Running for Your Life: Fall. Because It Keeps You Going

On Marathon Sunday (Nov. 2) in New York City – with the singular menacing exception of Sandy Sunday in 2012 – brings running to the fore. On this day we are all runners.

This is the season that whilst running I will catch a leaf without any help but the wind, impossible to intuit, a jolt of luck, the real thing, that brings a leaf to me to be held aloft, never touching the ground, for placement on the very full of dry leaves tackboard on the wall behind my basement writing workspace.

Fall is the season, and I’ve never been able to understand why, that the second wind will come on a run. Not every time, mind you, but often enough that it qualifies as exceptional. In fall, I will more often than any other season feel that I can literally run forever, that on a six-miler, a ten-miler, a sixteen-miler, I will come up the street toward home and feel like a million bucks. No, better than that. Lots better than a million bucks.

Because it does, you know, keep you going. It’s hot, humid in July and the sweat is literally pouring, a two-miler, at times, feeling too much to bear; in early November, the chill in the air, the wind at your back and it’s all you can do to hold yourself down, to not fly like a bird.

Cool spring days have their merits, of course. But there is something about those first weeks of chill after summer’s ropy fog. The crystal blue skies, the wetness of the air, the lungs; it’s the lungs, the song they are singing that carries you along like nothing else.

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