Summer is just around the corner. Normally at this time of year, my seasonal anger (which starts to build in late September and reaches its peak in the dead month of February) melts as the sun rises. This year is different, however, because this year is the first year I’ve managed to run outdoors throughout the entire winter. New York is mild enough; in Chicago, I could never make it much past mid-October. Anyway, because of this, for the first time the warming weather has actually had some negative effects in my life: there are people about now. When I go running in the park of a morning (or afternoon), there are people all over the paths. People meandering back and forth, people with dogs, people with babies, people with yoga mats and ice cream cones and no sense of purpose or direction. People, in short, who are In The Way.
They are even in the way on the running track, which blows my mind. While I may hate it, I understand how some people arrive at the conclusion that sidewalks are an appropriate place to list vaguely back and forth while staring at the sky with your thumb up your ass, but surely an actual running track is the one place in New York where even the most placid and directionless fool would realize people are meant to move about in an orderly, brisk, purposeful fashion. But yet, the track in Greenpoint is clogged with people (and their freaking children) wandering all over the place, completely oblivious to the lanes and the many runners moving with a momentum that makes it difficult to swerve and stop at a moment’s notice. There are people who appear as though this one half-hearted lollop around a track is the first time they’ve gotten off a couch since they hit puberty. There are old people who wheel around and stop in the lane and gawk at you when you run up behind them, as though they’re horribly offended you would do something so blatant and aggressive as run on a running track, when they are out for their morning waddle. There are even (I swear to God) hulking teenage boys riding little girls’ bikes the wrong way around the track. And incidentally, every single time I’ve observed any soccer player from the field in the middle of the track crossing after some errant ball, I’ve never once seen one of them look both ways and wait for runners to pass. Nope, they just stroll right on across without looking up and let the joggers either stop short, jerk to the sides or plow straight into them.
So much for the running track. There are also two parks where I run every day, and both of them have been lately ruined by the Brooklyn Park Service’s yearly spring maintenance. In Park No. 1, they are busily cutting the branches off all the trees; to avoid killing people with the falling limbs, they helpfully tape off the portion of the walk that they’ll be working on that day, except that they usually only remember to tape off one side of it, so that you’ll be running along and suddenly you’re clotheslined by a length of police tape appearing seemingly out of nowhere, just before a giant tree comes crashing down behind you. And the air is thick with sawdust. In Park No. 2, they have repaved the running track with an insanely thick, pillowy bed of uneven wood shavings, which is about as easy to run through as a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit.
I can’t wait till fall.
