Running for Your Life: Fall Mood

Wishing it were as it were – meaning fall in September. Cold mornings and brilliant blue skies. Sept. 11 mornings. Not here, twelve years later. No coincidence that I had chosen to run the longest since the Boston Marathon 2012 (not the terrorist-bomb marathon, the one before). But instead, with the humidity in the scary zone, the heat clearing 90 degrees, I treadmill-ran for an hour in A/C indoors. In New York City this late summer and early fall the new normal is sleep shirt-drenching humidity, breezes that belie cooling off, rather just move sweat droplets along the skin not dry them, stay the natural relief that we who were born during early fall crave in our favorite season, the one before the strong cold sets in, teeth-grinding with the thought, sweetness to pair with fiber, winter when men and women are tested, what doesn’t kill you, instead the body hovers in limbo, the humid horror of Sandy, the new normal, as I say, that was Halloween 2012, not fall, no, anything but, if weather is a color make it gray-purple, if a substance, mud, in part because mud cannot be numbered, not like apples, say, or buildings; mud defies the consciousness shaped like pages in a book, think the horror movie Blob http://bit.ly/UNvgQE mud covers and smothers, throws you off and under, waiting as I do now, and every year, for the real fall to come.

(Here’s hoping that Friday afternoon, before the holiday sundown of Kol Nidre, the Jewish new year, when the stifling humidity is supposed to break, I will finally be able to get in my long run, 20+ miles to brownstone Brooklyn to Harlem. Waiting…)

Next: Running for Your Life: Running to Harlem