NY State of Mind

This morning I took a nice run through Central Park in New York City. According to the little map I downloaded, it was a nice six mile loop through the little forest within the city.

The weather was around 40, and the sky kept looking like it was going to dump snow or rain at any moment, but held off. Though I could always hear the traffic, there were actually times I couldn't see it directly, though the tall buildings ringing the park let me know that no matter how idyllic it might seem, I'm still surrounded by humanity in all directions.

Central Park is set up well for all the folks who walk, wander, run, bike, relax, or live there. There are large vehicle-restricted areas that keep the casual observer from trying to share the same place as a taxicab or the occasional fearless civilian driver, and somehow even despite how many people are there (particularly near the south end), things flow smoothly. Running up the east side of the park, I was passed to my right by bicycles, and likewise I was passing walkers and strollers to my left, and especially north of 72nd St., there was nothing interrupting the pace of the folks out there.

The further north I went, the fewer the number of people out. The young mothers with the jog strollers left in the mid 70s, and passing the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservior there were few folks other than the park workers, the occasional police car, and the determined NY exercising folks who look neither left nor right and don't make eye contact with anyone. I did see an apparently homeless man, dragging two bags of miscellaneous stuff, and sporting a three-liter Camelbak hydration system. In New York apparently, high-end accessorizing has made it throughout the various social strata for which I'm presuming some presidential candidate will take credit.

After heading back south past the open fields at the north end I encountered an older German couple I'd met in my hotel who were out with a book on North American trees and in search of several different kind of leaves for their collection. In their long coats and somewhat pointy hats, they looked as though they could have been on some sort of Tolkein-inspired Hobbit hunt, but they assured me their interest was trees.

Further down, I saw a blind woman riding a bicycle. She had a friend following behind yelling directions, and she didn't try to go too fast. I remain very impressed with her skill and the level of trust she has in her friend. At one point I was concerned that the blind cyclist was going to ram a popcorn cart that was being unloaded from a truck, but she swerved just in time.

At the end of the run it was time to head out of the park and back down 7th Avenue into the swarm of Manhattan where smiling at a stranger or saying "good morning" has the typical resident thinking of dialing 911.

As for the run itself, the pace was good, around 12 min./mile, and the walk too and from the park was a great warm-up. The one thing that I didn't expect is that the park is somewhat hilly. It's not the Himalayas, nor even the Poconos, but it's certainly not flat. It's a very nice run, and certainly worth the schedule-bending it took to fit it in.