TheBanyanTree: buns of steel, teeth like baleen

[Julie Anna Teague]

I run through an Indiana summer heat wave.  I run because I can again.  
Because it feels good again, after years of surgeries, babies, 
backpain.  Years of doing all kinds of other things besides running, 
but still missing my first love.  Twenty-five years ago, running was my 
life, and then *poof* I couldn't do it anymore.  Like an addict, 
though, I never got the desire out of my system.

I can run again, but I have to force myself to keep going through the 
heat.  Any running is progress, any stopping is backsliding.  Half of 
running is mental--mental strength or mental illness, sometimes it's 
hard to tell.  The weather site still reads ninety degrees and 
ninety-plus humidity at nine pm.  Ninety, ninety, nine--some kind of 
cosmic joke on us.  Why do people live in Indiana?  (That's the lead in 
to the joke.)  But we do live here, for various reasons, and ninety 
degrees at nine in the evening is what we get dealt sometimes.  Very 
funny.  With my family gawking at me like I'm a mental case, I go out 
and run anyway.

I am instantly soaked.  It's a somewhat sadistic kind of pleasure that 
makes me feel tougher than I really am.  "Punch my ass," I tell my 
husband, when I've been doing a lot of running.  He's known me for a 
long time and tolerates my stupid desire to prove to him that my ass 
can be tightened into a rock hard lump.  "I'm not going to punch your 
ass."  "No, seriously, punch my ass."  He finally does so I'll shut up, 
and he acts suitably impressed, and then I laugh because it is 
completely ridiculous that I need him to understand that I am TOUGH AS 
NAILS HERE.

By the small string of ponds, in a low spot where the breeze--if there 
were any breeze at all--is bunkered by blue spruce, I ran through a 
thick cloud of tiny insects.  They stick to my face and my bare sweaty 
arms.  Breathing hard, I close my mouth just a little and imagine 
myself filtering the swarm through my teeth like a blue whale in my 
blue running shorts.  "More protein" is the old joke that goes through 
my mind.  I laugh to myself.  It's hotter than Hades.  The air is thick 
and damp and barely breathable.  But I am running again, and that makes 
me happy.