St. Vincent.

I had a good meeting with my adviser today, but I've got quite a bit of work to do before I'll have anything coherent to post from it. So, instead, I'm going to talk about the run I went on after our meeting.

There's a park south of campus called St. Vincent park. I don't know what this Vincent character did to get canonized, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was probably genuine virtue rather than simply winding up on the wrong end of some Turk's simitar. Since many of my runs from campus go through this park, I've started naming them with virtues. St. Vincent the Humble is the shortest; it's just a loop around the park. St. Vincent the Goode combines the park loop with most of the Wayne Goode trail that runs through campus. The longest loop is St. Vincent the Patient.

Today, I decided to run a new route. I went through the park and then continued south to Forest Park. I then took the metrolink back to campus (UMSL students get free metro passes). Running through Wellston, four High Schoolers did a comically bad job of impersonating dangerous thugs. Granted, this is a very rough neighborhood and race relations in North County are challenged, to say the least. But, this was also in broad daylight on one of the busiest streets and they were having a hard time not laughing as they ran towards me. They ran along with me for a bit and heckled me while I just chuckled. Seeing that their "attack" had failed to produce the desired response, they went back to whatever they were doing before (which appeared to be nothing).

I run through the hood all the time and little incidents like these don't phase me. Nobody is seriously going to mug a runner; we don't carry anything worth stealing. Still, I don't know that I'll run this particular route often enough to warrant naming it. However, I can't pass up such an obvious pun. From here on, this route will be St. Vincent the Chased.