I will posting my daily thoughts and progress leading up to October 6th. This is the first entry.
The big walk is coming up, and I am feeling more or less ready. One small thing I am trying to work out is my pace. I am currently walking too fast to be comfortable over twenty-one miles and I am working on that.
I was exhausted after my last long walk, but I should not have pushed through in one go without a break. Tomorrow is my final long effort and then I can rest, keeping stretched out until next Tuesday. I will walk around the edges of the entire town, population 12,000. I like these walks, kind of wandering around until I reach some arbitrary mileage.
I know my neighborhood pretty well at this point, and the running narrator tells such stories about the things I see. Most everything can be an inspiration, a trigger for my imagination. The town I live in is awash with railroad and pioneer history, capped by a wildcat gas boom in the nineteen-eighties. Heck, my house is in the 1890 US Census, the whole town having grown around it in the meantime.
Two blocks down from me is the roundhouse, a Union Pacific maintenance facility that spun the great train engines of the steam age to diesel electrics of the new age of raw freight. Now shut down, the buildings have been reclaimed as community spaces and museum pieces. All that remains of that industry cleans and refits tanker cars.
Some detritus remains: old engines, dumps of railroad ties, random junk. Since I am often just passing by, I don’t stop to document the images sparking my brain, so today I did. Trying to slow my walking pace, I figured it would help that, too.
To be honest, I’m not sure it did. Once my photo safari of shots I have been thinking of for a year was over, I resumed my walk at what could be an unsustainable pace for a 60-something stroke recovery dude covering 20+ miles. It isn’t a terrible thing, I suppose. Four years ago, any mile under an hour was a success.
In the end, the photos were a pleasant distraction from the current single-mindedness of my walk preparations. Some have noted this as an obsession, and they are somewhat right. I do this while I can. A lot of water has run under my bridge, and it has been battered by the debris of time. There is still a lot of world I want to see and time I want to be spend with loved ones.
Not to be too melodramatic, maybe I am just checking in to see if I am going to make it another year.
So this year is twenty miles, maybe further next year. That’s getting ahead of myself. I have a more immediate goal. Today, I slowed for a minute and I remembered why I made it. I’m probably going to make it another year.
Leave a comment