ten miles

I walked up to the bike trail's three-mile marker today, which made the one-way trip exactly five miles. I started the walk at 8:42AM and finished at 11:50AM-- 188 minutes for ten miles, or 3.19mph.

My more athletically inclined readers will have to forgive me for talking about something they already know, but the concept of "walking off" a certain pain or discomfort is no BS. During the first mile or so of today's walk-- and this was true yesterday, too-- the muscles along my right shin were cramping up. Stop and stretch, or keep on going? was the question my body kept forwarding to my brain. The brain's reply: Are you kidding? Keep on going! (I'm certain my ego had a large role in the brain's reply.) Sure enough, by about the end of the walk's second mile, the cramping was gone, perhaps because the muscle group had warmed up enough to become more pliant.

I remember "running off" similar problems when I was younger. Though never much of a runner, I did jog through the latter half of high school, often running around the neighborhood block at night with my buddy Steve, who was a much better jogger than I was. I'd occasionally get the standard "stitch in the side," and the only remedy was just to keep on going.

It's nice to have rediscovered that little bit of wisdom. I would not, however, try to apply this wisdom to problems like, oh, needing to take a raging dump. That's not the sort of urge you should be fighting for two hours. I'm hoping that one of the side benefits of this stroll across the country will be a return to a long-forgotten regularity, a condition I currently simulate with the help of that magic powder, Metamucil. I say this because I'm a bit worried about the prospect of traipsing through American suburbia with an urge to lay out some logs, but with nary a port-a-john in sight.

Right... off to the shower, then.