Kids back to school, mornings back in the dark — the IKO Core back on the head for the 5am runs.
The kids went back to school this week and the mornings noticed straight away — five a.m. now arrives in the dark, the trail gone quiet and unlit, so the torch comes out of the drawer again, seventy-nine grams, three settings, five hundred lumens at full reach for two and a half hours before it asks for rest.
The world shrinks to whatever the beam allows — a rope of light thrown down the trail, tree trunks stepping forward out of black and back into it once you’ve passed, the ground reduced to what’s directly ahead, which turns out to be enough.
Ahead of me, always a little further than the light quite reaches, the dog trots into the edge of the cone and out again, trusting the dark she can’t yet see, the way I’m learning to trust seventy-nine grams strapped to my head to tell me where the next stone is.
Summer ran in daylight and didn’t think about it. Autumn asks you to earn the miles one small circle at a time.
Inspired by Dylan Thomas