I was wrong

 Hey, it happens to the best of us, and in addition to those ideal human beings, it happens to me too. Luckily, I'm plenty used to it.

For years, being the haughty bicycle rider, I would comment about how infrequently runners appeared, judging by facial expressions, anything more desirable than substantially miserable.  In fact, miserable runner became the default, and I would comment only when someone running appeared pleased with their mode of motion.

Then I became a runner. No, it wasn't just having ample free time and wanting to take longer to get anywhere. There is something naturally elemental about moving on one's own two feet, and this appeals to me, although the human body still needs an eon or two of evolution to run elementally on hard pavement, so I avoid that as much as reasonably possible.

That means I met trail runners, and they make mountain bikers, the branch of the bike riding tree I figured as the friendliest, look rather like stand-offish jerks. Trail runners, at least the ones I've met, are shockingly nice people.  So I revised my earlier statements about runners to more carefully specify PAVEMENT runners.

Then, this weekend, I joined trail running friends to cheer others as they pounded the pavement at the Bridge of Flowers race in Shelburne Falls.  We were at the top of Crittenden Hill, which was long, with an extra helping of long poured atop of that.

And the runners, they were smiling. No, not just my mistaking a grimace, but also friendly and generally seeming happy to be there, regardless of where in the racing field "there" was. Many even thanked us for being there to cheer, so I started thanking them back for being there running, because we would've looked really silly cheering the thin air!

So it definitely isn't running that promotes misery, nor even running on pavement, so I have a new hypothesis that the key to joy is intent. Many of the seemingly miserable runners I'd seen through the years, I'll guess they ran not out of desire to run, but for the after effects of running. Runners for them wasn't the fun part, and it showed.

Now I'm sort of a runner, and I run with people who want to run, like my friends and I did on nearby trails after watching the racing shindig, and you know, we chatted and smiled the whole way, maybe even a few laughs. It was a good time, or at least we thought it was, and I suppose that attitude made it so.