~10 miles, team walk at Morristown National Historical Park
Snow and ice led to the cancellation of the walk scheduled for last Saturday, but on Sunday, Coach Alison led a walk at Morristown National Historical Park. It wasn’t one of the usual sites for team walks, but after I ended up there by accident a few weeks ago and wrote about it, she decided to give it a try. I had visions of walking in snow and worrying about wet feet, because I was thinking about the trails again and there was fresh, wet snow from the preceding couple of days, but Alison was smarter than me and I think planned to walk the park roads all along. Before the other walkers got there, she showed up early to drive a loop through the roads that measured out at a little over three miles, so we just repeated that loop.
It was a small group, with just me, Alison, Joanne, and Roger. Roger is known as “Rocket” among the walkers, because as soon as he gets warmed up, he zooms ahead of everyone else in speed-walking form. He’s also the oldest of the bunch (unless I haven’t seen all the walkers yet), so I respect the heck out of the guy for his commitment to training. He ended up doing the road loop four times, while the other three of us stayed together and walked three.
We started around 8am, so it was still pretty cold when we started out and we had to pay attention to the road to watch out for icy patches. The road was plowed, but not completely cleared of snow and ice. There were convenient tire tracks that we could walk in – probably from Alison driving the route ahead of time – so it wasn’t too bad. There were a couple of places where the slope got a bit steep that required extra caution, but except for one time when I slipped and then caught myself before falling, there were no mishaps. As the morning wore on and the sun came out and had some time to shine, the road got better and better, so each repetition of the loop was less treacherous than the previous one.
On the third lap, we were about halfway through it when Alison stepped on about the only patch of ice that was still unmelted, and fell down on her tailbone hard enough that I heard it. She instinctively put out her hand to break her fall, so she bumped her wrist and arm pretty hard, too. Fortunately, she didn’t appear to seriously injure anything and was able to get up and continue, although she did cradle her hand and arm pretty gingerly the rest of the way. It was also fortunate because once we knew she wasn’t hurt, that made it okay to laugh about her finding the last piece of ice to slip on.
My next long walk is going to be another “short” 10-miler on Saturday, because Sunday is the MORE Half-Marathon in Central Park, which is just for women, and a lot of the women walkers will be doing that for their long walk. For those few of us on the team with penises, Alison was kind enough to offer a Saturday alternative, even though that means back-to-back long walks for her since she’ll be doing both.
The Saturday walk will start and finish near the Sneaker Factory, which is a TnT sponsor and offers participant discounts, so I expect to be getting some new shoes. The ones I’ve been using seem to lose there spring after a few miles, and I know from the first long walk I did that my regular running shoes aren’t as comfortable for long walking as they are for long running. I’m not quite sure what I really need that would be different for walking than for running, but I’ve heard good things about getting good advice there, so I’m counting on them to help me figure it out.
