Or: Things That Irritate Me When I am Running.
First, the good news. I was not anticipating today’s run, as I felt I was still in the “getting back up to speed” phase but I set off under sunny skies and mild temperatures. There was a breeze again but not anything like last week’s gust-o-ramas. Midway through the run I felt pretty good. I hadn’t experienced any real discomfort and would only go on to feel a little cramp in my stomach around the 8km mark. My time turned out to be 5:23/km, a whopping 8 second improvement over Friday and only three seconds off my best pace ever. I’m quite pleased by this and hope I can maintain this pace on Wednesday.
As it was quite a nice day there were lots of people at the park. A regular who does a workout on one of the balance bars found the set he normally uses occupied and instead sat in his car and smoked pot. I’m not sure if he was intending to exercise afterward or not. It would probably be an interesting sensation, at the very least.
Now, the golfer mentioned in the subject line. I have seen him once before and today he started by doing the same thing, positioning himself in a spot where there was an excellent chance one of the balls he was whacking would go flying across the path ringing the park. Likewise, a guy kicking around a soccer ball was observed kicking it not once but twice across the path. I am happy to report that glares, karma or something inspired both of them to finally alter their positions to minimize ball-on-innocent-bystander contact. There were several other examples of people being generally oblivious to other people around them. I had a woman with a dog (off leash, of course) nearly step in front of me just as I was coming up. She stopped at the last moment and meeped a quiet, “Sorry!” Another woman farther up the trail looked, saw me coming, then started to step onto the trail directly in my path. Fortunately it seems her brain was able to work out the physics of the two objects (me and her) and saw that a collision would be the result and stopped to let me by.
Finally, I was approaching the part of the path that has the playground on the right and a baseball diamond fence on the right. It is the only part of the path where you get funneled along the path with nowhere else to go. As I get close I observe a couple walking their dog ahead of me. There is a very narrow strip of grass on the left that I can use to get by them should they not squeeze over a smidgen. Instead, just as I close, the dog suddenly cuts left and the three of them form a virtual wall. It is the first time in 10 months of running that I have had to come to a complete halt as my path was totally blocked. The dog owner then realized that there are other people in the park and pulled the dog over. Thanks, mister!
Anyway, that’s really just minor grousing. It seems people regularly don’t consider the others around them and even after they do, the knowledge is never retained, so the next time they have to learn it all over again. Oh well. The important thing is soccer guy, golfer man, dog man, dog lady and dogs did not prevent me from having a very spiffy run.
Results:
Total distance: 10.02 km (previous: 10.02 km)
Average time/km: 5:23/km (previous: 5:31/km)
Best time/km: 5:02/km (previous: 4:58/km)