Getting Back

I travelled for work this week. 

Long hours.  Little sleep. 

No reading.  No running.  No family. 

Mentally drained.  Physically weary.

I work with good people.  Dedicated.  Smart.  Engaged.  Kind.  If I must be away from home, those are the people I want to be with.

Still, it felt great getting back.

Hugging my wife and daughter.  Sleeping in my own bed.  Waking up, drinking coffee, and reading.

Returning to normal, after a few days of not normal. 

Not normal meant five days without running.  Instead, I traded running for sleep.

That doesn’t happen often.

So, it felt wonderful to lace up my trail shoes this morning.  A clear sky.  A cold day.  Well below zero with a biting wind.

To run with no other purpose than to run.  To move my legs, inflate my lungs, and clear my head.  To appreciate the beauty of the forest along the path I’ve run a hundred times before.  An isolated path with traces of snow, alongside a stream of icy water.  The crunch of frozen dirt underfoot.  No people, no phone calls, no stress.  Blue Rodeo in my earbuds.  More than a band.  Poets and philosophers of life and death, joy and pain.  Songs about navigating back to normal when your world strays.

A one hour run.  Never fast.  Or slow.  Just a run.  A little bit of uphill, a little bit of downhill. 

Like most of our days, most of the time.  Normal.  A bit good, a bit bad.  Usually somewhere in between. 

We are all desperate for normal now, almost a year into Covid.  Lockdowns and masks.  No travel.  Distant family.  Those damn arrows on the floors in grocery stores.  I hate those arrows.

Anger at those who break the rules.  The temptation to break them ourselves – to ignore the arrows, visit a friend, travel.

A virus jolted us out of normal.  We took too much for granted for too long. And now we wait for vaccines, and double-mask our faces, and challenge ourselves to be more patient than we’ve ever been in our lives.

If only it was as easy as a run, along a trail, on a cold winter’s day.