I went for a long-ish Sunday run with the crew the other day and, I fully admit, my head was in the trees.
See, around these parts autumn is a season that lasts about as long as a soap bubble at a kid’s birthday party. The trees have been green all summer, and then over the course of a few days everything turns hues of gold and orange and red. The world is glowing.
And then a few days later all that foliage is on the ground, the trees are bare, and we won’t see naught but bare branches until about April.
I get a little excitable when I’m in the trails with my camera and the sun is out and the leaves are turning, and Sunday was just such a morning. We had veered into the local suburban trails, dipping into a nearby creek that drops out of the sprawl and winds through about eight klicks of relatively pristine urban woodland. There are literally parts where you don’t realize you are running through a city of a million people—but then you go around a corner and see that mansion overlooking the ravine and the nearby golf course and you try to stay in your happy place, there on the trail.
We were in the creek and the sun was making the world glow a vibrant orange.
I literally took a hundred photos as we were running. Oh sure, a quarter of them were blurry and it the trail plus trees plus blue sky got a little derivative after twenty minutes or so, but—wow—was I ever distracted, lagging behind, running with my phone in my hand and the camera app open so that I could be ready for the next perfect photo op.
Distraction is not a bad thing. I mean, race season is pretty much over and why are we out there on the trails on a Sunday morning in autumn if not for the experience, after all?
But my focus was not on the run as much as it was on the trees that morning, and I’ve got the photos to prove it.
Definitions
- klick
- As a Canadian I run in metric. As a writer, I find the word kilometre clunky and clinical. I'll usually use the colloquial "klick" or "klicks" to substitute in for this.
- race
- You train and train and train some more, and then for no clear reason you pay a bunch of money to run as fast as you possibly can at a very specific time with a bunch of strangers along a course lined with more strangers (or along paths lined with trees if you are an ultra runner) at the end of which you are handed a medal and a banana and a sense of achievement unlike anything you will feel again (until you sign up for your next one.)
- suburban
- I live in the suburbs of a big Canadian city called Edmonton, Alberta. We call it home, but a lot of people might look at the manufactured urban sprawl as cluttered with cars and fabricated architecture and big box stores. They're not wrong, but we've found the trails and the parks and entrances into the gorgeous river valley routes that have their own unique identity in our lives. Run where you can.
