Surreal Saturday/TRIBE Run free

(For pictures of how blissfully beautiful the actual course was - click here)

I was in my pajamas by 6pm today (although I subsequently got out of them to go and get some sourdough bread) with a good kind of tiredness in my legs from the trail run this morning.

It felt surreal - handing in two essays at midnight night, having fitful dreams of catching buses and taxis and being late, waking up early and taking the tube to Waterloo, seeing Jacob there and then we were on a big red train, eating oatmeal while outside the window the sun hung low in the sky and shone so you could actually look at it for a split second.

We got off the train with lots of other people evidently there for the run too, walked through forest to get to the starting area, registered and then all so quickly we were running.

I'd told myself this was going to be a run, not a race. This past term I've been learning so much about humbly accepting my limits and not letting my own ambition and competitiveness spoil the joy of the moment or the value of the experience. Fearing my own tendency to look at the numbers on my run tracker instead of the world around me, I decided to run without my phone so I would be oblivious to both distance and time during the race. I'm so glad I did, because it was one of the most beautiful courses I've every run. It was mostly in forested areas, over trails covered in autumn leaves (sometimes those leaf-duvets hid boggy bits of mud) At one point we emerged from forest and ran over a dew-covered field which glittered in the sun. There were steep inclines and exhilarating downhill bits. As I ran I couldn't help but think 'thank you God for this run, thank you for the sun, for legs that work, for seasons...' and put in a little prayer request that in heaven I'd be able to run through fields and forests like this (but better).

The weeks poem ended up scribbled in a ten minute interval before calling Jacob for evening prayer:

There was a sea change in the sunrise this morning
a line of grey cloud across otherwise blue sky
and the smell of last night's bonfires fading.
This wooded path has become familiar,
eroded through the process of intimacy.
A quiet optimism previously shadowed by anxiety
follows my footfall.
The night's turbulence is over
it is all going to be okay.