02.15.23
As the great writer and Real Housewife of New York City Carole Radziwill once said in conversation with notorious leg-thrower Aviva Drescher, regarding picking up smoking due to stress, “It’s like global warming, you know? In the long term, it’s terrible, but in the short term, everyone likes those sixty-degree days in February.” Carole, as ever, knows what she’s talking about.
I try to make the time to go outside each day, but especially when the weather is this nice. Between meetings, I stepped out in the afternoon, bought an ill-advised seven dollar latte, and walked over to Inwood Hill Park nearby. I’ve only started walking here recently — it takes me a long time to go to new places where I live (Anxiety, thy name is Emma — so I learned from the newfound “diagnoses” column on my therapy receipts). Something about exploring my own neighborhood is very nerve-racking to me, I think because it’s the last place I want to feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t want to seem confused on how to order at a counter-service restaurant, I don’t want to wander aimlessly around the grocery store looking for peanut butter, I don’t want to unknowingly walk toward a dead end in an unfamiliar park. I have no issue doing these things in neighborhoods I don’t live in, because I am insane.
But today I walked around Inwood Hill Park, where I’ve been walking lately. I don’t think I will ever move out of my neighborhood for as long as I live in New York, because you cannot beat the green space up here. Enormous, well-manicured parks without the Central or Prospect Park crowds. Having grown up in a relatively rural area, being near actual nature is important to me, even in the city. How many places in Manhattan can you use the phrase, “I got lost in the woods today”? The answer is one, and it’s only a few blocks from my apartment. My favorite places in New York are the ones that make you question whether or not you even really are in the city. The parks where I live have sweeping views of the Hudson and cliffs, big trees and hills. I always used to laugh passing the maps in Inwood Hill, where most of the trails are labeled as “hikes,” until the first time I actually walked in the trails here, and found my legs exhausted and my ass very sore the following day. I wonder if there’s some kind of rule that says if the gradient is over a certain number for a certain percentage of the paths, it has to be labeled a hike, as opposed to, I don’t know — a jaunt?
While I still and will probably always consider myself a runner, I much prefer a walk. My relationship with running is a little contentious, but a walk I always find pleasurable. I like the limited amount of pressure, I like the leisure of it, I like that I don’t have to be wearing certain clothes for it. I have been known to walk great distances just because I didn’t have anything else to do that day. Once I went to a screening of The Muppet Movie at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria (of course) and then walked home to my old apartment on 159th Street in Manhattan. It was about 7 miles. In Keds. Just because.
I really need new running sneakers. I was told by a Cross Country coach in high school that if the tread on the outside of your shoes is worn away (as they are on the ones I am currently wearing), the inside was probably cooked a while ago, and you really need new shoes. It doesn’t feel like it should be time for new ones, because I don’t feel like I’ve run very much in these, but I have walked an awful lot in them. Running shoes are so expensive, though. Everything is so expensive.
I have a 3:30pm meeting to make it back for, so I relish in my last few minutes of sunshine, finish out the latest episode of Doughboys, which has recently been a more consistent player in my weekly podcast rotation, and go home. Meetings, emails, pretending to laugh on Zoom, to-do lists, trying to remember things I’ve surely forgotten here or there. Maybe I’ll go for another walk before the sun goes down. Shorter one, closer by. I need to take advantage of my 60-degree February day, or else none of this climate change stuff will have been worth it.
