I set out for my weekend run in the park this afternoon, and it quickly became clear that I wasn't going to be able to put in the distance I was scheduled to go, nor stay at the pace I was supposed to run it. For one thing, I slept in, read for a while, and played around with my computer and therefore didn't get out of the house until 12:45. The last few days have been relatively cool, and I assumed this one would follow suit. I was wrong. A little over halfway through my run I was sticky, light-headed, and miserable and decided to call it a day early.
Even if it had been a 65-degree day, however, I don't think I'd have wanted to go barreling through the park - there was way too much to see. I stopped for a few minutes to listen to a guy with a guitar perform for a small crowd, and passed by two drumming circles several minutes later. I watched three men practicing capoeira, a strange combination of martial arts and dance, under a tree. Then I ran by an impossibly long line of people hoping to land tickets to tonight's Shakespeare in the Park performance, which are free if you are willing to get there early enough and wait long enough. I listened to a violin and harp duet near the south end of the park, which was really lovely, and then stopped by the Boathouse to watch some actors in costume all holding open copies of a book called Nude Walker as though they were reading them. Every four or five minutes, they'd unfreeze and perform a brief scene, and an older woman in a Nude Walker t-shirt handed me her card and told me that they were playing the parts of characters in her new novel, which I should check out online. Closer to home, I watched a couple playing a very animated game of Uno, admired sidewalk chalk drawings done by a 2- and 4-year-old boy, and peered over the shoulder of an older man by the pond who was sketching.
There's far too much to see in Central Park on a weekend for me to stick to my training schedule. Perhaps I should use a treadmill instead.
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