Rain Running

Today I ran in the rain for the first time in my training. I've run in little sprinkles before, some snow flurries, but not all-out RAIN. It felt wonderful, honestly. I think it's probably a mood thing, sometimes I could see rain being a frustration. But today the humidity was disgusting and a brief downpour was welcome to cut the curtain of moisture in the air.

For fear of shorting out my iPod, the rain also forced me to run musicless for much of my long run. I'm amazed at how much I can process and reprocess, obsess and regress over while I'm pushing through miles. I've been stressed over a few things recently and each got their moment of over-analyzation, each question and answer pounded home (emphatically) with footfalls.

The heaviest bit of the storm occurred while I was rounding Lake Calhoun, the Minneapolis skyline in the distance. The rain was heavy enough to blur the buildings, make the city a mirage with fuzzy sailboat gliding to and fro.

I'm running the Twin Cities Marathon 8 weeks from tomorrow. It's funny, the things that stick in your head, or rather, the things that upon experiencing them you know they will be stuck in your head. I was running and anxiously counting the number of weeks to the race, wondering if I was training hard enough, wondering if I should worry about the occassionally twinge in my left knee, wondering if my toenail is supposed to look like that, wondering if my friends and family would be disappointed in me if I failed, when the rain started to really, really pound. I looked out at Lake Calhoun right as it picked up, when the tiny pinpricks of rain on the water surface became huge, crowded splashes, like pebbles thrown from a million happy children. I'll remember that little moment, that pace and that hot, summer rain, that crescendo of Rain on Lake. I was running. I was soaked. I was happy. I am not worried.