Trail Running Just Around the River Bend

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” ~ Albert Einstein

While I may have grown up in New Hampshire and I like hiking and being outside, there are a couple things I do not like. Spiders for one. I absolutely abhor spiders. I am usually calm cool and collected except when it comes to those way to many legged little beasts. The same go for ticks, which kind of resembles a spider anyway.

So when my brother asked if I wanted to go trail running I was excited, until I found out about the ticks. Ewww. I admit I might have some PTSD after being sick for almost two years with undiagnosed Lyme. That tick scarred me for life and I never even saw him!

Behind my brother’s house, there are quite a few ski trails, which you can run on during the summer (and even the winter when their isn’t any snow, as happened this past year.) We went at dusk which probably wasn’t the best time to go since the mosquitos, bugs and yes, ticks were out in full force.

I put on my big girl running shoes, shrugging it off, following my brother on the winding, woodsy, narrow trails, along the Saco.

Insects, and disgusting little tick buggers aside, there was something relatively bad ass about running through the woods. It didn’t help that my brother and I talked about bears, foxes, and coyotes (which New Hampshire does have and which I saw one only a few days before while driving to Maine) and the chances of us running into one (pun not intended, but hey it works). Or the fact that a few times we were bushwhacking. Or maybe it was by the end of our little run – and by little it was only three and some change miles, no biggy – we had to run through the Saco.

That last part, especially screams bad assery. A couple years ago running with the same brother, we ended up running through a river that met with the ocean and actually happened to be much deeper then we had originally thought. But we ran through it and high fived each other after.

I run pretty regularly. And while it might be a Concrete Jungle, the key word in that is concrete. I love running along the East River, but that usually comes with cars whizzing by just over the jersey barriers on the FDR. Running through the woods is in actuality a real jungle. An incredibly peaceful jungle.

Where it isn’t man made things you have to worry about, but rather Nature’s wrath. Where the soundtrack isn’t cars speeding by, but insects buzzing and leaves rustling. It is just you, your pounding heart and shallow breaths, in the woods escaping the technological world we live in, and dialing it back Swift Family Robinson style.