DOWN HOME: A Gnat, a gullet & thoughts of sin

How much do I outweigh a gnat?

If I tip the scales at 154 pounds, then I've got around 153 pounds and 15.9999999999999 ounces on your typical gnat.

But for a few minutes there, I thought he was going to take me down.

I swallowed a speck-sized winged whizzer the other morning. It happened about 5:35 as I ran beside a pond not far from our house. First, I'm feeling fine. A nanosecond later, a living creature is buzzing around the back of my throat, struggling in vain to find fresh air.

Heat and bugs are the two primary reasons I feel ambivalent about spring and summer. When I run, anything above 55 degrees feels warm. In fact, this winter, I figured the optimal temperature for running is the mid-40s—so your hands and ears get cold when you start and your body feels perfect after about a half mile or so.

With the temperature that low, you don't worry about bugs. I'm not an entomologist, and I don't play one on TV. So, I know very little about the physiology of insects. What I do know is you don't have to worry about small flying critters in the winter. They're either (a) not hatched yet, (b) hibernating until spring or (c) bundled up in their little bug sweaters, unable to fly.

But when spring arrives, I run more slowly because I sweat more, get dehydrated and tire out more quickly. And I also must watch out for bugs, a fact I remembered just a smidge too late the other morning.

Since then, I've been trying to recall how to run without sucking an insect down my windpipe. The obvious answer is to breathe through my nose. But with a deviated septum, that's like driving with a brick for a carburetor.

So, I've been keeping my head down. I normally run with my head back, slightly opened mouth into the wind, like an intake manifold on a roadster. Unfortunately, this creates a huge target for Kamikaze bugs. When I run head-down, bugs can fly into my lip and maybe even my teeth, but they don't zip past my lips.

After the nasty gnat clawed onto the back of my throat, I coughed and hacked, trying to dislodge him and stop the stinging. For awhile there, I wondered if I could keep running. It's just silly that something so tiny could almost overtake a grown human being.

Ultimately, he came loose and joined the great food chain. No, I don't know how many calories.

The rest of my run, I thought about that gnat and about sin. All during Lent, I've been working on a couple of sins that grieve me. I know them and avoid them, just like I avoid the bobcat in the woods by that pond. And then, like that gnat, pesky little sins zoom in and mess things up.

But just like relearning how to hold my head, when I change the attitude of my life—mostly through prayer and meditation—those annoying sins can't find an opening. And life is sweeter.