I wear my sunglasses at night

I've been doing all of my running in Central Park this year, other than the weekend I was in Ohio, and with rare exception I run at night.  Elder statesmen who remember a bygone era of New York City crime and Law and Order junkies might consider it unwise to run amidst the stillness under the dichromatic orangeglow of high-pressure mercury halide luminescence, but I prefer the desertion and perceived vulnerability to the ill-intentioned.  For one, I am saved the bruised ego experienced in AM hours as one actual, serious, life-committed runner after another passes the portly pretender ambling around the Park Drives.  Night running also helps me mitigate the brutal heat of this greenhouse summer, despite the fact that the weather up until this past week has largely been oppressive even after 9pm. Lastly, I relish the opportunity to try and convince a mugger that my MP3 player is incapable of playing rap music, per the urban legend of the woman who deterred a potential assailant in the '80's by suggesting that her Walkman only played music of the Classical variety.  I understand that it's only likely to get me pistol-whipped, but I think it'll be a funny story.

The Park at night is not without its peculiarities, though.  One is much more likely to happen across wildlife of the unwelcome variety, for one.  On the north side of the park, raccoon families make frequent road crossings and eye me suspiciously as I cruise past, giving them a wide berth.  Last week, Baby Cub found himself a straggler in the middle of the road as Mama and/or Papa Rocky scuttled into the underbrush maybe 25 feet in front of my path.  Generally speaking, I understand that animals are typically more afraid of me than I am of them, but I have no interest in playing chicken in a mother-protecting-child scenario.  I passed the potential wildlife insurgency without incident, but not without a moment of tension as a hiss arose from the underbrush as I passed between adult and toddler.

Then there are the bats.  I've seen enough of them over the course of my life to recognize the swooping, flapping, drunken black objects to not be nocturnally-inclined retarded birds.  I'm not sure if they have a tendency to hang around lightposts or if that is merely the only time I can see them, but I know they're around, nonetheless.  I have no harrowing stories of being divebombed by a rabid flying rat or guanoed by Sooki's vampire boyfriend, but I feel that story comes in just a matter of time.  In the meanwhile, I nearly always run with a hat, and otherwise bask in the benefits of my garlic pills like the Department of Homeland Security counts thwarted terrorist attacks. (As in: No one has flown into a building lately, so we must be doing a good job!  That said, we need the Cavity Search Bill to pass to effectively counteract potential Anal Bombs and further promote National Security (TM), since we've now made the Shampoo Bomb a a thing of the past.)

The lights themselves are interesting in a sort of semi-dangerous way.  There seems to be some sort of electrical problem on the stretch of East Drive on the northeast side of the Jackie Kennedy Reservoir.  As such, the lights on the path adjacent to the body of water have a tendency to just shut off spontaneously, leaving the would-be runner in pitch blackness.  The adjacent road's streetlights similarly fluctuate between states of on and sometime-on, like they've been shut off in series as a precursor to a demon's arrival in a religio-thriller flick like Constantine.  I've nicknamed this stretch "Watch Your Cornhole Corner," as it strikes me as a lovely place to sexually assault someone running along who suddenly finds him or herself transplanted from a well-lit path in a large urban park to an inky, isolated forest pass of twitching illumination where no one can hear you scream.

All in all, I like running at night.

Week 4
August 8-14
Sunday: Rest, 12 beers (estimated)
Monday: 4.5 miles, 0 beers
Tuesday: Rest, 0 beers
Wednesday: 7 miles, 0 beers
Thursday: 3 fast miles elliptical, boxing, 0 beers
Friday: 7 Miles, 2 beers
Saturday: Rest, 2 beers

Miles Run: 21.5
Boozecount: 16 beers

While the Cleveland recap sits languishing in the editor's bin awaiting review (his last comment was "remains Longwinded and Boring, and is also generally UnFun and specifically UnFinished"), I'll relate one story from Sunday evening.  We were wandering around the festival at St. Mary's in Mentor and the group of relatives I was with ran into a group of people they knew from church, or school, or the Rogaine clinic.  Whomever they were, I knew not, so I walked over to the beer tent to grab myself a frothwagon.  I rejoined the group, seeing my young second cousin standing idly with no one to talk to at his mother's side, and tried to strike up whatever conversation a 31-year-old could with someone 20 years his junior. It went something like this 4-line play:

Me: Hey Jake.  How's it going?
Jake: Everytime I see you, you have a beer in your hand!
Me: (stuttering, holding back a laugh) That's very perceptive...
Jake: It's true! 

This is not the first time I've considered I might have a problem, but it is both the most recent and the most memorable.  Nevertheless, the count favors me this week.

Overall Record: 3-1

Stay tuned for the eventual post that details the Exciting, Riveting, and 2 Week Old (and counting) events during my visit to the balmy shores of Lake Erie.  And a new blog entry is also due in 3 days or so.  We'll see if it actually happens.  Until then...