Bay Area December

BTW: It's not as wintry here as in some places around the country, but it's cold enough for me.

The Bay Farm Ferry dock—at the start of my Saturday group-yet-solo run.

To say that Saturday I ran with my running club is really to misspeak. I arrived at the designated meeting site three minutes late, and there were no runners to be seen. They had actually taken off on time—at 8:30 am. A couple of other latecomers, K and J, arrived shortly after I did, and the three of us started running together. They soon left me behind, at my urging. Even though I had told them to go ahead, I still experienced a few minutes of “oh-poor-old-and-slow me” time. It was cold (amazingly so for the Bay Area) and I was (sob) alone. Imagine my pleasure when I came to an intersection of the trail and a major road and found K and J standing there, waiting for me to catch up.

“We didn’t want you to get lost,” they explained before they ran off ahead again.

When I reached the end of the day’s 5.8 mile loop, there they were again, in the parking lot, waiting for me and making sure I hadn’t gotten lost/hurt/vaporized by the cold air. These were two people I really didn’t know at all. How kind they were.

Monday morning I ran across the old b-ball court, which in the rain looked a bit different than it usually does (wetter).

I remember in the late 1980s walking down here some afternoons to find my younger son shooting hoops and to break it to him that it was time to come home for dinner. Not long ago when he was in town he told me he'd walked by the old court with one of his friends from those earlier days.

"Yeah," he said. "It looked the same--even the crack bathroom was still there." The crack bathroom??? "Oh Mom, just kidding." Was he? Sometimes I get hints that my children used to feel I needed protection from the real world. And here I thought I was protecting them.

Anyway. Last Monday I awoke at 5:30 am to silence outside the bedroom window. A relief after the pounding rain I’d heard when I’d awoken earlier, around 2 am. “Yay!” I sez, throwing on my running clothes and getting out the door while the rain was in abeyance. “Boo!” I sez ten minutes later, trying with no hope of succeeding to dodge the fat raindrops pelting down. I’ve always held, however, that although I won't start out to run when it’s raining, once I’m out there I won't stop on account of a little sky water.

The overhead world of clouds scudding across the sky (wonderful word, scudding) in between showers.

The upside-down world of puddles.

Little-known fact: Z and I have run not one but two complete marathons (the Coeur d’Alene Marathon and the Marine Corps Marathon, both in the late 1990s) in the pouring rain. That’s a total of more than ten hours we both ran while soaking wet. And cold—these didn't take place during mild summer storms. So now when I end up running in the rain I stay aware of the short duration of the experience and try to enjoy the puddle-wonderful world that is springing to life around me.