The fall along the North Coast (Great Lakes), especially early-on and mid-through (like now), is generally a perfectly delightful season comfort-wise, but it is undoubtedly, for me, the most energetically seductive time of year also.  It is always harder for me to run in the early-to-mid fall—to keep my running disciplined and ongoing—than at any other time of the year.  The urge to stop, to forfeit, to submit to some cosmic call to shut-it-all-down tampers with my will most mightily at this time of change.  Yet I know that if I can just push on a little longer, into a later, riper autumn and closer towards grizzly winter, that I’ll be able to skate on through the winter running almost on auto-glide, back into the spring with an emerging gleam in my eye, looking forward and then sailing into a scorching summer once more. 

Incipient 21st century (take-a-snapshot-of-these-global warming) falls, in my experience, are great challenges for an outdoor running-warrior spirit.  To run on intrepidly, even as nature all about signals retreats and imposes terminal constraints upon itself, smacks of kick-ass defiance. 

Even as the leaves now fall,

I run to catch them before they hit the ground,

delaying, if but for moments more,

the inevitability of all-falls-down.