Walk, don’t run

The elegant gent standing next to the phallic cairn is Paul. He was my high school social studies and earth science teacher. (I am now his landlord. The worm turns.) We’ve been friends for over 40 years, and these days we walk three miles or so together every morning, solving along the way many major national and international problems. We have a couple of regular routes, known to us as “River” and “Loops.” Our fondest hope every day is to meet an early dog or two to pat and scratch. Then Paul starts looking forward to his Quaker Oats, and I to my Wheaties. How the mateys have fallen.

This photo was taken on neither “River” nor “Loops” here in Woodbury, Connecticut, USA, but on the Welch-Dickey Loop, a classic, beautiful, half-day stretch of the legs in New Hampshire’s Waterville Valley area. Distance is about 4.5 mi. (7.2 km.), total elevation gain is about 1,800 ft. (550 m.), and much of the walk is on open slab. Terrific walking, fine views, and at least on this September mid-week day, no crowds.

The smiling paunch in the red shorts is me, overlooking the unfortunately obscured Nancy Cascades, on a different walk during the same week, this one west of Crawford Notch and on the way to what I suppose is my favorite single spot in the Whites.



After our morning walk, I sometimes run (or, more accurately, shuffle) a few miles, and when Paul the cosmopolite is away in exotic locales, I often dump the walk altogether and just shuffle a little farther. In fact, this is how the “Loops” route was born. I used to be a runner who could actually run. Then I became a runner who thought he could run. I persisted in this delusion despite regular and unmistakable signals given out over time by all parts of both legs. The result was that I kept finding myself grumpily limping home from miles away. This happened over and over again. I’d strain an achilles, say, offer the excruciating penance of rest, gradually build back up to running, stretch the mileage, raise the pace and…boom…grumpily limping home again from miles away. It took only a dozen or so of these cycles before the brilliant idea of local loops flashed into my quick and supple mind. So, making use of the Main Street sidewalk (pretty much the only one in town), part of my old high school cross-country course, and the cemetery where I ease quietly past a number of gently resting relatives and friends, I put together a set of loops that could be modified, linked, reversed, repeated, and short-circuited to give me essentially any distance I could sanely hope to manage, without ever being more than a mile or so from home. The “Loops” Paul and I walk many mornings is a basic version. Of course, when I do whatever that is that I repeatedly do to the outside of my right knee, it’s always at that mile-away-from-the–house point.

Now that all I want to do is to be ready for the TGO Challenge in May, I’m going to be walking more and running, even shuffling, less. I do NOT want have to limp grumpily back home from deepest Knoydart.