the Way of the Turtle

LUNAR ECLIPSE
9.5 Mile Run on the Mohawk-Hudson Bike Path
Wednesday, February 20, 2008

A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon's orbit carries it through the Earth's shadow, blocking out the light from the sun that we would ordinarily see reflected as moonlight. For the last day or so the news agencies have been talking a lot about tonight's total lunar eclipse, in part because its the last one that will be visible in our part of the world until December 2010. Weather permitting (there was a possibility it might be cloudy) there was no question that I wanted to get outside and see this one... so I combined my interest in the eclipse with a need to get out for a run and decided to run on the bike path tonight while the eclipse was happening.

I got off to a late start (I'd planned to start running around 8 PM) and hit the path just as the moon was entering Earth's shadow. It was a cold, clear night - a perfect night for seeing the eclipse and a great night for a run, too! Initially, the nearly-full moon lit everything up with a silvery-white glow almost as bright as my headlamp. As I continued to run, more and more of the moon was covered by the shadow, and things got dimmer and dimmer... but never so dark that I needed a light to see. One of the things that's kind of interesting about a lunar eclipse is that the moon never gets completely dark; instead, sunlight refracting through the atmosphere around the edges of the Earth casts a reddish-orange glow over the face of the moon.

Thanks to the warm weather we had earlier this week, the path was clear of ice for almost a mile east of the Niskayuna Lions Park, so I was able to run a section that I couldn't last winter (fewer loops on the Gerbil Wheel! Hurray!) The entire time that I ran, the ice on the river and the streams and ponds bordering the path was cracking, popping, and snapping... it sounded like a host of large monsters were out in the water smashing through the ice! The first time it happened I wondered what was going on, but as the run progressed and I kept hearing it, I realized that it was just the ice shifting and moving with the currents. But it was loud enough that I still jumped a few times!

I also heard some sort of bird off in the woods, and startled a couple of bunnies on my first time out along the Gerbil Wheel. On the way back I nearly had a run-in with a skunk that was wandering down the path - he moved off to the side and lifted his tail as I ran by, but fortunately we parted quickly enough that he didn't spray - that would have been a miserable addition to my run!

My legs felt pretty good on my 2nd lap, but unfortunately I made a rookie mistake and wore a different type of sock than I'd used previously with my Adidas Supernovas - and ended up with sizeable blisters on the arch of my foot and a blistered toe. So I cut things a bit shorter than I might have otherwise, and was pleased to find out later that I'd ended up running somewhere around 9.5 miles (rather than the 8-8.5 miles that I thought I'd done.) That's easily the furthest I've run since November!

As I wrapped up my run, the moon was just starting to come out of the Earth's shadow, with a sliver of brighter light along one edge. It would have been nice to be able to run longer and see the bright light returning to illuminate the path, but this was still a great run, and a first - I've never run during a lunar eclipse before tonight!

JMH