I am in Los Angeles for the wedding of my friends Julien and David. Consequently I traded my 6-mile Saturday run with TnT in Eugene for three two-mile loops around the Penmar Golf Course in Venice Beach, all by myself. I do not like Los Angeles.

In a few months I will be moving somewhere, and it will be a city – a city bigger than Eugene. Beyond that it could be lots of places – preferably somewhere with access to the outdoors and a few cool museums and some significant body of water. It could be Portland or Seattle or San Francisco or Philadelphia or Boston or Chicago, and I’d even consider places like Austin or St Paul or other random spots for the right job or the right people. But it will not be LA. Not if the love of my life and my dream job were waiting for me here and nowhere else.

LA is more highway than anything else. It takes an hour in a car to get anywhere, and car is the only way to get there. It’s sprawly and scattered and for me has all the peculiarities of a foreign city without any of the appeal. I know these sentiments are neither fair nor original. I don’t care. I just got back from a six mile run and I can write what I want.

The run, actually, was not so bad. I ran by whitewashed houses and people working on their yards listening to Spanish radio. Half the run was on sandy southern California soil that, because of the unusual eighth inch of rain that fell yesterday, was sticky and puddled. The grainy mud clumped on the bottoms of my sneakers and weighed down my feet.

When I run I pass the time in my head in several ways: I sing songs – often just a particular part of just one song over and over, I think about my body and how I am feeling, I have elaborate day dreams. This works until I start to feel physically bad. Today this happened after four miles, just as I was starting my third and final loop. My face flushed and my mouth dried and stifling heat came up off of my chest and throat; my stomach twisted. That’s when I started thinking about how my body will only get better at this if I push it; how you have to constantly put yourself in an uncomfortable zone to improve. It’s not like I say this to myself in some motivational speaker kind of way. I say it in a grudging, angry, so-why-the-fuck-am-I-doing-this way. Also, and I mean this, I think about how many people have encouraged me, and how many people have supported the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society because I am doing this, and how doing this is my end of that bargain. That’s what I think about when I really want to stop.

Also I identify plants, because I am a science geek. But that was harder here in a different climate zone, where the plants are different. Today I could only i.d. a few: coast redwood, some cotoneaster, a bottlebrush tree, rockrose, Hollywood juniper. Most of the other plants were strange desert-looking things with smooth bark and glossy leaves. The air as I ran past was sweet and citrusy.

I finished my run by a taqueria, and it’s the longest I’ve run so far, maybe ever. And when I finish that on marathon day I’ll still have twenty miles left to run.