Miner's Run

1:22 am

I'm wide awake and it's... not morning. (Shameless Bright Eyes allusion).

Monday nights before Tuesday Morning runs I barely sleep... constantly worried my alarm will utterly and completely fail me. I toss and turn trying to put ideas of missing the run out of my mind. It comes once a week and I dare not miss it without damn good reason.

4:43 am

I'm awake again. And I have two more minutes before the alarm is off and I am off and eventually - we are off.

The North Carolina Parks and Recreation Department apparently doesn't appreciate our need for an early start and has forewarned that those of us who park outside the locked gates of the Sardis Rd. entrance to McAlpine will be subject to towing. We are worried about obesity in America and yet we can't let people use the public park facilities (for which we pay state tax money) during hours that are conducive to the hectic work schedules demanded by a competitive/capitalistic/pick-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps society.

Alas... our run that began as a beautiful jaunt entirely on a very soft, gravel surface now must start at an unnamed lot farther down the road where we proceed to run on the sidewalk for more than a mile and a half before getting to the gravel. It doesn't sound like a big deal... but to us - three more miles of pavement is definitely a big deal. Every step I take on sidewalks is one more step closer to an injury. I know this.

The Miner's Run began sometime in November... my M/W/F morning running partner told me he had run on a Tuesday morning with one of our other running friends. A Tuesday morning? Why, this was near blasphemy to me... but we decided to give it a try the next week. Our group of 3 grew exponentially each week to the large, ever-changing gathering we now have. The group is unpredictable - sometimes the pace will be stable and conversational... at other times we will be gasping to keep up with each other, one-stepping the whole way. Every once and a while, half the group will split off to do some blistering paced tempo run while the rest of us thank goodness it is not a workout day for us...

The first time the group was really big - about 15 runners - we all kinda fell into to pace together from different directions because some people were late and found different entrances to meet up. Someone watching the approaching mass of runners with headlamps said, "Wow, it looks like a bunch of miners." And that is how this run got its name.