Blowing & Drifting

Summer is a great season for running, along with the other three. There’s something to be said for running in the heat of a summer afternoon (namely, “Holy shit it’s hot,” and “I wish I didn’t have to run during the girls’ naps/the lunch hour”), and I’ll bet there’s also something to be said for running early in the morning (a moment with which I’m unfamiliar), but my favorite summer-run time is the late evening.

A number of reasons, all excellent, explain this preference. The lack of heat isn’t one of them: I like running in the hot-hot, firmly (and unfoundedly) believing that running slow in a good old 105°F heat index has the same training effect as running fast in 70°F.

But there are just so many nice things about dusk runs, whether or not the temperature stays up or goes down. I like being able to start in full sun and end just as the sun goes down – or even later, in that yellow post-sunset haze. I love seeing how the already sharp angle of the light from the setting sun gets more and more acute, throwing cartoonish twenty-foot-tall shadows in the open and creating deep dark shadows in the woods. And those shadowy places often, in turn, hide animals: squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, turkeys, deer, mice and voles. The word “crepuscular” ricochets around my brain, distracting me from the pesky bugs.

And I especially like the way a dusk run carries me through pockets of air that are cool and damp (in hollows that the sun hasn’t hit for hours) or hot and dry (in high places where the breezes blow away the humidity but the sun can still bake the ground). This micro- or nano- or femto-climate aspect of runs can only be enjoyed (at least around here) in the high summer. It’s magical, the weird sensations of running through a patch of cool air as I swoop through a little valley and then hitting zone of oven-hot air on the hilltop.