Running and Thinking

The other night when I went out for a run, I had a few things going thru my head. The first was that my face was kind of burning. It felt like I had a bad sunburn or something. I guess my skin was so dry, and the perspiration was burning my cheeks.

Then later I started thinking about my new meatless diet. I’ve been reading some vegetarianism forums the past few days, and I’ve been surprised at how aggressive vegetarians and non-vegetarians are towards each other, at least on these message boards. It’s so surprising to me that people would get so confrontational about one’s lifestyle choice. Especially about food. I guess I can understand when someone is passionate about not eating meat, but the meat-eaters who come to these forums and start flaming the vegetarians are just amazing. I guess I just don’t agree with forcing your lifestyle choices on others. It’s okay to explain why you made the choices you made, but it’s too much to demand that others follow the same path.

My regular running route takes me to the neighborhood high school, at which point I turn around and head back home. This particular part of the route is a long, straight street, with a speed limit of 35mph. I have often seen people get ticketed for speeding here, and I always keep my speed down. But, since it is near the high school, I see lots of new drivers hauling ass down this stretch. This night, I saw the opposite, although it was still a bit of stupid driving. One car was driving extra-slow, and another car behind it (I presume they were friends) was tailgating. Brake lights would flash, and they would slow down even more. Then they would speed up. Then slow down. I tried to remember back to when I was in high school, and I guess we did silly stuff like that too. What these kids were doing was not too dangerous given the slow speed and lack of traffic, but still, I couldn’t help but shake my head.

Towards the end of my run, I again noticed that my face was totally burning. It only hurt when I touched my cheeks, so I just tried to ignore it. It must have worked since the next time I thought about it was when I was falling asleep, and my cheeks were back to normal.