mountain life, January

    Running in a winter forest is so invigorating. Its worth it to pull my exhausted ass out of bed before the sun rises above the piny peaks. I work nights right now and I rarely make it home before midnight. Its hard some mornings to pull myself out of bed to run, but I know I need to train for my first race, in less then a month! Time is moving so fast and I’m finding two hours a day is what I need to train, to run five to seven miles a day. Because I can’t add an extra two hours into my twenty four hour day, that means getting up two hours early every morning. Some days I don’t pull into my driveway, admiring the millions of mountain starts that shine in the darkness above me, until one A.M. and yet I still get up before the sun has even begun to rise on the horizon. 
    I love how the frigid air makes my lungs burn on these cold mountain mornings. I love running in these mountains when its in the twenties and I can’t feel my fingers. I’ll remember these icy mornings, my fingers feeling like numb icicles, in June when I wake up to balmy eighty degree mornings and spend six months sweating.
   My feet fly fast over frozen dirt and the brown  mud feels like springy pudding under my feet. It reminds me of Alaska tundra,  bouncy soft ground  my feet fly over so fast. My calves may burn but I don’t care.  I just keep running through this frosty morning, my breath a white glow against the sun rising in the Jeffrey pines at my back.