4.3 miles
lake nokomis — one way
19 degrees / feels like 10
50% snow and ice-covered
Hooray for moving outside! Hooray for warmer air! Hooray for getting to run to Lake Nokomis! It felt good to be outside breathing in fresh air. My legs and lungs felt strong. At one point, I remember breathing in deeply through my nose, then out through my mouth and watching the frozen breath as it hovered in front of me.
layers:
- 2 pairs black running tights
- 1 bright yellow TC 10 mile racing shirt (2018)
- 1 pink jacket with hood
- 1 black winter vest
- 1 pair of black gloves, 1 pair of pink and white striped gloves
- 1 fleece lined cap with brim
- a gray buff
- 1 pair of socks
Only a few layers short of my most layered look. Maybe someday I’ll invest in an expensive running jacket and be able to wear less layers, but maybe not.
10 Things I Noticed
- the call, but not the drumming, of a pileated woodpecker
- the path on the biking side of the pedestrian bridge had packed down snow that was uneven, but not too slick. It had little flecks of light brown — sand? grit? dirt that Minneapolis Parks put down to make it less slippery?
- a fat tire! I could hear the crunching of their wheels as they approached from behind. After they slowly passed me, they stopped just past the locks and dam #1. Why? To rest? To figure out where they were? To take a picture?
- a few days ago I mentioned hearing construction noises near the falls. Heard them again today. Pounding hammers at another new apartment building going up on the other side of Dairy Queen
- heard a high-pitched whine near all of the apartments; it was coming from a gas vent by the roundabout
- minnehaha creek was mostly frozen, with a few stretches of open water
- heard, but didn’t see, kids’ voices — yelling, laughing — somewhere on the creek
- more voices down by the dock, near the shore, at lake hiawatha
- noticed the creek water leading into the lake was not completely iced over
- there were stretches where the path was an inch of solid brown ice, but most of it was a combination of bare pavement, stained with salt, patches of packed snow and smooth ice
I don’t remember noticing anything particular delightful. I devoted a lot of attention to my effort, staying relaxed, and avoiding slippery spots.
I follow the Mary Oliver Bot on twitter and they posted a line from this beautiful poem:
The Moths/ Mary Oliver
There’s a kind of white moth, I don’t know
what kind, that glimmers
by mid-May
in the forest, just
as the pink mocassin flowers
are rising.
If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.
And anyway
I was so full of energy.
I was always running around, looking
at this and that.
If I stopped
the pain
was unbearable.
If I stopped and thought, maybe
the world
can’t be saved,
the pain
was unbearable.
Finally, I noticed enough.
All around me in the forest
the white moths floated.
How long do they live, fluttering
in and out of the shadows?
You aren’t much, I said
one day to my reflection
in a green pond,
and grinned.
The wings of the moths catch the sunlight
and burn
so brightly.
At night, sometimes,
they slip between the pink lobes
of the moccasin flowers and lie there until dawn,
motionless
in those dark halls of honey.