When I awoke this morning, the sky was still dark with a heavy set of storm clouds. The weather channel app said that my area was on alert for severe weather in the form of thunderstorms and torrential rain. How fun! It cemented my thoughts of going for my long run today, before my week heats up exponentially.
My trail runs riverside, next to one of those big concrete ditches that usually only hold a trickle of water and a medley of wildlife in the soft bottoms. As the river passes under the 405 freeway, the river is sent into a concrete channel, almost narrow enough to straddle, with a wide cement sidewalk on either side. Just below this bottleneck, is a series of large concrete teeth used to catch the debris before it enters the ocean, a few miles away.
The river was fast and full of debris. Not garbage, so much as leaves and branches. Probably left over from our wind storms of last week. The channel was full and spilling onto the walkways in places. It excited an instant of fear at the realization of the power and swiftness of that river. Already the guardrail had sticks lodged in it from earlier in the day. The water must have been at least a foot deeper.
I ran in my bike brights, a neon green zipper front jacket with back pockets across the rear. As JE was driving to his work with me in the passenger seat, I looked over at a truck next to us and saw the driver sporting bike brights. I started looking around at his vehicle to find his bike and realized that both the passenger and the driver were looking at me and looking around the car to find my bike. Completely recognizable as bike wear. But, it saved me. My ten miles was fun, but wet and cold. My inner thermostat kept my core warm, but my limbs were all wet and chilled. But, I felt invigorated by the rain!
I was the only person running out there today. I passed two people on bicycles, but that was it for my entire ten mile stretch. When I think about how many people live here and probably ended up at the gym today, I have to laugh. Can you imagine the humidity from the sweat generated by all those bodies? Yuck! And you're breathing that stuff...
When I got back to the freeway underpass, the river was impassable. I sent JE a text asking if he would pick me up at a nearby store. My phone battery went dead even before I knew if he had gotten my text. But when I got to the store, he was waiting for me in the car with the heat cranked up and the seat heaters on. That is love!
I was so cold and hungry, we stopped by the closest burger joint and got lunch from the drive thru. As we were waiting in line, we watched several people going in and out of the store. Most of them hunched over, bending their knees and squinting with their foreheads ready for spring planting. It was sort of comical at first and uproariously funny by the end of lunch. My favorite was a woman in a raincoat and goulashes clutching a bag of food to her chest as she huddled over to protect it on the way to her car. We parked, facing the entrance, to eat--just so we could watch people's response to the rain. Some Californians do not do well in wet weather.
Maybe this sounds sort of mean, but I grew up in Seattle, where rain is a given. So, seeing so many people interacting with these rare southern California rains, was an experiment on culture!
After lunch, I was still frozen, so JE took me to a coffee house to get a cup of something hot. As we got out of the car, JE called to me that I needed to hunch down and furrow my forehead to stay dry. We both took long steps, coming from the hip, with our shoulders bent toward our knees. JE was fast in that position, and I called to squint his eyes if he wanted to stay dryer.
JE's quote of the day, in reference to anyone who may have seen us playing fools: those guys are smart. In that position they are likely to get less wet!" well, I was belly laughing...
The one problem with these big runs is how remarkably calorie deprived I feel afterward. I'm not entirely sure it isn't the cold making me feel like this. In Nar'yan Mar, in the sub degree temperature, I sought high calorie foods all the time. Tatiana Ivanovna owned a countertop deep fat fryer. Perhaps arctic Russia is one of the truly excusable place to own one of these things. Often, after a long day at work, she would turn on the fryer and 'boil' hotdogs in it until the skin turned golden and split. I never developed an affinity for this. My high calorie food was French toast fried in endless amounts of butter topped with black current jam. I'd eat it with a piping hot cup of peach or blackberry tea with a healthy dollop of sweetened condensed milk stirred in. Yum.
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