The reward

I am a predictable creature, I think, but I am happy to report that I had an utterly blissful run just now! It was very short, I was only out for about thirty-five minutes and covered barely three miles (a lot of verticality!), but it was amazingly enjoyable. I am glad I did it--first couple miles super-hilly, but as I ran back downhill towards the hotel I felt ecstatically calm--I could feel all the muscles in my shoulders and arms having loosened up in a most appealing way.

The West Point campus is very beautiful. I explored a little (VERY steep) trail with strenuous exercise stop-points labeled with things that I was slightly tempted to try myself (not the obstacle-course type things, just the fitness ones!). I saw streams and reservoirs and several medium-sized mammals (PDF alert--but some of those rodents really have mighty evocative names!). It would be nice to think the one slipping into a rock crevice en route to a stream was an otter, but really I think they were both more along chipmunk-woodchuck lines...