6.2 miles
minnehaha dog park and back
31 degrees
Hooray for great winter runs with clear paths and strong legs and lungs! Yesterday I spent 6 hours in the car — dropping FWA off at college, then going home, then turning around again and going back with a forgotten backpack. Today I’m happy to be outside moving. On the first trip back, as we drove beside minnehaha park I noticed how beautiful it was with the clear view across to the VA home and the open river and the gnarled bare branches, and I thought, I want to run here tomorrow. So today, I did, and it was beautiful. Oh, that river! I hovered above it on the edge of the bluff, and admired it through the bare trees.
My IT band hurt a little, so did my back, but mostly I felt good. I picked up the cadence at the end and sprinted for 20 or 30 seconds — could I call that a “stride”? Thought about how my legs and form felt better after the speed work. Maybe I should try to incorporate this into one of weekly runs?
10 Things
- small slivers of ice sprinkled over the path
- orange orange everywhere, 1: rusted orange leaves still on the trees
- orange orange everywhere, 2: park or city workers in orange vests doing something with a hose near 44th
- orange orange everywhere, 3: a compact car in Dukes of Hazzard orange — I stared at it again as it drove north to make sure that it was actually orange
- roaring falls, churning bright white
- running by the furnace for the old WPA quarry — today I noticed its door, on the other side, a little farther down the bluff
- open, flowing, dark gray creek water about to fall over the limestone ledge
- a runner running with a big fluffy white dog
- the light rail’s recorded bells ding ding dinging
- the steady, strong rhythm of my feet lifting up up up up up off the ground
Writing that last item, I remembered something I thought about: how running combines flying (or hovering or floating or flowing without resistance) and striking down hard on the ground (solid, sturdy feet make contact with the surface). As I thought this, I also thought about flying = water and feet striking = stone. Does that work?
Camisha L. Johnson’s wonderful poem, Disclosure, came up on my post for jan 3, 2020. Today I was struck by her explanation:
About this Poem
“A person bumps into me on the street and I instinctively reply, ‘I’m sorry.’ Seconds later, I regret it. I notice the same compulsion towards apology as I navigate the world as a hard of hearing person. What does it mean to feel compelled in this way, to ask forgiveness over and over for interrupting other people’s comfort? Through this poem, I am grappling with what’s happening beneath the surface of those exchanges, the cost of all those apologies, and, ultimately, the unnamed cultural demands of the hearing world.”
—Camisha L. Jones
a fun challenge
Yesterday I used the word supine and remember my beloved high school vocab workshop book. I found it on my bookshelf and had an idea: why not randomly pick a word from each day and spend time with it (ideally, write a poem about it). Yesterday’s word (found after I asked FWA to pick a number between 1 and 162 while he waited for his doctor’s appointment): kudos
Here’s a poem inspired by the clinic waiting room:
Kudos Tuesday
you’re off to a great start
a crowded waiting room
everyone masked
deep coughs
a long wait for urgent care
a confused woman
with a respiratory infection
uncertain whether or not to wait
in this stuffy room for 2 hours —
should she stay or should she go?
her daughter arrives and says,
let’s sidebar for a moment
and I don’t care what they decide
I just want to know if
this is how lawyers talk all the time
or she’s just watched too much law and order