"'Felt so good, like anything was possible..."

Today marked a turning-point in training: for the first time, I did a midweek run longer than my first weekend "long run." I ran the six miles along the Slippery Elm trail, on which I usually do my fours and fives, but since I usually do my longer runs elsewhere, I hadn't been that far along the trail for months.

When Monica and I were running in Athens, we passed a strange grouping of decrepit structures, with debris ranging from coffeemakers to dollhouses in the mud surrounding them. "What is that?" I asked, its similarity in appearance to the reservation near my old Auburn neighborhood causing me to wonder whether this might be the same. Her answer made me feel a little silly; "It's a trailer park," she said. "We have those in Bowling Green."

We do, although BG's are considerably nicer. As Monica pointed out, that part of the state, at the edges of Appalachia, has a much higher poverty rate than we do in the north. The trailer park I see most often in Bowling Green lies along the Slippery Elm trail between my turn-around points for four- and five-mile runs, and features tidy trailers with built-up wooden steps, matching sheds, and nice cars.

Today, though, I ran past the trailers, and was quite suddenly in the middle of the country, wetlands ("buffers against Lake Erie," a sign announced) on either side of me and trees bordering the trail up ahead. A toddler on a bicycle alternated between careening across the trail (and into his rollerbladed father), stopping, and attempting to start again; he waved and called out, "Hi!" both times I passed. With the sun shining and a cool breeze whipping clouds across the springtime sky, I turned around at Kramer Road to run my three miles home, but felt like I could just have kept going.