Strange Reward

The drive home was .... long.  The traffic on 295 was pretty determined to keep me to 30 mph.  There were a few stretches I was able to go 40.  The drive from Freeport to Lisbon Falls on 125 was better in that I didn't have to deal with too much traffic, but the roads were definitely slipperier.  On the steep hill approaching the Andy, two cars were stopped unable to make it up.  Luckily, they didn't block my way down.

By the time I got home, I just wanted to have a beer on the couch with Rick.  I knew I needed to get out, though.  I made myself change.  My headlamp created my own snow globe right in front of me.  I was running the fields that I had the night before.  Wow!  Going was tough.  I thought of my commute.  The cars' wheel would spin and the tach would rev.  Well, my wheels were spinning and I'm sure a hear rate monitor would show my bpms revving.  That's where the similarities end.  I didn't have to deal with other peoples inability to navigate the conditions.  I was the opposite of tense.

Oh!  But I was scared (kind of a strong word for what it was) for a bit.  Cresting the hill heading out to the Davis's fields (long, open, windy stretch not the across the street hill - for readers who have run the FatAss), I saw two glowing eyes in the field below.  Could have been just about anything, maybe Bambi, but, being alone in the dark, I knew it was a coyote.  Again, it probably would have been fine to keep running my intended path anyway, but I turned back.  I could stand to run the hill across the street again.  Yeah, that's really what I wanted to do all along.

Running there, I was struck by how quickly my tracks from just 20 minutes earlier were being erased.  Almost like the anti-magic footprints that Ian left.  So you can deduce from that, it was windy.  So my reward was running in conditions that were hard.  The feeling that I did it.  I got out there.  Then I got to sit on the couch with Rick and have that beer.