pain and rain

This morning I went running for the first time in more than three months. After the marathon at the end of April, I was struck with a persistent pain in my left leg that seemed to come straight from the bone. Sometime in late May, I started playing football again, though the legs weren't really ready. Throughout June, I had to pay with days of grave limping afterwards.

Lately, football has been pure joy, and I started thinking about running again. At the beginning of July in Hamburg, I picked up a pair of Adistars despite my best intentions. While I needed new running shoes, I had wowed not to support Adidas anymore after a friend of mine, in marketing there, had failed me on a promise of a London Marathon sponsor entry. Unfortunately, the Adistars were the most comfortable and best fitting for my narrow feet.

So this morning out I went, hitting the familiar Hyde Park loop after a long hiatus. The going was good, my feet were happy, and my legs didn't complain. Even now, late at night, it's not the bones that feel the effort but my quads. The only bad aspect of the half hour in the park was the rain.

It is August, and I feel entitled to summer. However, the local definition of the term does not agree with mine. Sun, blistering heat, and cloudless skies are all but unheard of. In their stead, rain features prominently, in various incarnations. Today, a particularly curious kind hung over town, best described as transparent but thick particulate mist, a condensation of fog into what's not quite yet rain. Fine drizzlets just sat there, impervious to gravity but ready to smash into any moving object. My face was wet before I even broke a sweat.

I should be grateful for the misery. My next marathon will be in Dresden in mid-October. There's absolutely no reason to assume the weather should be as nice as it was for my first marathon. Fall in Germany can be a mean experience. But if you're mentally prepared for it, it might serve to overpower the pain coming from the legs.