Throw your head back

Last night's run was one of those throw your head back and revel experiences. I can't explain why. No one thing was special about the run. I took my usual path from the office, ran at a hearty but ordinary pace, in the typical late summer evening breeze, darting along with the same swamp bunny audience. Heck, I didn't even have the happy swish-swish of a running skirt or my favorite sunshine-yellow top. Just ordinary running shorts. But perhaps it was the so very ordinary that made the run so very remarkable. No new scenery to distract me. Too dusky to take note of litter in the bayou. No hitches in the knee. And the skateboarding twerps must have all gone back to school.

For that time, my world was reduced to just the crunch-crunch of my feet on the grass, bayou scrubbrush tinged violet-gray by the dimming light, and a mauve sunset deepening into a dark, glittering skyline. And all was right within it.

That something so biomechanically routine, so-old-as-time, so inherent, so easy as softly kicking back one foot after another, padding lightly down, and doing it all again, over and over, can buoy the spirits always momentarily amazes me. And then that momentary amazement gives way, at the peak of that ebullience, when I feel like a kid again, darting across a field with abandon, arms flapping, stride fluid and strong and unhindered, to a little bit of melancholy, that we adults mostly let the rapture of childhood running slip away. When did running become a chore? And more importantly, why?