I usually run in the morning, sometimes during my lunch break at work, but a strange confluence of scheduling issues found me lacing up my sneakers last night after I'd finished stories with the kids and they were tucked in and asleep. I put on the brightest, shiniest yellow shirt I could find and trotted out into the mellow spring gloaming. I learned a few things over the next 52 minutes that I thought worth sharing.
First, when you run at night you feel as though you are running much, much faster than you really are. About halfway through the run I remember thinking, "wow, I am flying!" I may have even had a mental image of a cheetah or some other slim, very fast creature (attributes I have never quite managed to fully achieve, bless the darkness for them). It did occur to me to wonder at how I was running this fast—my race pace and then some – without being anywhere near out of breath. I passed a mile mark and checked my watch. I was really running 30 seconds slower per mile than my average training pace. Oh well, I enjoyed the illusion.
Second, blues music is good music to listen to on a night run in spring, when the air is warm and cold at the same time, and the dark air still smells like snow. I recommend a mix of Nina Simone, B.B. King, Albert King, Bobby Bland, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. At least that's what was working for me.
Third, I almost never wear my glasses when I run. Without them, I'm not blind, but the world does take on the characteristics of an impressionistic painting. At dusk this effect is magnified, and at night, between the long stretches of road with no streetlights and the occasional blinding headlights of oncoming cars, I'm like a bat – without the sonar. The upside of this unnerving experience was this bit of visual poetry: there's a little lake or pond I pass out on 114 in either Bedford or Goffstown. On icy winter deep mornings when the wind is howling and my face is freezing and my breath is coming out of me like steam from a train engine, that pond is covered with pristine white snow and flocks of crows land on it and they look like ragged bits of night torn out of the sky and left behind to flutter across the ice as the sun came up. This image haunted me all winter. In the spring, in the dark, the same pond is all dark and ripples and the shadows make it look like small boats, just big enough for giant frogs or very small people, might be plying their way toward hidden ports. If it weren't for the cars rushing by, you'd probably be able to hear the dip of the oars into the cold snowmelt water.
And finally, as I neared the end of the run, now seeking to balance out the slow pace from the first half with something a bit brisker and end the night with a tolerable mile-per-minutes average, I realized that I had two options: I could run all out as fast as humanly possible to the end of the distance I'd set for myself, or I could just run a bit faster than normal, but go a bit father. There are obviously times when one choice might be better than the other – in running, in work, in life and love and all the other things we do. Last night I chose the latter.
