T.S. Elliot said that April was the cruelest month. I'd take a bet (without googling first) he didn't live in New England. At least in April, nature itself isn't trying to kill you.
Running in Boston can be a pleasurable experience. Our major river is well preserved, there are enough parks and greenery to provide a decent amount of shade, and its a healthy enough city that most running areas are well populated. But the weather, which is likely are least pleasurable experience, makes all efforts heretofore irrelevant. The don't make DryFit fit enough to keep out our humidity. I'm sure our Houston readers (both of them) are scoffing profusely right now, but I should mention we're a North Eastern sea port, and it shouldn't be comparable. Even the trail-runners have to deal with what an old running buddy of mine used to refer to as "the lingering damp." That 10 degree bump that sits in the woods but some scientific reasons I'm too lazy to look into, but that still defies my school yard understanding of climate.
Its why I've taken to the late run. 10:00 p.m. or later when, after a few hours without sun, the temperature drops to a comfortable 75. When my sweat is only from running, and when I can get a peace back I haven't seen since the depths of Winter. Tonight I went out at 11 pm, just as I did last night. Its the only time, as best I could arrange it, when I had the streets to myself. When my only fan club is the third shift at 7-11 out on a smoking break thinking to himself how ridiculous I had to be to run at this hour. There is a great unspoken morale boost to running at this time that the biologists and kinesiologists can't find with all the labs and studies in the world. Running by a thousand houses full of sleeping people and knowing that while everyone else takes it easy in their air conditioned homes, you're out here busting your ass.
Summer in New England is as challenging as anything else here. But there is also beauty. For me, and moreover for me as a runner, it sits just outside the window, beneath the leafy suburban streets. Its dodging trash cans and watching drunken college kids make out sloppily as you just to run past them. Its transient vagrants and their eyes full of broken dreams. The drunkards spilling out of pubs, the red-eye refugees clamming home after too many hours and not enough coffee. And occasionally, for some of us, its a free and clear sidewalk and a good old fashioned run.
