OK it wasn’t really yesterday I was chased by wolves, but the day before. Not literally, of course, but in the dream I had a couple nights ago, I was getting chased by a huge pack of these canine beasts, and they were not friendly. They were not out to eat me, mind you. They were the puppets of the evil master who was trying to take over the world. This nasty dude used the wolves, who he had somehow managed to convince to follow him, to subdue the populations of every place he wanted to rule. I was fuzzy on the details, but that is the way dreams are.

I saw the wolves coming from far off, being on the roof the huge Victorian house I had never seen in real life, but they were too fast to avoid. I warned everyone–and there were lots of people in this house–but we all were held captive once the wolves arrived with their bared teeth and threatening growls. The dictator who wanted to rule the world had wolves as minions. It made me think of Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s, or Sudan in the 1990’s. This is what I thought about on day 29 of my running-ever- day experiment. I wondered what it would feel like to have your world turned over because one man is crazy for power. I was scared in the dream, but it was only a dream. I ran in the dark, early morning, before the sun got around to making the sky light, and thought about fear. It was a beautiful morning, but every run can’t be filled with wonderful thoughts.

Today I hit the 30-day mark. It felt good to do that. It snowed last night and snow crusted the ground in spots. It was slippery and I had to be careful. I thought about the snow. Then I ran into a friend and we ran together for a while. We had a conversation. We caught up. We didn’t talk about dictators or drooling carnivores. We talked about kids and running and weather. That was a little more like it. I plan to run again tomorrow morning. We made a plan to run together on purpose this time. Maybe we will talk about the dreams we had. Let’s hope the wolves don’t come back. Like I said, they were not friendly.