I smelled daphne on my morning run and it woke me up to spring. When I first got a whiff of the hardy pink and white bloom, I couldn’t see it. But I could feel it.
I’d just returned from a visit to the cooler, harsher East coast, which was an adventure that reminded me of several things I love and want to pursue. Spring was far from anything on my mind – well, other than my thoughts about how I ought to toughen up for the track season. On a loopy 16-miler in and around Syracuse, I confronted the hills, wind, ice, snow, sun, pavement of my winter training in NYC, an environ more subdued than that of Sorry Excuse, but not lacking in its own sharp angles and skin-callousing elements.
It felt good to feel my weakness in forceful gusts. I didn’t feel the light, crisp turnover of recent lactic uptake pace workouts in Portland, but I felt real. I felt excited when Andrew, Ryan and I returned to the Italian joint on the “wrong side” of the freeway where we started the long run with the City’s Track Club. I felt all of this under winter’s closing umbrella: the dreary mornings are worth exploring, rain braving, lonely roads traversing.
Upon returning to Portland, on a jet-lagged slog of a run, daffodils startled me first in their yellow sincerity; spring?! I wanted ice, sleet, frost to get me ready for my eagerly-planned outdoor 5 and/or 10 ks this spring. I needed it. I needed more time to get stronger; I thought.
And then the next day daphne bloomed somewhere, and blind to it on my way to the poor surface of a local high school’s track, I felt the excitement for that smell’s inception of spring. And in spring, I can smell track – especially the way Baker Field marinates in noon sun, the way field-trimming tractors stir up grass pollen, the way someone’s always BBQing hot dogs near the homestretch at a meet. Whether I am ready, here it comes and here we go, right around the corner, the final bend of indoor and roads, to the oval.
Without prompt, while I stretched after this morning's workout, my coach said, “Well, your enthusiasm for running has really blossomed over the past several weeks.” Perhaps spring encourages us to blossom; it reminds us there is more – to come, do, be, find within our carefully hibernated, protected selves. As with so many other actions, blossoming may feel like the last thing we want to do, especially when faced with the cushioned comfort of a couch, the placating consolation of a TV. But we must proceed, heed these notices, because what’s to come, where we may be, is next.
When we let ourselves unfurl like the green shoots now abounding, we more often than not find that the stretching out of our colors from within is worth it. Thank goodness the seasons change, that competitive schedules cycle around, so we remember we can change, too, whether our own stagnation, complacency, fear rendered that truth moot in a dark hour.
