A Moment of Stillness in a Long Run

Yesterday, with my Achilles again feeling better, I went for my first long run of the year. For me, a long run is anything that lasts longer than 1.5 hours, regardless of distance traveled. This time, I headed down to the Mississippi River Gorge, in the middle of the Twin Cities, to get my dose of wildness for the weekend.

I have avoided the trails for the last two weeks. With the disturbingly warm weather, the trails have been either ice sheets or mud patches, or both. I don't trust my Achilles on ice yet, and I don't like to run in mud because it tears up the trail. So it was with great excitement that I woke to 15 degree weather and frozen dirt trails.

The promised snowpocalypse missed us entirely.

I usually run without pausing on my long runs. That is, after all, the point of the run.

Yesterday, though, I paused. I came to a spot where a small side stream joins the Mississippi, a place where I often see fresh signs that there are beavers living nearby.

Today, with the sudden temperature drop, the stream's mouth was covered in a thin layer of pancake ice.

And it was talking.

As I stopped to look, the ice made cracking, popping noises. Surprisingly, despite being in the middle of a metro area, I couldn't hear anything other than the ice, and a plane passing overhead.

Looking and listening longer, I noticed to my dismay a piece of trash under the ice. But that trash drew my attention to movement under the ice: thousands of minnows were circling in the shallows, their dark, streamlined shapes highlighted by the bright sunlight shining through the ice.

Without the trash, I would not have noticed the life under the ice.

And somehow, after a week of despair about the state of our world, I realized things might just be ok.