We just got back from vacation. I would rather get up early than get home late. The only problem with that is it means if we want to leave at 5:00 am I have to get up at 4:00, or even earlier, to go for a run, which is what I did the day we left for our trip and the day we left to come home. Those two runs were in drastically different locations. The first was from my house down to the Fiserv Forum, through the inner city of Milwaukee. The second was in the dark, looping around a campground in South Dakota. The strangest thing happened to me while running in the pitch black of Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I was afraid. I could barely see the road in front of me and couldn’t see anything more than 10 feet to my left or to my right. I was more afraid of what I couldn’t see than what I could. Custer is home to about 1,500 buffalo and a bunch of other animals that would hide better in the dark along a campground road. The standard way of thinking would be, of those two places, I should be a lot more worried about something happening in the ghetto. But I know there is nothing to worry about there. I have to guess I would become more comfortable running at that campground if I did it everyday or even every once in a while. Maybe that’s the point of comparing the two runs. I wonder how quickly people’s fears of the inner city would diminish if they spent even a minimal amount of time here. This feels like a thought that could be expanded upon on another day.