Out and back

Having walked out to the Rockland Breakwater Lighthouse, Kris has been inspired to run out to the light house and back. When he first looked at it, he thought a minute to run to the end of it. Distances are deceiving when you're looking at a sidewalk of giant granite blocks. After we walked it and realized it's 7/8 of a mile, the time was jokingly estimated back up to 5 minutes.

Right.

7/8 of a mile on uneven ground in five minutes?

Not going to happen.

The run, though, could. Starting the day late (AGAIN, we cannot seem to get up earlier than 11 am), Kris laced up his shoes, with my following quickly behind, and off we went.

Unfortunately, my knee locked up about 200 meters out. Kris kept going around the drive and down the street, as I took the short cut we found the other day, and started doing walking lunges to unlock my knee.

Kris caught up to me, and kept going.

Since my knee has been locking up a lot lately, I've decided to start on the lots of squats, lots of lunges, lots of balancing program I've done a couples times. While Kris was out on the breakwall, I started my lunges. As I finished up my second set of 20 lunges per leg, my left hamstring completely cramped and I nearly went down in a wave of pain.

Annoyed, I skipped the third set of lunges and tried to find Kris on the wall, checking if he was still running out.

After ten minutes of amusing myself taking pictures of the rocks, chains, seaweed and wood around the breakwall, and being unable to spot Kris in the distance, my worrying took over, and I started out along the breakwall myself. I made it half way out before Kris caught up to me running back.

"You came out a long way," he commented as I turned to head back to shore.

Yeah, yeah, I guess I did. Whoops.

We split on the run back, with my going the shorter way, and his going the longer way. When he arrived back at the room a short while after me, he flopped down on a chair and asked, "What did you think of running on the wall?"

I answered, "I thought it was meditative, and good symbolism for life. You couldn't look up into the distance, you had to be looking where you were right now, or you'd lose your footing. The stones coming up and passing you were hypnotic. When you did look up, wow, you had accomplished a lot. I liked it."

He thought they were very much like agility ladders, with the shorter steps and the side to side movements required to find good footing.

A good experience for both of us, each in its own way.