The Walkin’ Dude

(disclaimer: the following post contains rhapsodizing. Click away if you’re feeling a high level of rhapso-intolerance. 🙂 )

After Readercon ended, I needed to get back to my workout routines. But it was so hot and humid, I just couldn’t face the exercycling, even with two fans and cold water spritzes. The Bowflex workouts are three times longer but paced much differently. I don’t get nearly as hot, and I can take breaks.

So, I decided to try taking walks instead of cycling: brisk, fast, non-stop walks around my pleasant town.

At 2:00 a.m.

And I’ve been loving it. I have excellent night vision, and even though I take a small flashlight with me, I never need it. Mostly, I’m walking on roads that have sidewalks (and the only sidewalks in Pepperell exist primarily on the roads near schools and were built for kids, not civilians) but not entirely. My town is safe, peaceful, very quiet at night, quite dark–not a lot of street lights and they’re widely spaced–and quite rural. We don’t have a “commercial district” where the commercial buildings line both sides of the road or exceed three stories in height, anywhere in town, and we don’t have a single traffic light.

The first walk was Monday night, July 12. I usually cycle for 35 minutes, and walking didn’t feel like nearly as much of a workout so I wanted to walk a lot longer. I headed out, walked down to Donelan’s grocery store, came back, took the long way around to get back to my house, and it clocked at 50 minutes.

Not long enough, I thought, so the next time I walked, I decided I would set my cell phone timer and walk 45 minutes, then come back the same way, thereby walking for 90 minutes total. The weather cooled off and got rainy, so I did cycling the next couple of days, then came another warm muggy night, and I tried out the new walking plan.

Well. I learned a few things. (a) In 45 minutes, I can walk a long way. I completely underestimated how much ground I could cover in that space of time! (b) I live in a really, really small town. In 45 minutes, I’m “downtown,” through the “downtown,” out past the post office and well on my way to Dunstable, the next town over! (c) 90 minutes walking at what must be close to 4 mph is a damn good workout. Whew–and ouch. Using some different muscles than I do for either cycling or the Bowflex, I’ve been so stiff and sore! 🙁

Which, of course, is a very good thing. It’s always great to challenge new muscle groups. 🙂 Truth to tell, at my fitness level, I probably should be running, even if it’s just gentle running, but that’s awfully tricky at night even with my good night vision. The sidewalks are pretty rough.

90 minutes seemed like a bit much (especially when I got up the next day, oof), so the last two walks I’ve tried out different routes that weren’t quite so long. Last night, I ran two errands–I walked to the post office and mailed a bunch of items and then stopped at the bank ATM and made a deposit. At 3:00 a.m. 🙂 And the cops pulled up next to me once to ask “if everything was okay.” Yep…I live in a really safe town! Thank you, officer, and, sheesh. (But, I suppose broken-down motorists and domestic violence are two of the main types of calls our cops respond to, and both of those might be a reason someone was walking alone late at night.)

The main thing about these late night walks, though, is how incredibly beautiful the world is at that time. My town is so lovely at night! The stars have just taken my breath away–every night. Brilliant against a deep black sky, the Milky Way wending a clear path like a hazy river straight overhead, the Pleiades so bright in my peripheral vision (they’re brighter that way than looked at straight-on) that I kept turning my head to see what they were. I never realized how much light is cast just by the stars. Walking down a completely unlit road, with no streetlights anywhere near, no house lights, I could see clearly just from the light of the stars overhead, they were so bright. The air is the perfect temperature for walking and the humidity makes it soft and caressing, not oppressive. It’s so quiet, I wince every time I scuff my sneakers on a rough spot, it sounds so loud. I think a bat went right by me once, I saw just a brownish flick go by. And walking across the bridge, which has no lights at all, over the Nashua River in the dark is so cool. And the smells…! Good smells, bad smells, I couldn’t even start to describe them, they’re so varied and complex.

I love being out at night. I’ve missed it so much! Last night I stopped at Cumberland Farms, which, along with White Hen Pantry, is open 24 hours. I asked the night clerk, a woman about my age and even shorter than I am, if she liked the night shift. “Love it,” she said, and we chatted a moment about how much we like working nights. We night owls, we’re a tribe, of sorts. Most of us can’t be awake and alive at night the way we used to. In the 80s, I did my grocery shopping at 2:00 a.m. Now nothing is open all night anymore, except convenience stores, and getting a good night shift job is almost impossible.

As far as I can calculate, I’m walking from five miles to six and a half miles each session. That’s a pretty good walk. I’m also starting to get accustomed to it. Last night I was out for 93 minutes total and I wasn’t nearly so worn out. In fact…I didn’t want to come back inside!

Today, I mowed and weed-trimmed all the lawns, front and back. They look so nice and tidy now! My neighbors won’t hate me! (Unless my sneaker scuffs are disturbing them at 2:30 a.m….but nearly everyone is running air conditioners and fans, I can hear them as I go by the houses.) But that was today’s workout, it took about two and half hours. Next up is some serious work on the vegetable garden. I’m picking blackberries by the pint now and they’re just ramping up. I’m going to have to start freezing them!