chasing coyotes.

i'm back in iowa city after an aborted trip to waterfall glen. after getting stuck in chicago last night because of the snowstorm, i set my alarm at 5:30am and planned to hit the limestone loop at waterfall glen by 7am. when i got there, however, it was closed! it turns out the dupage forest preserve district opens their parks one hour after sunup and fines people for entering the park illegally. so, i hopped back in the car and started the trek back west to iowa - planning to run the north route at lake macbride (twice) when i got there. thankfully, i stopped at one of the iowa oases and chatted with the very nice "welcome to iowa!" woman who gave me a bunch of iowa state park maps. i checked them out, threw caution to the wind, and decided to head towards palisades-kepler state park, just west of mount vernon. and thank god i did!

palisades-kepler is a bee-you-tee-full park. i wish it were about four times bigger than it is (~800 acres), but i'll take what i can get! the park sits on top of the cedar river, with a bunch of park up on top of some bluffs and a bunch of park down below along the river. there were plenty of geese, ducks, and racoons. there were also - though i didn't see any actual coyotes - plenty of coyote tracks. which brings me to my theme of the day: chasing coyotes.

when you spend as much time as i do driving down the interstate - alone - and running for hours - alone - you tend to have alot of big thoughts. and this is today's: chasing coyotes. as i ran up and down the snowy bluffs at palisades-kepler, attempting to retain my sanity while running and re-running over my own tracks in the snow, i invented a game to keep me going. in my darkest hour, the moment at which i found myself trying to convince myself that 8 miles might be just as good as 18 (yeah, right!) and that i should just pack up and head on home, i noticed how all the coyotes in palisades-kepler state park seemed to follow the park trails. the same trails that i was running, had been run sometime in the last few hours by either one endurance-crazed coyote, or a whole slew of them. everywhere i looked were coyote tracks, and i made it my business to follow these tracks - to chase the coyotes.

now chasing coyotes is a pretty ridiculous pastime. for one thing, they can outrun me. for another, what the hell am I going to do if I actually _do_ catch a coyote? but "f&ck it!" i thought, i'm going to spend my afternoon chasing coyotes, which is exactly what i did. instead of throwing in the towel at 8 miles, i chased those tracks for a good three and half hours - up and down bluffs, through the trails, across roads, over downed trees, along the river, across the cliffs. and i loved it.

and that, of course, is when it occurred to me that chasing coyotes makes a nice metaphor for trail running - for the absurdity of running through the woods for hours at a time with no destination and no specific goal. just a chance to embrace the hunter gatherer in all of us. a chance to focus completely on the (absurd) task at hand. to lose yourself in pain, yes, and also joy. and i know i could use some more of that in the rest of my life - embracing the hunter gatherer, forgetting the bullshit, losing and finding myself, chasing coyotes.