Running Fast on Spongy Grass

My normal route takes me from the park southward until you reach 91st street, which currently dead ends but has access to the north end of the parking lot. Usually I walk back on the perimeter sidewalk on the east and north edges. 

A leisurely stroll down through the park to the soccer fields today. I have learned---or rather was reminded of the fact that---the soccer fields are officially known as the Bell94 Sports complex, because it sits on the north side of Bell Road, and west of 94th Street.

Today on my walk I saw the parking lot full of cars, as happens on weekend during the season of soccer practices. As per my custom I walked around the entire set of fields, passing along Bell Road until I looped back around towards home.

The fields were full of activity.  About half of the six fields had games or practices in progress. When I got closer to them on the other side while coming back I saw almost all the players were girls. It didn't really register to me at first, because that seems normal---that these days girls are the ones doing organized sports. I've seen boys play there, and adult competitions (where people shout to each other in mostly Spanish). But boys---active hard-playing boys as was normal in my childhood---seem to be more rare in our society with each passing year. 

Seeing all these young folks, along with their families and coaches under small portable tents and in folding camp chairs milling about, I felt an urge to play in a youthful way. Today a walk would not be enough. I needed to initiate a new phase of my physical recovery. 

I saw that the two fields on the two end of the complex were completely unused, and being as shy as a leopard when it comes to hanging around other people, I entered the gap in the fence and made my way past the preoccupied families and teams until I found myself in the furthest field, with no one else nearby. I am inhibited and did not want observation. 

I walked over to one of the nets of an unused field and sat down on the grass. I took off my shoes down to the socks. I was partly in the shade of the net of the goal. It made a cross-check pattern on my clothes as I sat there. I lay back and looked up and deep blue uninterrupted sky. The short grass of the field felt heavenly on my bare arms and on my neck. 

But I was not there to relax. I was there to work out. I'd been studying videos of possible programs of exercise to address the weaknesses in my core and quads during the relative inactivity I suffered last year recovering from vertigo. I could still feel that weakness and I had realized that unless I started addressing it, the rest of my life would not be as pleasant as it could be. 

At that moment, I heard a banging noise behind me. The goal I was using as pseudo-shade (actually I was hiding from everyone else there) was back-to-back with another goal facing the other direction. While I had been lying there, a teenage girl had snuck up behind me and had begun using the other goal as practice to kick the ball into it. Everyone always wants to clump.

I took the opportunity to raise myself from the ground, which I could fluidly. I grabbed my shoes and walked directly away, towards to the remaining empty field in the corner of the complex. As I got the edge of the demarcated game area, it hit me that what I wanted to do was to run. I need to begin running.

Note that I don't mean what people call "running", like on streets and trails. I know many people from Colorado mostly who are runners, and have been so for years. I tried it, mostly out of peer pressure. It's not my thing, to be sure. I'm not sure that kind of running is healthy for your body. It takes its own toll.

For me, running has always meant sprinting. I loved "running fast" when I was boy. In fact I thought of myself as gifted in athletic sense. I was proud that I was always one of the fastest boys in class. I didn't need to be the fastest because I was fast in another way, in that I was super-quick at picking up anything in school. I could blow away any other kid that way, and it seemed like overkill to me, even as a child, that I should also be so excellent athletically too. 

Now at sixty the idea being that fast and agile was one I knew belonged to my boyhood. In fact I had tried to sprint one day while in a park in Staten Island, maybe it was 2002. I hadn't sprinted in years, and I discovered somewhat to my horror that I could not go 100 yards at full speed. I was 35, the age when Dante got lost in the woods. It had much the same effect on me as did his voyage to the Inferno---namely a consciousness of the passing nature of one's physical life on Earth. 

That experience, however, was now twenty years in the past.  I had discovered that the crucial muscles that launch one into a sprint are among the first to wither away. They are also the same ones to launch one into a jump.

So when I decided to sprint across the grass holding my shoes, I knew to be gentle in launching myself into the run. The grass field felt spongy as I walked on it. I was not afraid of tumbling over. I have a residual fear of that from when I was in high school and fell over doing sprints in gym class and broke my collarbone (while practicing breaking the tape).

So launch myself I did, and I let the wisdom of my body settle into a speed that would take me all the way to the other end of the field at an even pace. I was huffing and puffing at the end, but it felt exquisite. I decided at once that this would be part of my routine, along with the other calisthenics that I do on my walk. If I could do it on Saturday with the fields overrun by visitors, I could do it any day.

Whatever happened the rest of the day, this day would feel like a success in some way.  I put on my shoes and walked towards the opening in the fence where I could pass through the parking lot. There were a group of kids and adults sitting at the edge of the sidewalk, as if waiting for other folks to show up. I had to walk right past them to get to the parking lot.  I didn't care a whit if they'd been watching me.