Let 'er buck

That's what I say in the bike leg in a race, when I'm pulling up on someone or someone's trying to overtake me.  I lean over my bike like the cowboy in Hidalgo and say, "Okay little sister, let 'er buck," and we take off.  It's also evocative of my high school tennis coach, who had lots of inspirational and bizarre sayings, including 'let 'er buck', 'hey little girl, want some candy?', 'have some fun hitting some tennis balls', 'when E.F. Lyon talks, you better listen', and my personal favorite, "I want to hear you say, you painted a Rembrandt sir."

This morning was a run, a great run, fueled by extra adrenalin whenever the blackbirds and jays buzzed me, through an ethereal ground-effect fog on corn-lined gravel roads in a sweat-bathed dawn.  Had to stop for trains going out and coming back, but I was fast and light and my feet hardly touched the dirt.  The sun broke over the soybeans as I headed back into town, immense in the thick atmosphere, like the sun had cracked and was running yoke-like down through the fields toward the sleeping village.  I ran ahead of it, buoyed up by the haze.