"I'll Never Fall in Love Again"

This song was a departure from the 'Peter, Paul & Mary' agenda for my friend, Veronica, and I. We'd sing this quite a bit, which probably helped to make us the cynical teenagers that we became. I'm not sure if my daughter's getting an early start--entirely possible--but she wanted to sing along on this one as well.

Warning: if you are a male who gets queasy at the thought of women's bodily cycles, you might want to stop right here and read no further. I'm not talking about it exclusively, and I won't make a regular habit of it, but I am a woman. It becomes an issue now and again.

So I ran the ten miles today. It was a beautiful day, and the course is lovely, a five-mile loop around the lake. I got my period ten minutes before the start of the race, which is drastically unfair. It also makes it difficult to tell now if I'm achy from the run, or my period, or from the several hours of chair massage I did later in the afternoon. It all hurts, right now.

I ran slowly, though my time at the end wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. At this time of year, the people wanting a long race are marathoners for the most part. They are all dressed well, with real running clothes, streamlined jackets and tights, though the people who win the race always seem to be wearing shorts, no matter what the weather. These people are able to hold long conversations with their friends during the race. Admittedly, I really don't know if I could manage that, I've never run with anyone I knew, except last fall, and then my husband took off shortly after the start, which made sense, given his speedier legs.

Everyone passed me today, as far as I can tell. In recent races I've done pretty well, passing a few folks myself, but today I saw them all run by me: old people, heavy people, slow people. I kept thinking throughout that surely everyone had passed me, but they kept coming. Towards the very end I was even 'lapped' by the faster runners who were doing the fifteen or twenty mile race. I tried not to let any of that bother me, I was glad to keep going, to keep running, and I did.

I have my souvenir hat. I have two more races to finish for the jacket, both short 5Ks. May this spring feel like a downhill coast in all good ways.