A few days ago I told you I was switching my exercise to a mix-match of walking and biking. This allows me to ride to an interesting place, lock up the bike, and finish my exercise with a walk. I am convinced that the walking is a better exercise, but I like to walk in pretty areas, thus the need of my bike to get to the “jump off” place. (I don’t own a car.)
This required that I get some measure of how to “weigh” biking and walking in relation to each other. That was easy for me to do just from long experience. I know how much walking takes out of me, and such, and had years ago worked out a measure:
4 minutes of walking = 1 mile of biking. But this is a problematic measure. I measure the walking in TIME and the biking in DISTANCE. The problem is that when I am walking in lovely areas, and see interesting things – were I walking in the park and saw a box turtle or turkey crossing the path, I’d want to immediately stop and watch, but I would never remember to check my watch, and even if I had a stop watch, I’d never remember to click it off.
So, I needed a measure of DISTANCE in walking to measure against a mile (distance) of riding. I got on e-bay and won a very lovely pedometer. Now I am setting it up and despite their seemingly easy directions, it will take a bit of trial and error to get it set right.
All that is a long introduction to tell you why I am mainly walking the last few days; I’m testing out the pedometer. I knew my bike distances so well. I wasn’t 100% sure my bike odometer was fully accurate. So, on Sunday a friend took me round in her car to a few places where I know the bike distances exactly. Happily my bike odometer readings were PRECISELY what the car readings were. I can trust the bike’s odometer.
The last two days I’ve walked from home (Tamm at Wade), up to Clayton Ave, then up Clayton to Hi-Pointe, then down Skinker to the drinking fountain at Forsythe. I know for sure that is 1.8 miles. Yesterday it took 68 minutes to walk it, round trip. But the instructions with the pedometer say that sometimes if one walks in sandals the reading is different. Today I did the exact same walk in my sandals since I MAINLY walk in my Birkenstock sandals and have done so for the past 25 years! Happily the distances measures and the time of the walk were the same.
Now I have almost all the data to adjust the pedometer’s “step” measure to get that 1 mile on the pedometer = 4 miles on the bike.
In walking today I discovered something that delighted me to no end. Some people in Dogtown keep CHICKENS. I was walking along at 6 AM and heard this rooster. I didn’t register it at first, but walking is much slower than biking, and soon, getting closer, I hear the rooster again, and it hit me: that’s a ROOSTER!!!! And this is the heart of Dogtown. I followed the sound which was right on my path, and there it was. And other chickens. I was just delighted.
Even in the 1950s people had animals in Dogtown. Graham Street behind the school yard was rife with critters. Horses, cows and chickens for sure, and bunches. My great uncle Jerry Corbett lived down on Dale in 1916 and I have a photo of his apartment (the building still stands on Dale near Manchester) and they had about a dozen pigs.
When I was growing up on Childress, from the alley (north) to West Park (south) on the east side was a very large lot. There are now about 8-9 small brick homes there. In the war years people let their cows graze there. Tied up.
Vito Barone who is a couple years younger than I was telling my brother John and I about his horse he had for many years. Vito was saving up in the LATE 1950s to bring a bride here from Sicily on an arranged marriage. He just about had the money saved when he changed his mind and purchased a horse with this money. Vito had life-long problems with the horse – it would constantly throw him – and he had the horse for years (into the 1970s) there on Graham. Vito is absolutely convinced the (unknown) woman in Sicily who was to be his bride had cursed the horse and that’s why he couldn’t ride it.
But in recent years all THAT sort of animal – chickens, pigs, goats, horses and cows – have disappeared from Dogtown, and rabbits too, not the occasional pet, but people keeping rabbits for food, which was common in the past.
There are lots of dogs and cats. I’m sure people have small birds, hamsters and such, and surely there’s a snake keeper or two in Dogtown now. The wild animals are quite limited to squirrels, rabbits, possum, raccoons, an occasional garden snake and the standard run of birds.
I am simply DELIGHTED to welcome the rooster and its hens to Dogtown. May he not end up in the soup pot.
The walk along the Skinker bike trail these past two days has been lovely. Walking is so much slower than biking that one notices details more, and the long stretch along the golf course is very lovely. The grasses gleam with dew in the rising sun, nearly blinding one as one looks east to the course. I tend not to look west much, though the rush-hour traffic on Skinker is rather noisy. I do prefer getting more “inside” Forest Park for the peace and quiet and relatively little traffic. But the golf course is just so lovely and the early morning hours, it’s been a delightful experience in the past two days.
I plan the same walk tomorrow, just a bit longer. I need to continue on 6 more minutes, which should take me about up to Deperes Ave on Lindell. That will make each leg of my walk exactly 40 minutes and give me the accurate reading of my 80 minutes since I don’t stop at all on these “test” walks. Once I have that data I can fiddle with the adjustment on my pedometer and then I’m set.
Lots of fun walking the streets of Dogtown and that stretch of the bike trail in the early morning hours.
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