Running commentary

"This is no social crisis...just another tricky day for you..." --The Who

Weekend mornings present a difficult choice sometimes. Those early hours of the day can seem so precious. What birds are could we find? Should we get out and cycle instead? Go for a walk with my wife? Sometimes I wake up early Sunday morning and don't know what to do. It's just another tricky day.

This morning I chose to go running at Dick Young/Nelson Lake Forest Preserve. But to assuage my guilt over using gas to go exercise, I measure the mileage from my house in Batavia to the parking lot at the preserve. 3.7 miles. Sure, I could ride my mountain bike out and save a tenth of a gallon of gas, but these morning hours are precious...so I'm glad I drove.

Understand: there was a time when I would have run those miles out to the preserve, run 6 miles while I was there and run home again with no problem. But time and years of running mileage require a certain penance, and I cannot run that far anymore. Adding up the miles I did in training over the years puts me somewhere between 40 and 50,000 miles of running. Several weeks in college I ran 100 miles in a single week. That's a lot of running, I can assure you. Now I'm glad for my 2 or 3 runs of 3 miles per week...

I've always used my runs in forest preserves as reconnaissance for bird trips. If you listen carefully while running through the woods you will hear the occasional warbler or other species chirp in alarm. And there are a number of birds that simply ignore you and keep singing their regular songs. Since you're covering a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of time, it's a good way to do a quick survey of what a bird hike might bring.

This morning brought weather. A strong northerly breeze had picked up by the time I started running at 7:30 a.m.. Birds in the woods were particularly hard to hear because the wind through the leaves was quite loud. But I was thankful for that breeze. There was a fresh and aggressive crop of deer flies in the woods. I wore no shirt and dared not stop even to adjust my shoelaces for fear that I would be attacked by a herd of deer flies. Deer flies are slow, stupid and easy to smack, but they also hang out behind your head and neck where it can be hard to reach them. Fortunately I'd worn a bandanna to keep bugs off my bald head, but my back was fair game. And of course you begin imagining there are more insects back there than there really are. It is a guessing game when to try to hit the real deer flies from the imagined ones. I've heard that people have been driven mad by insects in Alaska, and I can see why. When these flies smell blood they get a little frenetic, especially when they sense fresh, thin-skinned suburban blood like mine. I'm probably irresistible fodder. Every fly in the woods hears the battle cry, "Fresh meat! Fresh meat!"

Moving quickly to get out of Fly Purgatory, I pick up the pace along the prairie edge and feel fresh relief in a dose of that northern breeze. The air seems to be speaking its own language, whispering that the recent heat wave was a treat, a temporary state of summer doldrums we had better remember to enjoy. Summer language it still was, but with a Canadian accent.

The wind quieted the normal panoply of yellowthroats singing on the prairie. Either they gave up trying to be heard or their woodsy voices were simply blown south by the wind. I could still hear the chugging songs of marsh wrens at the north end of the slough, and goldfinches were twittering (yes, nature was the original source of twittering) as they dipped and bowed on their way between woods and prairie.

I take the cut-through path from woods to the marsh and encounter another runner coming my way. It is Tim Norris, owner of Spring Bluff Nurseries a couple miles west of Nelson Lake. Go there sometime. His nursery and garden business offer all kinds of prairie plants and annuals for the garden. You will not regret the trip to Bliss Road and Spring Bluff.

Tim and I go waaaay back. We were teammates on the 1971-72 Kaneland High School cross country team that won the school's first ever Little 7 conference title. Small achievements in a big world, but significant enough to draw a flood of friendly memories as we passed. He recognizes me instantly (you never forget a teammate's stride) waving "Hello, Chris" as we were pass in opposite directions.

The sky is so blue above us it is obvious the earth is tripping through eternity in fine fashion. We are barely significant sentient beings searching for a word from God on a Sunday morning. I've run enough miles in my lifetime to circle the earth twice, yet I've not been off the North American continent except for a weird little junket to Hawaii in 1981. So I'm just like one of those stupid deer flies in the woods, going round and round. Looking for fresh meat of one kind or another. We call that business.

