Call Me A Rebel, Call Me What You Will

As part of my physical therapy “homework,” I walk three times a day. (Before you start thinking I’m some kind of Amazon Woman, these are not very long walks, and I’m not exactly burning rubber.)

And when you walk three times a day, the same old routes begin to get, well, old. The treadmill is a fallback in the bad weather and first thing in the morning, when I don’t feel like getting in the car (I live near the crest of a veritable mountain – popping out the door for a quick walk around the ‘hood is not in my cards right now). But at least once a day, I like to walk outside. I mix things up a little. A quaint, verdant neighborhood nearby if I want to lose myself in the spray of flowers and pretty houses. A road in the woods with some rolling hills if I want more of a challenge, but not enough to make me sore for several days. (There are other places I can go to do that, if I’m feeling especially perky and foolhardy.) And if I need to be around people and activity, I like to go to the local track.

I haven’t been there too often lately, because I’m trying to get more hills into my life, because often it’s not convenient to drive 20 minutes there and back in the middle of the day if I have appointments in the afternoon. But last night I was out having an early dinner and I wasn’t too far away from the track and it just felt right to toddle over there for an evening constitutional before heading home. I was already dressed for it – for dinner I’d just popped a dressier cardigan over my pink t-shirt, gray knit pants and walking shoes.

The track wasn’t crowded, odd for 6:30 on a beautiful Wednesday evening. I slipped into my usual lane in my usual direction (why is it that humans naturally want to point counter-clockwise when they’re in a situation that calls for locomotion in circles?) I noticed several people running the other way but shrugged them off. I wasn’t in any of their lanes and it’s a quarter-mile track: enough sight distance so you’d have to be running as fast as Michael Johnson or completely lost in the clouds in order to smack into anyone. So I didn’t think about it. Until I was passed by pot-bellied, sour-faced, middle-aged gentleman running in the opposite direction.

He gave me a dirty look.

Whatever, I thought. Maybe, like some runners who don’t want to be running, they think that everybody out there should be running. Misery loving company and all that. Then on the next lap, he came up upon me again, and this time a pre-teen boy was on lap 1, running counterclockwise like me.

“Hey,” the man called out to the boy. “You’re going the wrong way. Today we’re supposed to be running clockwise.”

And the boy obediently changed directions. Oh, right, I thought. The sign. They put up that sign on the chain link fence around the track, some year or so ago, outlining which direction they wanted you to run on which day. A lot of dads came there with their kids, so I assumed that the young man was his son, or else why would he be so pliant? (Nearly every kid I know, if you told them that, would sneer at you and keep on running.)

And after that I didn’t think about either of them anymore. It was a nice night, nothing was hurting, I was walking my requisite 15 minutes (3 laps worth, for those who are keeping score). Nobody seemed to be bumping into anyone (as several of us were running/walking in the “wrong” direction) and all seemed fine.

I finished at about the same time he did. And as I was walking off toward the parking area, I heard him talking to a couple of old duffers who were hanging around the picnic tables under the overhang where, during high school football games, the boosters sell hotdogs and programs.

“Hey,” he said. “One of you guys work here?”

“Yeah,” one of them said.

He was really winding himself up with outrage. “Well, you might as well take that sign down, the one that tells people which way to go on what days, because apparently nobody pays attention to it. And my tax dollars went into renovating this stadium and now everyone’s gonna screw it up again. Some people are just rebels.”

I didn’t hear the maintenance guy’s response. But I hope it was something like “get a life.”

Because that’s what I was thinking. Yeah. The three laps I walk in the “wrong” direction, say, every four weeks or so is really going to cause a lot of wear and tear on the Vibram. And then I thought, “Hey, that guy thinks I’m a rebel.”

I pulled myself up a little taller.

I’m a rebel.

Don’t let the pink t-shirt fool you.