This is a picture of a small house by the road I walk on to get to my local bike path. It’s about a quarter mile walk from where I live to the bike path. In the summer the path is so crowded with tourists riding bicycles, pushing baby buggies or jogging that I usually avoid it and get my exercise indoors on my spinning bicycle. However, today I felt like walking, or maybe even running.
I haven’t run in more than two years on account of chronic ankle pain. During that time my aerobic exercise has been limited to daily 45-minute workouts on my indoor spinning bike.
I began with the idea that I would alternate between running and walking short distances. The bike path has markers every tenth of a mile so doing intervals of running and walking is easy. But once I started running I didn’t feel like stopping and I wound up running the entire 4.6 miles that I usually walk when I’m walking on the bike path.
The cool part of this story is that after not running for over two years, and being just a couple of weeks shy of turning 53 years old, I ran the 4.6 miles in 32 minutes and 46 seconds, which is an average of 7 minutes and 7 seconds per mile! I ran the third mile of the run at 6 minutes and 50 seconds because two people on roller blades passed me and I wanted to see how long I could keep up with them.
I’m pretty proud of this small accomplishment, that’s why I wrote about it. As we get older we like to feel like we still have some of the spark from our earlier years.
And that brings me back to the picture of the little house with the crooked window. It’s an abandoned, dilapidated old house by a marsh. When I walk past it I wonder about who used to live in it. They must have walked the same route to the beach that I walk. What did they talk about inside the room with the crooked window? I am like the old house, and so are you. As time goes by people won’t know who I used to be or that I used to be a good runner, and they won’t care. Like the house, we will grow old and crooked and other people that see us will never know what secrets we have. But wouldn’t the world be just a little bit kinder if people wondered? To wonder about the history of strangers is to see them as fellow human beings and recognize that we all have a story.
Monte Ladner