Spring Fever
Balmy temps made running fun this weekend.
Played hooky on Friday - from work as well as from running.
Took an easy run on Saturday. Ran out to Mount Moriah Cemetery and did some urban archaeology. Fancy (and trendy) term for mucking around amid the old headstones. Took some pictures with my phone and looked at what I could find online when I got home. Took names off of the giant phallically shaped monuments, which were, when I could find info, mostly business types who must have lived in fear of being forgotten. Ironically, where they are buried is now bedecked in weeds and surrounded by trash, tires and the like. In other words, forgotten. There are also quite a few civil war vets, some who died in the war, others who lived on but whose lives, insofar as there is any documentation online, only focuses on the war.
Mount Moriah, which was one of the "pastoral cemetaries" laid out in the mid nineteenth century that sought to provide large space to bury Philadelphia's dead and also let the City reinter the dead buried in many churchyards and small cemeteries throughout the city, freeing up that land for development. 80,000 people are buried there. I guess people thought they were getting a nice peaceful plot in the country; little did they know what the place would look like 150 years later.
After poking around there I headed to Bartrams Gardens and explored down by the river a bit. I went down an improbably named Botanical Avenue which led me through some industrial areas and onto some dirt paths that took me over railroad tracks and after some bushwhacking I popped up on Grey's Ferry and 47th Streets. From there it was home again, in about 55 minutes of running time, about an hour and a half and 6 miles total. Route is here.
This morning I met John Dubs at the Art Museum and we ran up to Manayunk, over the Belmont hills and through Fairmount Park. We pretty much did non-stop chattering, not much that was too deep, for two hours and the time went by pleasantly enough for the most part. You know the conversation is getting trivial when I start talking about how I like my coffee, but when you are on a long run you have a captive audience and can talk about such topics. This was a tapered long run - marathon is in two weeks - though my training this time around really doesn't seem worthy of a taper. Or maybe I just started my taper six weeks early. I don't have the route gmapped but John assures me that it came out to 15.7 miles. In about 2:05.
Played hooky on Friday - from work as well as from running.
Took an easy run on Saturday. Ran out to Mount Moriah Cemetery and did some urban archaeology. Fancy (and trendy) term for mucking around amid the old headstones. Took some pictures with my phone and looked at what I could find online when I got home. Took names off of the giant phallically shaped monuments, which were, when I could find info, mostly business types who must have lived in fear of being forgotten. Ironically, where they are buried is now bedecked in weeds and surrounded by trash, tires and the like. In other words, forgotten. There are also quite a few civil war vets, some who died in the war, others who lived on but whose lives, insofar as there is any documentation online, only focuses on the war.
Mount Moriah, which was one of the "pastoral cemetaries" laid out in the mid nineteenth century that sought to provide large space to bury Philadelphia's dead and also let the City reinter the dead buried in many churchyards and small cemeteries throughout the city, freeing up that land for development. 80,000 people are buried there. I guess people thought they were getting a nice peaceful plot in the country; little did they know what the place would look like 150 years later.
After poking around there I headed to Bartrams Gardens and explored down by the river a bit. I went down an improbably named Botanical Avenue which led me through some industrial areas and onto some dirt paths that took me over railroad tracks and after some bushwhacking I popped up on Grey's Ferry and 47th Streets. From there it was home again, in about 55 minutes of running time, about an hour and a half and 6 miles total. Route is here.
This morning I met John Dubs at the Art Museum and we ran up to Manayunk, over the Belmont hills and through Fairmount Park. We pretty much did non-stop chattering, not much that was too deep, for two hours and the time went by pleasantly enough for the most part. You know the conversation is getting trivial when I start talking about how I like my coffee, but when you are on a long run you have a captive audience and can talk about such topics. This was a tapered long run - marathon is in two weeks - though my training this time around really doesn't seem worthy of a taper. Or maybe I just started my taper six weeks early. I don't have the route gmapped but John assures me that it came out to 15.7 miles. In about 2:05.
posted by seebo | 10:03 PM
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