Fog Running

Not my photo, but this is what it was like running this morning:

 [image credit Marjolein Vegers, here]

The bride dropped me off on her way to work early this morning and I ran back home.  Heavy fog; visibility was perhaps 200 yards max.  You could certainly hear cars approaching well before you could actually see them.

And there were spider webs everywhere.  The saturated air had laden them with dew, which had the effect of making the webs quite visible.  Here in south-central PA, in the late summer and early fall we get many extensive webs around the house from large spiders I've always just heard called "garden spiders," but I had no idea that literally thousands of smaller spiders are right under our noses all the time.

One final observation: running in the fog is closely akin to running at night.  For me, in night running, since you cannot see any landmarks far off and lack much sense of visual proportion, it always seems to me that distances pass faster.  In other words, I frequently come up on a place way sooner than I thought I would (like, "Man, am I here already?").

Fog running is quite similar.  You're pretty much putting one foot in front of the other, seeing only what you can make out within a short radius, and all of a sudden you've reached a known point much more quickly than you figured.