When the Lights Go Down in the City

...do I want to be there, in my city....

Actually, it's not my city (Berkeley is my city), but I work here and get to run here. Last night I was able to slip away from my desk about 5:30 and run southward down the Embarcadero for a 4.5-miler, along the waterfront and around the ballpark of that orange-and-black team. I made it back in time for the first PDF to hit my desktop for proofing.

Sadly, the camera phone just doesn't do justice to the SF panorama that beckons me when I venture into the semidarkness here. You'll have to take my word for it that the lights in the lower right-hand quadrant of the frame are glowing on the Bay Bridge, and the rakishly canted oblique that isolates the dark upper left-hand corner is the arrow shaft of Claes Oldenburg's sculpture Cupid's Span. Wonderbar, I know. Guess that's enough about the scenery.

But the run--when I calculated all my numbers on MapMyRun, it told me my pace was 10.37 minutes per mile. For me, that's smoking. Hard to believe, especially because I've had the major munchies since the holidays and am currently packing five extra pounds. Maybe when I run on a slope the weight will cause me to catapult downhill at a rate only slightly slower than the speed of sound?

In compensation for the poor quality of the above image, here's one I took today. Same city, different scene (and different time of day). This was taken from the approximate spot where my run last night began. I looks a lot in daylight like it did then, only not dark.

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