Spring Has Sprung

I woke up feeling good—not completely drained, like so many of the past Saturday mornings. Maybe I’m finally getting my energy back after the marathon, various winter illnesses, and finishing the daily-posting part of my fiction blog. I sleep more now. Not a lot more, but maybe it’s enough. Everyone’s sleep needs are different, and the traditional eight hours has always been a little much for me, leaving me sluggish and cranky. I seem to do better on about six.

Anyway.

Not much happened on today’s run, except that it’s definitely spring around here. The robins are bopping around in the grass, the woodpeckers are drumming away at the trees, the azaleas and crepe myrtles are in bloom, the banks of the bayou are thick with clover and dandelions, and squirrels are everywhere. All we need now are the bluebonnets!

When I checked weather.com before heading out, it said 46 degrees, but I think they were wrong. I was comfortable and at times even a little warm in my lightweight long-sleeved top and capri-length tights. Only the gusting wind kept me from getting hot.

My hip has been bothering me again. I think it’s tendonitis, because it’s so persistent. This has been going on now for, what, nearly two years? It really messes with my racing plans, especially with my desire to do more triathlons, since there’s no way I could properly tape myself up for the run after the swim and bike. And unless my hip and lower back are swaddled in kinesio tape, I can’t handle much running.

But not running is simply unacceptable as a lifestyle option. So it’s quite a dilemma.

I guess with the way I’m feeling tonight, it will be an indoor workout tomorrow. When the weather is this beautiful, I feel like it’s almost a sin to not spend some time outside, running around in what little bits of nature I can find. Just this past week it was warm enough for me to have my first midriff-baring run of the year. I think these runs get earlier and earlier in the season, and as always I felt a little exposed, after a couple months of being covered up. But I wasn’t the only runner out on the trails showing a little skin. I think all of us around here enjoy winter until Christmas is over and then we start looking around, thinking, “Okay, that was nice. Where’s spring?”

If you have the means to leave this part of the country and you don’t, it’s because on some level, you really do prefer to be warm. Which is perhaps why I’m sitting here with a blanket draped over my shoulders. My normal body temp is 97.4, not 98.6, which is probably why I’m not much bothered by heat, but the tiniest dip below 50 has me shivering.

I’m a warm-weather creature. And except for the inevitable final cold front which we can expect sometime this month, spring is here.