December in Austin

Austin is an unusual town. It is a very secular city; however, it loves Christmas. One part of the city's Christmas festivities is the Trail of Lights, a lighting spectacular which would make Clark Griswold blush. For the past ten years, the Trail of Lights has been inaugurated with a 5k footrace on the first night that it is open. This is appropriate because Austin leads the nation (perhaps the world) in most running events with over 1,000 participants. Because the Trail of Lights 5k is held in December, the race packet features a long sleeved tshirt to guard against the cold. This year, those who wore the official race tshirt were in for some heavy duty sweating. At race time (6:30 p.m.), the temperature was a very warm 81 degrees. A few days earlier, it had been 37. The cold snap earlier in the week had caused the leaves to leave the trees in prodigious quantities. As a result, we had winter, fall and summer all in the space of one week.