Airborne!

It's all about OPTIONS, CHOICES, and CONSEQUENCES...

As I mentioned about a week ago, I work out every morning, and every third day my work out is that I go jogging. Since I take Saturdays off from working out, that basically means that--unless my routine changes for some reason--I pretty much end up going jogging on the same two days of the week. Lately those 2 days have been Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings.

I have the OPTION of jogging on some other day, maybe Monday and Thursday mornings, but no, I CHOOSE Tuesday and Friday mornings. As such, I have to suffer the CONSEQUENCES.

And the main consequence--at least the main negative consequence--is that Tuesdays and Fridays are the days in which the southwestern streets of my town have their garbage picked up. There are no street lights on Pleasant Ridge, a street about a mile in length that I jog down. And since Tuesdays and Fridays are the days I choose to go jogging, I find myself not only jogging, but dodging in the dark piles of garbage as well.

Many people do the polite thing in regards to garbage, which is to place their garbage cans and garbage bags in the grassy area between the street and the sidewalk, but a large number of people put their cans right in the middle of the sidewalk. And on a darkened street, this turns my exercise time from a pleasant jog into an American Gladiator-like obstacle course.

I counted this morning as I was jogging and I get about a second and a half of time from the moment I see the garbage can in the pitch black and the moment in which I physically encounter the garbage. A second and a half to weigh my OPTIONS, consider the CONSEQUENCES, and make a CHOICE about what to do.

So what? you might think to yourself. How many possible options could there be? Ahh, but that's where you're wrong. There are a multitude of OPTIONS. I could stay on the sidewalk and try to get around the trash. I could step out into the person's yard to get around the offending refuse. I could jump into the street and go around that way.

All have their risks. Jumping into the street could get me hit by a car if it's coming down the road with its headlights off. I could slip on wet grass if I step in someone's yard, and truth be told, I just don't like the idea of stepping in someone's grass. I feel like I'm invading their property (funny how I have no qualms about running across their sidewalk, though). Trying to go around the garbage and stay on the sidewalk is usually the safest bet, but I run the risk there of being so preoccupied with the garbage can that I forget that there is a low hanging branch from the tree on the other side of the sidewalk and end up whacking myself good in the head (or, as was the case this morning, I might be so preoccupied with going around garbage cans that I forget to look out for raccoons and end up almost stepping on one. But believe it or not, that's not the focus of my story today!). And when deciding which OPTION to CHOOSE, I need to be cognizant that if at all possible I don't want to break my running rhythm, because if I do it's hard to get back "into the zone."

And this brings us to this past Friday. I'm jogging along at a good clip, listening to music and just enjoying myself, when I realize that right in front of me someone has put out--not shiny, easy to see cans of garbage, like civilized people do--but a number of off-white kitchen-sized bags of garbage stacked on top of each other. Because the bags were off-white and the sidewalk was off-white, I didn't see these bags until I was right on top of them. And because the bags weren't lined up neatly on one side of the sidewalk but instead extended across the entire sidewalk and even into the grass on both sides, I couldn't get around them and stay on the sidewalk. And because the impediment was so wide I couldn't jump into the grass or the street to avoid them without seriously slowing down (Now bear in mind that my brain is processing all of this in about a second and a half). So instead of doing any of those OPTIONS, I CHOSE what was behind Door Number Four: I leaped over the bags like a 110 meter hurdler...

So.

So the problem with leaping into the air like that is that it seriously curtails all of your future OPTIONS. So when my head passed over the bags of garbage and I could see that there was additional trash on the other side of the bags, my OPTIONS were very few. I could either go crashing into the cardboard boxes (which might have been empty or might have had discarded bricks in them for all I knew) or I could try some gymnastic move in middair, hoping to avoid a painful collision. Again, I had just a split second to decide, but I threw my arms to the right and my legs to the left and--somehow--came down in the grassy area between the sidewalk and street. This was great except the grass was a bit dew-covered and my left leg came out from under me and slid out into the street. I sort of did the splits. Lucky for me I didn't strain anything. I picked myself up and continued my jog, and had no further incidents, neither Friday nor today (unless you count the raccoon today, but again, that's a story for another day).

So, why am I CHOOSING to go jogging on Tuesdays and Fridays. Because--despite what I've written here--I LIKE jogging in the dark. I work on Tuesdays and Fridays, and so I go out jogging at 5:00 AM. I like that at 5 A.M. I rarely meet anyone on the sidewalks, and I like that there's not a lot of traffic to have to deal with. I sort of feel like these are my own personal sidewalks and that I own the whole town.

If I CHOSE to go jogging some other three day interval one of those days would be a day that I don't work in the summer, and I'd invariably sleep in and have to go jogging later in the day, when there was more traffic, and when I'd pass people jogging and either a) have to say hello to them, which always seems weird to me when I pass them out of breath and in a run or b) suffer the pain of rejection when the people coming the opposite way DON'T say hello to me.

Sad as it is, I CHOOSE possible serious injury over having to actually interact with people.