First Run

I went for a run to the park today.  It wasn’t planned.  I woke up at a reasonably early hour, I don’t start my new job for another two weeks, and my husband suggested it might make me feel good, so I went.  It’s been some time since I ran.  A few years ago, from about 2004 through 2007, I was running pretty regularly.  I’d had a baby in 2003, and aware of the fact that my 30-something body was not going to bounce back from pregnancy as my 20-something body had from the first two, I was logging the food I ate, drinking plenty of water and had reached and maintained my goal weight.  I felt great.  Then, as it always does, life threw a few curve balls and I lost my handle on my routine.  It happens.

So today I ran.  The park; - Cape Henlopen State Park, about a half mile from where we live, has a great paved bike trail about  three miles long.  I have walked and biked this trail a few dozen times with my family since we moved here about a year ago, a highlight of our trips often being the sighting of a particularly beautiful white albino deer.  

At first, it was going fine.  My legs felt good, my knees felt good, and I was alternating between walking and running to get my lungs back into the swing of things.  I felt happy I was doing this for myself, and was feeling very Zen.  Meditating into the run and just enjoying the rhythm of my feet on the pavement.  Until I realized I’d meditated my way into missing the turn on the path.  I could have gone back, but that would have meant passing once again by all the campers and the park workers I’d waved and smiled at on the way (they do that here).  I’d have to wave and smile again and give that small yes-I-went-the-wrong-way-cause-I’m-a-doofus laugh.  I was decidedly not doing that.  

So instead, I stood at the wrong side of the dunes, squinting up from the bottom of the giant sand hill.  I wasn’t lost; - I could see the WWII observation tower I knew was alongside the running trail peeking out at the top of the hill.  All I had to do was cross the dunes in the hot sun when I could have been traveling on the nice shady paved path.  I was going to have a boatload of sand in my shoes and socks for the remainder of the run.  Oh, and I was going to have to exert more energy than I had intended.  I mean, I had wanted to exercise, but not this much exercise.  Fighting my way through sandy dune mountains was not what I’d had planned.  

But since I refused to retrace my steps, I grudgingly stepped onto the sand hill.  My peaceful, positive frame of mind, however, got left behind.  Now I was mad.  Mad at the dry, soft, constantly shifting sand that made it hard to get a foothold.  Mad at the sun.  Mad at the Osprey overhead, because he had wings and could fly over the dunes while I had to trudge through the hard way.  Deep down, I knew it was irrational.  I knew that a quarter mile walk through some dunes was not the end of the world, but I was somehow more committed to the being mad thing.  Whatever.  Bah.

This frame of mind stayed with me until I was rounding the curve of the last stretch of trail; - until I saw her, darting out of the brush on my left.  The white deer leapt across my path, followed by a beautiful, tawny brown fawn.  She stopped in the small clearing to the right of the path, about fifteen feet from the path, and I stopped too; - both moving and breathing.  The fawn continued on into the woods, but she and I looked each other in the eye for a full minute before she turned and bounded after it.  

I had never seen her that closely before, and I doubt that I ever will again.  She was magnificent.  And had I gone the right way on the path I would have crossed that spot ten minutes earlier and missed her.  I ran the rest of the way to my car feeling grateful instead of annoyed, thanking the universe for that lesson.  Look for opportunities.  You never know where they will be.  That is the outlook I will take with me through this endeavor.  I feel sure it will lead me in the right direction.