After breaking my leg and ankle (again) a few years back, one of the rehabilitation regimens I started to try to build up strength in the leg was to walk up Mt. Tabor, the extinct volcano down the street from my house. It’s a little under two miles horizontally, and about a 450ft. change in elevation, with most of that coming in the last half-mile or so. Not particularly challenging, but if you tackle it more or less straight on there are a couple of tough bits for the overweight guy with a limp.
Last summer’s construction project and inevitable associated accident put a crimp in my walks, but I finally restarted them this month. The first one took a lot longer than I remember, but today’s walk went pretty well.
In fact, I thought I was doing quite well when — on the downhill return trip — I was slowly overtaking a healthy-looking 13-year-old boy on the other side of Belmont, despite having dropped a table saw on my knee last fall (which doesn’t make downhill much fun). Was pretty pleased with myself until I pulled even with him and saw that he was sucking the helium out of some Mylar balloons he was holding and talking on a cell phone. Maybe he wasn’t walking as fast as I thought he was.