What is there to do when it’s veerrryyyy cold outside? Why, you can go running, of course.
As usual, the cats said, Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!
Oh, cats! I appreciate their lack of sentiment. It is far easier to stay inside with all your mousies and loll on sunlit stairs.
But this week, I worked from home and binge-watched docudramas on Netflix. When I ventured out for meetings on Friday, I returned with $100 of sushi, most of which I ate. My mind and stomach had an excellent week, but my legs and heart and brain needed brisk thoughts and bracing air.
Winter running in extreme cold requires a laundry basket’s worth of clothing. Here’s a what I wore today:
That’s about 15 minutes of getting dressed, in about 11 items, for a 3-mile run in a real feel of -5 degrees F.
It’s like a story problem for idiot sadists.
But I stayed warm!
Here’s what I looked like to the world. The close-up is afterwards, when my eyelashes froze.
Along the way, I listened to the new podcast Slow Burn: a Podcast about Watergate, from Slate. According to host Leon Neyfakh, the premise of the podcast is to understand a big, scandalous, nefarious Presidential controversy (Watergate) as it happened in real time—in a way, perhaps, that will resonate to generations of voters today.
And wow, what a story in Episode One about Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon insider John Mitchell. Martha was a well-connected friend of journalists who tried to tell the truth about Watergate, since she knew the players well. But powerful spin doctors, including (ex) President Nixon himself in 1977, after his resignation— defamed her as drunk and mentally ill. Now, when a truth teller is decried as delusional, it’s called “The Martha Mitchell Effect” — one of the many tools the powerful use to control storytelling, truth, and resistance. Interesting, this pattern.
My brain has so much to ponder now.
Finally, shout-out to these birches, who make my route worth it every time, despite slow burns and slow freezes, and all my slow runs in between.
Yours in Runity,
Rebecca