Running in the Snow

A solitary black dot is moving slowly across a vast, white landscape.  Move in closer and you’ll see the dot become grey and grow appendages.  Now it’s starting to look like a virus attacking a white blood cell through the lens of an electron microscope.  Go ahead and get closer still. That’s actually a bird’s eye view of me running through a farm field in late December.  I’m trudging in 12 to 16 inch deep snow so quickly that you’d think wolves were on my tail.  I suppose I’m trying to flee from mortality, not ravenous beasts, for I’ve resolved to maintain my run workout throughout the throes of winter.  I need to do something to counteract my sedentary lifestyle.  Besides, I have so much energy inside me sometimes that I feel as if I am about to burst open.  There’s a fire inside my head, a passion, a desire, for something unattainable, indefinable. That sounds weird, I guess, or melodramatic.  In the distance cars pass by on a country road.  I wonder what the passengers are thinking: either I’m crazy for running in 25-degree weather or I’m getting a great workout.  Who knows?   Every once in a while a cross-country skier crosses my path.  Otherwise, I’m alone, as I usually am.  I enjoy the serenity and nothingness before me, though I can’t ever stop to take it all in.  I forge my path as I go.  I must press on for yet a while longer.