One of the side effects of all the steroids I’m taking* is that my already tenuous grasp on sleep has become even slipperier. Though I have gone to considerable lengths to control for sound, light, and other elements of sleep hygiene it has been my custom these last few weeks to waken at about the same time the very faintest traces of light begin to show in the eastern sky.

The Angle of Approach

The Angle of Approach

This works out to be a time that a lot of people still consider the middle of the night. And I am one of them.

Try as I might, I am usually unable to coax myself back to slumber. At some point, I realized that given the turn of season, and the impossibility of running after work for the intolerable temperature that time of day, I might as well avail myself of the insistence of my body and use my wakefulness to put some miles under my feet.

I love running first thing in the morning. Everything is limned in pinkish light and cool as it will be all day. It is quiet and still on the streets and down the trails I favor. The city is stripped of pretense and beautifully bare. Places are unhaunted by a populace too occupied with their devised reality to notice or participate in the full flower of the one around them. I am elated to encounter the bronze-haired Portlandia as I have always known her; maiden earnest, singular, and strong. That is how I prefer to see her, rather than the awkwardly hewn caricature she has been wrought of late.

So, despite a list of complaints that range from a shocking need for drinking straws at every turn for my newly sensitive teeth, to aching tendons, to butterface of EPIC proportions, I am grateful to these chemicals in my blood. Not least that they allow me to rise from my bed of pain at all, but also so that I do in such very good time as to see my city in a way that reminds me why I love her after all.

 

*Not the kind one takes to get mad gains in the gym, though don’t kid yourself; ‘roid rage is a thing. I can’t speak with authority about whether my testicles have shrunk…