Today was a good running day. It was a really good running day. I don’t know what it was, but I haven’t felt this good running in a long time.
One of my favorite on-screen gags occurs in the Marvel movie, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” At the opening of the film, super-soldier Steve Rogers is doing laps around the Washington D.C. mall. He keeps passing Sam Wilson, who will later become an Avenger (The Falcon). Wilson is just a normal guy also trying to do a morning run on the mall. Rogers keep lapping Wilson. Every time he does so, he says a bland, “On your left.” Wilson gets fed up with this and eventually collapses by a tree; he and Rogers banter and become fast friends. The joke has a long payoff, which comes much later in “Avengers: Endgame.”
“On your left” has become my mantra when I am having a really good run. For me, it captures the spirit of that nice-guy super-human runner who is clearly having a nice morning sprint over 14 miles. To be able to do that, and feel good doing it, is for me captured when I have one of those really good “running days”: the legs feel good the whole time, the respiration is normal and unstrained the whole time, and hills just melt into the terrain, causing no significant extra burden on my respiration. That’s a good running day for me.
Today was that day. Jodi went to do our weekly food shopping (which was like shopping during a zombie apocalypse) and I went for a run. When I left the house, it was warm and humid. It felt like it was a heat index somewhere in the 70s. About 2 miles into the run, I felt a cold wind from the north. A front had just swept over me. The temperature dropped 5-10 degrees. The air, once simply humid, turning into a misty precipitation. The whole time, my legs felt good, my lungs felt good, and the hills just melted into the terrain. I might as well have been a super-soldier. I felt that good.
All I could think was, “on your left.”
