Snowflake dash

2/28/2006

It was 32 degrees yesterday with big, fluffy snowflakes falling in the Toledo area. Despite the weather there were quite a few runners and high school track athletes on the road double layers and hoods combined with shorts. There s something benign about big flakes on dry pavement. Decent footing and crisp air equal easy conditions to get something positive done.

• 32 days before the Glass City Marathon on April 2.

Run with this

• "Someone lent us a cottage in Harsfordshire. I was sitting in a sort of parlor there one day, writing. And suddenly I saw someone run past the window, along the lane outside. With shorts on, white shirt and so on. And it seemed to me such an unusual image... that I wrote down at the top of a sheet of paper, 'the loneliness of the long-distance runner.' I didn't know where he had come from, I didn't know where he was going. He was simply a sort of ...vision, floating by the window. And I put the line away, I thought I was going to write a poem with this sort of line in it. It seemed rather a nice line.

Alan Sillitoe, author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner