometimes find running to be sucky" or the like is neither as damning as we need it to be not suitable for advertising on a garment as small as a sweatshirt.

But it's better with the right post-race refreshments