Arches of Witch Hazel

My good friend Ryan has been taking me running for the past two weeks. I found myself motivated after a recent marathon he ran to join him in the mountains for his trail running workouts. And because Ryan has been helping me with my own small business, our schedules line up well and makes for an efficient way of maintaining our motivation, feeding off one another's inspirations.

It seemed, too, like a good opportunity for personal growth and overall wellness. The general cliches, that is. As an arborist, I consider myself an industrial athlete, so I'm always looking for ways that I can improve my physical performance on the job site. The anaerobic and aerobic conditioning that running provides is a good opportunity to improve my endurance, and hopefully my physical longevity and also my mental toughness and grit. Ryan has been going into depth about the benefit running has for the body and it's functioning properly and more efficiently as an entire system.

Not to mention that our dogs Indy and Blue love being able to accompany us on our jaunts, nipping at our heals and each others, striding along, wallowing in cold October puddles that reflect the burning red and sugar maples and birches, exploding through the wiry low bush blueberry and mountain laurel, bounding from trail side to trail side, setting the best example of the free and careless and pure energy that these hills can draw out of us. We are a pack, sometimes in single file or scattered loosely along the track, pumping hurriedly up each ridge with wild eyes and panting smiles. Running wild is fun, and cresting the summit of another peak, we know it.

So far Ryan and I have logged about 25 miles over the course of 4 days together. We are training for a  15K at the end of November. A few thousand feet of elevation gain over a mix of loose, rocky washout, swampy meadow, granite outcrops and well-worn, rooty single track. The vistas are spectacular, albeit littered sometimes with adolescent vigilante garbage like cheap beer boxes and broken glass. From both Peterson Mountain looking east, or from the top of Campbell's Ledge, looking north and south, the trees are glowing in autumn colors, and the entire breath of the Wyoming Valley spills out both ways along the Susquehanna River. The temperature is cool and crisp and it seems to sting the lungs and leave them pinging. As we run the rims of these hills that cuddle the small village of Harding, we joke about old Campbell and the legendary tale of him riding off the ledge to avoid capture. True or not, I fancy in my imagination that the British troops floating downriver alongside Iroquois warriors saw Campbell's Ledge illuminate just around noon, the same way it does now, nearly three hundred years later, beneath the scratchy thud of our steady, chopping cadence.

My knees hurt a little, and my feet hurt a little bit too, now that I think about it. But it makes me happy to be running, especially up hill, knowing that I have the strength to do that in the mountains where things are rocky and muddy and tough. And hard to get to. Sometimes I need to slow it down to one breath, one step at a time, which is an exercise in simplicity I guess. I try to swing my arms heavy like Ryan does, so they can lift me up hill, as he coaches me from up ahead. I try to be graceful and float, but most of the time it feels like my legs are fuzzy and falling apart. As a shadow of hope at improving my pace crosses over my mind, I spin my wheels on the wet red oak leaves and soupy fall clay that hasn't washed out yet, passing under huge arches of witch hazel bent over the entrance of this trail like some sacred place. More so though, I am just glad to get in a little run with my dog and a good friend before work for an hour or so. For all the little aches and pains, I always feel a little bit better. A little bit stronger. A little bit faster. And most importantly, a little wilder.