We’ve had a record-setting rainy summer this year around where I live and train.
The air which is normally hot and dry mid-August is heavy and wet.
The trails are soft and muddy, and the culverts are overflowing with dark stagnant water that has become a bit of breeding ground for armies of mosquitos that aside from being pesky and annoying remind me that I’m not going as fast as I think I am when a microscopic insect is keeping up with me and buzzing around my head.
But.
Maybe it’s just me, but putting aside the chill and the damp, there is something meditative and poetic about being outside in the rain.
Very few people go out in suboptimal conditions, so the trails are quiet and clean.
The air smells fresher, and the noise of the nearby roads changes from the whirring rumble of speeding traffic to the white noise hum of rain and water soaking the city.
You are soaked to the bone after all is said and done, and your shoes and toes are squeaking with moisture, but there comes a point when you can’t get any more wet and so you just say darn it all and dash headlong through puddles and lift your face to the drizzle to wash away the sweat from the workout.
Everyone you went running with plods along in silence, steaming from the clash of moisture and the heat of bodies, not saying anything for risk of being the first to complain about this thing we all chose willingly to do.
It is a conflict of the heart. Wet and wonderful and cold and annoying and yet somehow so precisely human that it is undeniably quenching to the soul.
