After I get above eight miles, my mind starts to wander. 

I've discovered while training for half marathons how much your mind can disconnect from what your body is doing. There are times when it's too hot and my legs are too heavy and my lungs are bursting and I feel my mind slamming on the brakes, ready to override my desires with heat exhaustion, if necessary, to make this crazy 40-year-old woman stop running in the heat.

There are times when my legs are fine and the euphoria sets in and the air is so awesome to breathe I want to stop and tell other people do you taste this air? Isn't this air unbelievable?

Lately the temperature's been dropping. My vision no longer gets swimmy on big hills. I don't have to press pause on Runkeeper and pant like a dog in the shade after a big uphill. And above eight miles, I have all sorts of crazy thoughts.

I just read THE INFINITE SEA by Richard Yancy. It's the second in a dystopian end-of-the-world series that does a particularly nice job of being a dystopian end-of-the-world series, in a similar way to Dexter doing a particularly nice job of being a good serial killer. Really entertaining and well paced plot but also gets the job done showing the uglier side of humanity: how we make choices, how we weigh one life against another.

Ever since I read UNDER THE DOME by Stephen King, I've been having trouble swatting flies. The metaphors have invaded Missouri.

As I run, all the latest books swim together in my head along with the plotlines of my own writing and my own life. I think (in my running-induced euphoria that can sometimes beget delusions of grandeur) that if only I could somehow write and run at the same time I could solve some proof of humanity simply by analyzing various forms of pop culture and running them against current events divided by the number of times the Gaza Strip has been bombed and squared by the population of China. 

That would be it: The answer to why we are the way we are.

It was probably around mile nine when I noticed a large bug ambling across the sidewalk in front of me. I wasn't sure exactly what kind of bug it was, probably a beetle of some sort, but it smacked of warm-weather bug. Not-gonna-survive-the-frost kind of bug. 

And it was really cold that day. 

I started stirring all the end-of-the-world dystopian plotlines and honestly wondered if the bug was contemplating whether or not this would be his last day on earth. Could the bug know about dewpoints? Frost?

I skirted around the bug, because if he was going to die, I didn't want to be the cause of it.

I wondered how high the oceans would have to rise to flood Kansas City.

The air tasted amazing.

And I ran on.