The weather made a radical change yesterday, turning cold and rainy --- more like December than March. Today the sun was back, but it was still cold and windy. When I left the house to walk, it was 49 degrees with a wind chill factor of 41 degrees.
The first leg of my walk is 1.4 miles and I had the wind behind me, pushing me along, and was able to trot using roughly the same amount of energy as brisk walking. That was the good part.
When I made the loop to start the 1.6 mile return to home base, I was walking straight into the teeth of those 30 mph wind blasts. I'm not an engineer, but I figure I'm walking in one direction at 3.8 mph, and the wind is blowing in the opposite direction at 30 mph... well, you do the math.
The best analogy I can come up with is that my trip home today was like walking 1.6 miles in a shoulder-deep pool of tapioca pudding. By the time I walked into the house, I felt like I'd been dragging an anti-freeze can full of concrete, like the one my dad used as a boat anchor when I was a lad.
I don't know exactly how it works, but I believe whoever's in charge of life should award bonus points to older men who spend thirty minutes walking into the wind.
PS: When I was a little boy, I dropped that boat anchor on a toad to see what would happen. Maybe atonement requires walking long distances into bitterly cold winds... you think ?
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