Day Nine: Lower Loop

Today I managed to get out the door and head to the Lower Loop in Central Park by 6:30AM. The Lower Loop is 1.7 miles around and I only started running it on Saturday. Before that I was walking the path in Riverside Park, or running and walking haphazardly through parts of Central Park and down city streets. I'd come home and use Google Maps to try to measure out exactly how far I'd gone each day - usually between 2-5 miles.

On Friday of last week, a real runner I know told me to try the Lower Loop, and so I did on Saturday. It was a miserable experience. Not only was it a physical challenge that made me wonder if I'd been calculating my previous runs incorrectly, but the insult of better runners' (read: everyone) whizzing by me was almost too much to bear. I was running at the pace of a horse carriage, and so was followed along the entire course by the stench of horse manure. A portable nightmare.

If nothing else, you'd think that would have spurred me on to run faster, to get away from the manure, but I simply couldn't. I did my best to stop and stretch along parts of the route, and mid-way, at Bethesda Fountain, I even did some squats. (By the way, you know you really hate to run if stopping for squats feels like a break!) At the end of my run on Saturday, despite having barely run at all, I was so lightheaded and lacking in leg-to-brain coordination, that I actually crashed into a little girl who darted out in front of me at the exit at 59th Street. I saw her moving into my path, and yet, I had no reaction time. I couldn't stop! Kaboom! Fortunately my arm-to-brain coordination was still intact and I managed to grab her hood and pull her up before we both hit the ground, avoiding a hard spill that probably would have left us both really hurting.

So this morning when I ran and walked the loop in under an hour, and didn't injure any children, or myself, it felt like progress.

P.S. The mist on Sheep's Meadow is really lovely in the morning. I think I first saw a representation of it in the movie, "The Fisher King," which I saw in an outdoor amphitheater in Venice, Italy in 1991. At the time I remember thinking, "That's my NYC? How ironic that I am sitting so far from home and learning about a beautiful place in my own country." It's taken me 18 years, probably almost to the day now, to see that morning mist in person. Totally worth it.