Fortunately I'd left the deer flies behind and could concentrate on looking for birds. There were robins, catbirds, towhees, blue jays, red-wings, warbling vireo, red-eyed vireo and the distant gravelly mumblings of a sandhill crane. We take these local species of birds for granted sometimes, but nature does not. There is only so much June every year, and these birds are all busy feeding their young back in their nests. A barn swallow courses overhead and it makes me think it must be tougher to grab enough bug fodder in a high wind to feed their young back at the barn or house where they made their mud daub nest. I want to tell the swallow I know where there are some juicy deer flies to be eaten, but I do not know if even barn swallows can gulp down that much airborne stubbornness and stupidity.

On the trail I meet up with a fat green frog sunning itself on a patch of flat brown earthen trail. I reach down to touch the frog to see if it will jump out of the way, but it just sits there. Green frogs have beautiful yellow-green skin and a dark tympanum behind gold-flecked eyes. I turn off my running watch and rub the frog's back. He seems to like it. Perhaps he too had been bothered by deer flies and now needed a healthy scratch, but at any rate he sits there content to be rubbed by a giant stranger who normally would have presented a major threat. It is obvious that in cool morning air frogs do not always think straight, or perhaps he'd been up all night imbibing on fermented dragonflies. More likely this medium-sized fella was simply a little chilled and not thinking too clearly. The sun was warming up his blood enough that when I picked him up he gave a couple kicks to show he cared enough to stay alive. So I set him back down on his chosen spot and went moving about the universe myself. For the frog and me alike, it was just another tricky day. What is the plan? Sometimes it is enough to just sit in the sun and try to make sense of what's in front of you.

Round the bend toward the Audubon bridge, I encounter again my friend Tim Norris. He turns around to join me and we chat about how little we run compared to the old days. Then we come to a fork in the trail and Tim tells me he is turning around rather than continue back toward the woods. "I'm going back the way I came. There are too many flies over there." He wears no shirt either.

"Ha ha! I was going to say the same thing," I say. As we part I do some math and realize that Tim and I were teammates 38 years ago. We're both still running. That's what counts.

In the open country I catch up to a woman running climbing the slight rise to where I'd heard the Henslow's sparrows last week. This week I hear no Henslow's. Their songs are perhaps too thin and short to be heard in the northerly breeze. I exchange hellos with the woman, who is listening to some tune on her ear buds and isn't ready for much conversation. I always try to give women a warning clear of the throat or an advance hello when catching up with them on the trail. I think it a courtesy. But I also realize many of them don't hear me because they are listening to some inspirational tune. Such is life.

I don't often run carrying my iPod, but I will never forget on iPod moment. I'd been running along with my iPod when a recording of Dvorak's "Nimrod" came through the earphones. I'd forgotten that I'd copied it from my son's CD, and the effect of that particular recording was so clear and moving that it literally stopped me in my tracks and brought me to tears during a run at Leroy Oakes forest preserve some years ago. I fell to the trail on my knees and sobbed emotionally, releasing all sorts of tension related to the death of my mom, the failing health of my dad and some health challenges with my wife. That music seemed to send all those worries out of me into the void. They say music is the highest art. When I experience something like I find it hard to disagree.

As I approached my car at the end of my run I see a familiar form on the trail and realize it is Jon Duerr. He's got his Svarovski binoculars and is headed out for a bird walk. "I figured the deer flies would be bad in the woods," he tells me.

"You're right about that," I agree.

We chat about the great condition of the prairie at Dick Young Forest Preserve. Jon shares a little theory with me about habitat management, that we can't quite look at it like "This Old House." He observes there is something more, a flow to nature that is not mechanical, but organic. Who is to say precisely what plant belongs where? Instead there is so much we need to continue to learn, and keep our eyes out for opportunities to help restore what we can while not being emphatic judges of what comes along.

That philosophy goes a long way toward making me feel better about my "tricky day" and making the right decision to simply go for a run in a fresh northern breeze on a late day in June, 2009. Because one of the lyrics from that Who song I quote at the start of this article

goes like this;

"This is no social crisis, this is you having fun."

And there's nothing wrong with that.