Since daylight savings time is no more, I’m running in the dark during the week. Jason suggested that I try not to get hit by a car or a lancer. One way to make this less likely is to wear a head lamp. So I visited my local running store – Fleet Feet – and found a fine little LED head lamp, the Tikka Plus, made by Petzl. With batteries, this baby weighs only four ounces and has a comfortable elastic head strap. It has four modes: dull glow, pen light, penetrating blaze, and epileptic strobe.

Tonight I did my first run with this baby, a three mile tempo run. After a warm up mile, I took off along the levee trail. I was going along quite nicely, with the first mile at 7:11. At the 1.5 mile point I turned around and quickly discovered why I was moving so well. There was a gale force tail wind. Immediately that became a head wind! My pace for mile 2 was 7:20. And for mile 3, my pace fell off to 7:33. The head wind was relentless. But I got it done and didn’t get hit by a car.

However, someone running around in the dark with a headlamp is not the most appealing character in the world. I passed a few of my neighbors out on their nightly walks and got some pretty strange looks. It reminded me of an old ‘Far Side’ cartoon. For you youngsters, this was a single panel cartoon that appeared in a ‘newspaper’. A newspaper was a document that had the daily news printed on it and was delivered to your house by the ‘paperboy.’ But enough of the explanations!

This would be a nice image added to that cartoon: