When Your Friend Asks You To Run In A Dog-Friendly 5K Starting In An Hour, You Say Yes

My legs are tired as I write this! On a moment’s (well closer to ten moments’) notice I ran the somewhat unfortunately named Furry 5K with a friend. There were lots of dogs. It was excellent.

Beyond that, I had been looking forward to this morning for a while. I look forward to every Sunday morning, but this one in particular was going to be well-earned.

After a busy week in a long list of busy weeks, Sunday mornings are a slow dip in a cool stream. I sleep in a little, make some coffee, blast Ella & Louis, putter around in a very octogenarian milieu while I clean the apartment, finish up some reading, and plan out the week ahead. It is a quiet and lovely ritual that I talk and think about a lot.

Here are the things left on my list for the day:

1. Finish the week’s worth of work for my Prolog class.
2. Meet a friend at a new distillery in Ballard.
3. Pick out my class for next semester’s session at the Hugo House.
4. Go through like four weeks’ worth of physical mail.
5. Vacuum. (And wet mop. I can’t decide which makes sense to do first.)
6. Finish reading Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture.
7. Audit a bunch of front-end errors from Buttondown on Firefox. (Thanks, Jason!)
8. Repopulate Buttondown’s roadmap, which has gotten weirdly out of sync.
9. Close out a freelance project.
10. Call a friend from college.
11. Time permitting, fall asleep in a park.

It might be too much stuff? Whenever an ordered list hits double digits it is probably too long (and this is a truncated version of my real list, which also includes boring things like floss.)

It is summer, really summer, and the days are just packed. I don’t know when I came around this way of thinking, but it feels like the most virtuous thing possible is to take as much advantage of the daylight as you can. To strain yourself carrying it, like a child trying to carry all the groceries from the car to the kitchen in one trip.

Right now, though, I have very little desire to do any of that. (Well, minus the distillery. A gin tasting sounds pretty good right about now.) I am a pleasant shade of tired; I would very much like to sit on my couch for the next two hours and listen to the newest S. Carey album while idly browsing Twitter. Or, like, watch Ocean’s Eleven or something.

A 5K is not a lot of distance to run, in the grand scheme of things. I know folks who run half-marathons; I know folks who run marathons; I know folks who run ultra-marathons. But it’s something, you know?

And there was a version of me from not too long ago that could barely run a mile. So, at some point soon I’ll get back to the chores and the to-do lists and the bug squashes. But for now it feels good to luxuriate in the fatigue of my legs and the dim dampness of my shirt.

Happy Sunday.

I hope you get to jog alongside a dog.