Running Old Town

I woke up this morning feeling like I deserved the previous 9 hours of sleep. Or, well at least 7 of it, but that’s still way above average. After a mostly successful home-made dinner last night, I went for a run, purely for fun. Instead of running the usual course down King Street to the waterfront, I decided to be a bit more impulsive. Thus I ran a zig-zag course over to Duke Street, through some archway that lead to a rather boring through-street, past the train station (Alexandria’s Union Station, to be precise) and up the 138 steps to the GW Masonic Memorial. For those of you who haven’t run up 138 steps lately, that’s a lot of steps. For those of you who have, just let me have my moment. Well, the view from up there is great. It was well into the night, so I could make out all the major features of the outlying area based on the pattern of lights. To the left I could clearly see the Capital Dome and the Washington Monument through the branches of a rather tall tree. Some 8 months now, I’ve lived within view of that memorial and that was the first time I’ve actually been there. Anyhow, I did my site-seeing last weekend, so it was back down 138 steps, this time through Union Station, and into Old Town.
Running down King Street at night when I can just dodge traffic is much better than running it during the day when I have to stop and wait for the light at every corner. I still really like running that street because there are always so many people walking it and there’s so much to look at. In fairness, though, the fumes from the many busses and the scents from a plethora of restaurants, cafes and bars can make it difficult to fill my lungs at regular intervals. Eventually I made it to the Starbucks at the end of the street with the Potomac River right in front of me. You know in Forest Gump when Forest has been running for a couple years and he just decides to stop, then everybody following him is all “Well, what do we do now?” I had very much that feeling. I figured the only logical thing to do was to turn my polyester and spandex clad figure around and run back home, after another jaunt up those 138 steps of course. I’m afraid this is a long and boring story now.
Well, I also finished a book yesterday, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A rather amusing attempt at literature, I’d say. I was almost but not quite entirely unsurprised to find that there were a lot of unnecessary words at the end of the book which I didn’t bother reading. The end result being that I can now pass the book onto Heather as I get on to San Diego for a week or so.
I’m going to go get a haircut now.