Falling off the wagon

After six months of cold turkey endorphin withdrawal, I've been seriously jonesing the last couple of days. I broke my leg right after New Year's and wasn't really able to run for a good while after that; my waistline spent that time swelling like the budget deficit, and after a while I didn't really feel like running. With Inki in Boston and my self-discipline apparently stashed somewhere in her rollerboard, my workouts came to consist of circuit training with the TiVo remote. While the bone healed well enough, it took a long time for the muscles that had atrophied to come back, but in recent weeks my body has finally begun to forget that it got hurt. We've had so much going on, however, that it was easy to not run, particularly since I had begun to grow accustomed to my new symbiotic relationship with the couch.
Tonight, though, I took off from the apartment about forty minutes before sundown. Although I could only do a half-mile or so at a time between breaks, it was glorious. I ran down past Fort Mason and along the marina out to Crissy Field. At the Palace of Fine Arts -- a magical place I first fell in love with in the 1979 movie "Time After Time" -- I stopped and watched the light fade from the sky, which in true San Francisco summer tradition, looked for all the world like an impenetrable wall of cotton wadding. Then I ran home, walking when I had to, sprinting when I could, running flat out until I could feel my heartbeat thundering through me like the resounding of a Sunday church bell. God, it was so good. I've always dreamed of flying. Not in a plane, but for real -- up, up, and away! -- and this is as close as I've ever managed to get. I can't believe I've been away so long.