bike: 25 minutes
bike stand, front room
In addition to biking for almost half an hour, I took my dog on 3(!) walks without my knee brace. No knee brace! Very exciting. I still can’t run for another two weeks, but it’s exciting to feel confident enough to walk without the brace. My knee and leg are getting stronger.
I have 2 weeks left before I can start running. I’d like to take that time to revisit some of my thinking about walking. Although I was very happy to be walking so much today, none of my walks were particularly transcendent. Most of my time was divided between making sure my knee felt okay and making sure that Delia the dog kept moving. No brilliant thoughts. No poetic lines. No problems solved.
What did I notice?
- The gigantic cottonwood trees that made my neck ache and my head dizzy as I tried to look up at them.
- The huge hostas that encircled another cottonwood tree, a little further up the street.
- The burnt gold of the leaves of another tree. A maple, maybe or an oak? For the past few years, I’ve mostly seen glowing yellow leaves; these were golden.
- The bright pinks and yellows of the zinnias.
- The crows cawing as we walked through the Dowling community garden.
- The wooden camel lawn ornament in the yard of a house right next to the garden.
- The buzzing of the cicadas–more intensely electric in the morning, a slower hum in the afternoon
- A police siren.
- The walnut shells, broken up and discarded, that looked almost like mounds of poop, at least to me.
- The stillness of the air and the Mississippi river. No rowers on the river.
- The bright blue lights that framed the inside of the front window of a house.
That’s all I remember. How different would this list be if I had composed it right after getting back from my walk, or while I was on the walk?