I Run

It's raining, and it's hot. Not so ideal for road running, but great fun out on the trails. It's the kind of run who have to immerse yourself into, damn the discomforts. Run like a savage. I took the longer trail around Sweet Pond State Park. It didn't take long for the deer flies to find me, so had to take off my shirt to use it as a swatter. It was soaked anyway. In weather like this you don't run so much as plod, head down against the rain so it streams off the visor of your cap and not onto your face. Toward the far end of the pond I took a breather. The rain had let up, but I was saturated with the fluids of clouds, sweat glands, and whatever drips and oozes in a humid forest. I heard a commotion ahead of me, just over a knoll. My civilized thought processes were numbed and in my Neanderthal state of mind I saw something zoom up the hill just twenty feet from where I stood. "Ooh, antelope. Yum!", my caveman brain said. It was really a small white tailed deer. There was another commotion, another blur of fur. "Ooh, wolf. Not so yum." It was really a coyote. I think. Then the civilized brain kicked in. That deer was moving pretty fast. That coyote was moving pretty fast too. But that deer was probably twice as fast as that coyote. I, on the other hand, am three times as slow as the coyote, at my fastest. It's not going to catch that deer, but it's probably already caught my scent. Time to go. I ran the last part of the trail to the road a tad faster than I usually do. I picked up a stick with a pointy end and held on to it. Not that I'm paranoid - coyotes are pretty shy - but just in case. Anyway, not something you see every day.