Cake!

The story of this morning’s run could be as long and dramatic as Anna Karenina. Or as absurdly brief as a limerick.

I left the house without too much of a plan. I only knew that I had to do some distance, because tomorrow is spin class and Thursday will be too hot for a run outside. I started slowly, as per usual. It was nice and cool but the sun was very bright already at 6am.

As I approached 3 miles I started to warm up but my right knee began to feel weak again. I scolded myself “the only response to weakness is strength!” and kept going, tacking on 2 additional miles as punishment for the moment of self-pity.

The more it hurt, the farther I went out. And wouldn’t you know? I was rewarded with relief.

Fully warmed up on the way back, I simply felt the miles. I got faster but pictured myself gradually grinding down into the cement with each step, like the earth beneath me was folding up in half like a Monopoly board . At mile 7, near that little house between Montrose and Wilson, I became aware of an alert on the face of my phone attached to my arm. I wasn’t willing to stop, so I tried to read the message on the run, from the side, road-delirious.

I really thought it said “Calf!” And it seemed perfectly logical to me in that moment that this was like a ‘Check Engine’ light coming on, informing me that GPS had intuited that one of my calves was about to break.

I let myself worry about this for a half mile, fully believing that the Nike+ app was tracking me at the cellular level, intra-bone.

Until I hit a patch of shade and saw that the alert said “Cake!”

--the one I have to order for my mom’s birthday.

By this time I was past mile 8 and in the home stretch. Past the pain, beyond the false warnings of failure and onto the bakery. There’s nothing graceful or neat about my running life. It’s as ridiculous as my real life. Phantoms everywhere, sending me signs, making jokes of serious stuff that is rarely ever serious.