Walkies

Now, I'm going to be right honest here and tell you that it's Tuesday night, Blog In Earnest Night, and I don't have anything to write about. So I thought I might tell you about walking.

I mean, not like you don't already know about walking. You stand upright, you take one foot, put it front of the other, repeat steps two and three, and you've pretty much got the picture.

But recently, after a several-week period of inactivity, I decided it was time for me to get up off my ass and walk. I actually started this, well, for the physical exercise, a little, maybe 10%, but the other 90% I can attribute to those masters of music and myrth, the Hackensaw Boys. See, I figured that this past Friday night I'd be hoeing down, and I ended up being right, and I wanted to make sure I had enough stamina not to pass out and have someone yelling, "Hoer Down!" in the middle of the concert. Though that might have been kind of funny, had it not been me all sprawled out on the floor.

So I've been walking almost daily, about a mile and a half, maybe a little more because supposedly four laps are a mile and I walk six, going outwards on the track with each lap to make each lap a little longer than the last.

I walk at the town's middle school track, which is very nice, once you get up there. You have to walk up a slope that's so steep it tests your will for physical exercise before the laps even start. I used to walk this track in the "old days," the much-more-poundage days, and I can always remember that as I was slowly huffing and puffing my way through a few laps, I was being passed by various senior citizens scooting along at what seemed to be the speed of light. They don't seem to be around anymore, I've not seen one in the few weeks I've been walking. I guess they all died. From health.

I always listen to music when I walk, which makes the time go much faster and keeps me loping along rather happily, or at least as happily as one can lope when one is actually doing exercise. (I've always been of the philosophy that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who like exercise and those who don't, and no one ever goes from one side to the other.) I'm always trying to find the perfect walking music. I haven't yet. The Hackensaw Boys, while fun, are way too fast, I don't even think Olympic Walking, that weird style of walking we all giggle at on TV, would help me keep up with them. Sometimes I listen to my CD Mix Exchange CD, and the songs on it are either too fast or too slow. I'm toying with the idea of pulling out one of my CDs of march music, and just having a good old-style Sousa march around the track. It would be fun to see how quickly I can get the other walkers to clear away from me. Maybe I could even get a baton.

I walked on Memorial Day, I had to alter my time schedule for that one. See, I normally walk around 7pm, when it's cooler, but Mr M was coming down so I hit the track at about 11:30am, right in time for the midday sun to come out and put its fiery hands around my head. That wasn't a particularly good walk, but I made it through, even though it gave me a headache that lasted till I had a martini at dinner that night.

This past Sunday I was tromping around and it started to rain on me. Which, to be honest, I didn't mind that much. Sure, I could feel my hair curling up right there on my head, but it was kind of nice, that walking in the rain. Then a bolt of lightning crashed down about 50 yards away from my person, and I was at the furthest point from the track's exit, and so I did a half-lap somewhere along the speed of Ben Johnson's 100 meters on steroids to get over to the exit and back to my car.

The middle school's track, as I said, is a nice track, nicer than the high school's because it has asphalt and painted lanes. The high school's track is made of some weird sandish-gravelish concoction that your feet dig into while you try to go. However, the middle school's track has a small, well, disadvantage. Wooly worms. At the far end of the track, as you're rounding the last curve to come back up the home stretch, there are several very nice-smelling bushes growing over the asphalt, and they apparently are some kind of wooly worm condo. And so walking that end of the track entails doing a fair share of wooly dodging, live ones and ones already squooshed by other not-so-attentive walkers. The dead ones aren't so hard to dodge; the live ones, a little harder to dodge. They move, you know.

Then of course, once the laps are done, the music is enjoyed, the sweat is on the brow, and the hair is sufficiently curled, the only way to get back to your car is to - walk down that world's steepest slope that got you up there in the first place. I think of all the things I'm proud of where my new walking habit is concerned, the proudest is that I haven't fallen down that slope to my death, or at least to a broken leg or nose. Well, yet, anyway. I'm still early into things.

And that's about it, really. Walk on.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Acrowinners, we have acrowinners. So tell us about photo lies.
- Runner-up goes to Flipsycab, with her "Paunches, jowls, blemishes, tummies suddenly gone!" I want that photographer.
- And this week's winner is LilyG, with her "Photographing Jesus blessing those sermon guys." I wonder if that photo's in the Bible autographed by Jesus?
-Thanks to you who played. You happy few, you band of acroers.
* Tuesday is Ferd Day at Betland. Hi, Ferd!
- Here he seems to be making a point. Probably to Mr M.



And here he is during the "encore on the floor," with Baby J in the background.