My Running, Of Late

Lately I have been continuing at my running, but not at the longer distances that I had been hoping for. One reason for this is that the weather here has been heating up terribly as it usually does during the summertime. And when it is not overbearingly hot, then it is either raining with wet, slippery surfaces or is at nighttime, with poor visibility. I had been leaning toward running at night, even running at times back and forth in my own back yard after midnight. But running down a street at night? Even beyond the paranoid notion that anyone may think a man running down the street at night could only be up to no good, it is truly very difficult then for me to see the surface that I’m running on. And it would take just one trip-up or a step into a hole to cause a serious injury.

When I do run, I almost always run around my neighborhood. I have a 2.87 mile (exactly the same distance as my old Davie “block”) course I’ve laid out over my neighborhood. I’ve found this extremely convenient as I can just step out of my house, run, and then come back in. Also, the course is designed so that, should I need to cut short my running for any reason, I can just walk a relatively short distance back to my house. And so far, I’ve experienced no problems at all with dogs running around loose (as I had feared). When the weather finally does cool down, I can extend my distance by running down other streets. I have extensively used the website MapMyRun to help me design my running courses.

This past Fourth of July, Gainesville had a three mile running race at Westside Park. I didn’t run it, but I was gratified to see the Gainesville Sun newspaper actually feature an article about it the next day, complete with results for all the finishers. If they can just keep up that local sports coverage!