Before I started running, I would always point and laugh at people from my car, asking the occupants, “Don’t they just look like they are in pain? Why do they always look like they are in pain?” We would laugh, safe with the thoughts that people who run are nuts.<\/p>\n
I was out for a run yesterday with Yeti. It was about 5 degrees and the windchill was about 10 below. I’m not really what you would call a serious runner, but at one point this summer, we were going out about every other day, and I’ll admit it… I was enjoying the exercise. Once or twice I think there was even a feeling of “runners-high” where I kinda felt like I could just run all day, Forrest Gump style. Besides, I was constantly amazed at how far I could actually run without dying.<\/p>\n
So we start out yesterday, and I’m instantly thinking that it’s way colder than I thought, my knees and hips feel as though at any moment, they’ll freeze up and I’ll tip over to the ground like an action figure you’ve carefully arranged on the table. My jaw feels slow, and I’m uttering primal grunts at Yeti to slow down. She’s looking up at me like I’m crazy, and she’s running as fast as she can. I’m sure she was thinking, “Let’s get this over with as soon as possible.”<\/p>\n
I take the normal route to begin, hop on the creek trail, head east towards the lake. I arrive at Bloomington Ave. and make the snap decision that there is no way I’m going to run around Lake Nokomis today, so I take a quick right, and then a right again down onto the dirt path on the south side of the creek. I had never been on this dirt path before. Maybe I thought all the leave-less trees would provide some cover from the wind. I was thinking a lot of crazy things at this point.. the cold is not a friend of your brain’s.<\/p>\n
Now I’m weaving down the dirt path, dodging roots and branches, I think my ankle just rolled over a bit, not a problem since I can’t feel it anyway. I nearly fall off the embankment at one point where it had eroded, Yeti is weaving around like crazy, making it hard to stay on the path.<\/p>\n
I finally see the end of the trail, where it heads up about 30 feet to the road again. I moan something to the dog and kick it up a notch. I emerge from the trail and onto the sidewalk. A car passes, our eyes meet. Instantly I know.<\/p>\n
I’m one of those people who look like they’re in pain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before I started running, I would always point and laugh at people from my car, asking the occupants, “Don’t they just look like they are in pain? Why do they always look like they are in pain?” We would laugh, safe with the thoughts that people who run are nuts. I was out for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pf4VN-bL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colianni.net\/aj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}