The "nice little dirt path"

OK, so my friend Megan is a liar.

She’s the one who talked me into running in the first place, and I’m so, so, so glad she did. As I’m getting back into the swing of running, I’ve been looking to Megan again for help and inspiration. We were going to run with the Landrunners this Saturday but decided to do a shorter, easier run to really kick-start our training. We’ll do something easy, Megan says. We’ll do something short, Megan says. We’ll go run on this “nice little dirt path” she knows about, Megan says.

Well, the nice little dirt path we took off on was the Bluff Creek Trial. It’s a 3 1/2-mile bike trail in northwest Oklahoma City that’s maintained by the Oklahoma Earthbike Fellowship.

This was my first outing in the Oklahoma heat, and my longest run since starting back up. Let me just say, I was wholly unprepared for the heat, and I was 100 percent unprepared for the trail. Somewhere around mile 2 I thought, “I’m going to die out here. I’m going to literally sweat to death, and some cyclist is going to have to pick me up and move me out of the way so people can ride past my body.”