Karen and I got some good exercise over the weekend. She went six miles on Saturday and four miles on Sunday. I went a mile and a quarter on Saturday and took out the trash on Sunday.
Karen is ramping up serious training for the Komen Foundation 3-Day Breast Cancer Walk at the end of November during which she will walk 20 miles for three days in a row. She has my total admiration for doing this. She did the six miles on Saturday in an hour and 45 minutes, faster than I could drink two cups of coffee and read The Times editorial page.
My pace was 27 minutes for the mile and a quarter. A bit slow for me, but I am coming off hip replacement surgery, which made me a quarter-inch taller, and the height made me dizzy. We were walking at Miramar Lake in San Diego, which is circled by a five-mile paved path. There were many other people (and a lot of dogs) there on a pleasant Saturday morning, each put there at that moment in time with a specific purpose, no two alike. It quickly seemed to me that my purpose was to reassure everyone there that there was at least one person they could pass.
Then I settled in behind an Asian couple, very old. I was actually gaining on them. I cut in the afterburners and eased out to pass. “Good morning,” I said to the woman, who was in fact quite old, possibly late Ming Dynasty. Her husband, or perhaps son, was a couple of steps ahead and doing arm calesthentics as he walked. I forged a few yards ahead and throttled down to slowest-human-being-besides-them pace.
It wasn’t two minutes before the husband-son strode briskly past me and back into the lead. I glanced over my shoulder, thinking, “God, no, please, not slower than the Ming Dynasty.” But she was still back there and losing ground. Karen was long gone into the distance. Runners, joggers, skaters, bikers and walkers sped past me in both directions. There was a group of two moms, a dad, two young daughters each riding in black nylon strollers the size of small tents, and two retriever-sized dogs on leashes. The moms, each with a stroller and a dog, spread out across the path with the apparent remarkable intent to prove they were the only ones on the path this fine morning. A biker came up at speed behind them and yelled, “Left!” The woman on the left steered right, reeled in her dog, and exclaimed, “Oh! Sorry!” as if she were completely surprised, or perhaps just to annoy me.
The traffic was like Milan. The pros and the innocent. The bold and the meek. The fast and the slow. The dumb, the dumber, and the brain-dead. Somebody let a tiny girl on a tiny pink bike with handlebar streamers and training wheels out there. She was wearing a tiny pink helmet which would not have saved her if she happened into the path of the fastest man I have ever seen up-close. Two guys on bicycles sped by, doing I swear 20 mph, and directly behind the second bike, right on his fender, was this fastest guy, lean and black and glistening and hauling. I thought the bikers were pacing him, but Karen said they passed her on the other side and the guys on the bikes didn’t even know he was there. That reminds me of an old joke about a Cadillac and a bicycle that I can’t remember right now.
I checked the local news the next morning, and there were no Miramar Lake path accidents reported. I never could understand that about Milan, either.
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