10. Weather, poo, running.

I am drinking a cafe au lait and I should be working on a story but I am not, instead I'm just kind of in a daze. It's been a long weekend. There have been rainshowers aplenty flying through Missoula this weekend and I have been outside for many of them. I am just now starting to dry out and warm up. This cafe au lait is delicious.

I'm glad it's raining - maybe it will clean this town up a little. Missoula has been smelling like poo lately. The other day I was riding downtown and the smell was inescapable. Everywhere (except in the Rattlesnake - it always smells good in the Rattlesnake), every street I rode down, poo. It smelled like poo by the new railroad crossing, it smelled like poo on Spruce, it smelled like poo on Pattee. It just kept on smelling like poo, I couldn't get away from it. I wondered if it was me who smelled like poo - and you might be wondering that too - but it wasn't. It was probably the mass accumulation of years of dog poo. This town is a dog town and maybe it has finally reached the breaking point.

I was on my way to yoga. Before class, the ladies said, "The weather's been so nice, we've been really lucky." I got all weepy because I hadn't seen it - I hadn't seen that. I spent much of the first half of this year outside and I feel like I've spent too much of the last two months inside. Being outside in the weather is so much better than looking out at the weather from inside.

This weekend I began my Official Training for the next Big Race I'm doing and I'm happy about that for so many reasons, not the least of which is that I'll have to be outside a lot.

But what I'm most happy about is that I'll finally have something to say to all the people who are asking me about running these days. Everyone asks me about running now all of a sudden. Everyone. Always. Obviously I am a huge braggart, obviously I spent the first seven months of the year bragging about how I was such a huge runner. Now, people come up to me and say, "So how much are you running these days?" and I mutter something quietly and try to get away. They probably laugh and snort at my retreating figure. "Ha," they say, "what a fake."

Now they won't be so smug. This morning I got out of bed in the terrible cold darkness and went for a run through the rain up the Rattlesnake with a very fast person. It totally kicked me. I did not dominate. And that's what training is for. It was a perfect morning for running.

For the past few months I've been trying to write an essay for the running club newsletter - another thing I'm all talk about. The essay is not cooperating. Usually these things write themselves, and if they don't - if I have to actually work at it - overwhelming laziness takes over and I give up. I give up!

I think on my radio show this week I'll play bratty songs.