Normally when I take a vacation, I take a vacation from exercising too. I know I’m not supposed to, but eh, I’m on vacation and I’ll do what I want. However, I’m gasping through running the IrishFest 5K on Saturday morning, so taking a week off before the race would be a very bad idea unless I owned an Irish wolfhound to carry me across the finish line. (I don’t.)

I’m visiting my brother and his wife, and their house is near a trail that was built on an old railroad line, much like the Happy Fun & Fitness Trail near my old apartment is. This trail is amazingly similar to my Happy Fun & Fitness Trail, except for the little things that make it seem like a cloning project that went slightly awry. This trail has more curves and moves up and down on the z-axis creating something I’ve heard are called “slopes.” Us Indiana folk are not familiar with these “hill” things. Thus the huffing and puffing increased cardio workout. I nearly stumbled over a turtle on the side of this trail, which I’ve never seen on the trail in Indiana. Also, the people here seem to be friendlier than Hoosiers. I got Hello-ed at least three times during my 25-minutes on the path by a mom with a stroller, a white-haired walking man, and a twenty-something with a UNC t-shirt. Must be that Southern hospitality.

I like the fitness room in my apartment complex a lot. It’s much nicer than the fitness room at my old apartment, which was located in a carpeted room that looked like it used to be part of the lobby. The new fitness room has mirrors on the walls, more machines, and overhead fans. But whenever I run on the treadmill there I get really hot and sweaty. It’s so much nicer to run outside in cool weather because the sweat on my skin evaporates in the breeze instead of soaking into my shirt like at the gym.

I only wish there was someplace nice to run outside around here. I miss the trail! There is a little path near my apartment that is only 4/10 of a mile long which is sufficient for running outside, if also insanely boring. I have to run back and forth on the same stretch of pavement several times. Sometime people are fishing in a pond right next to the trail, so I feel rather silly running back and forth past them. I’m tempted to wave and yell, “Yep, it’s me again! I’ll see you again in about 6 minutes!”

I’ll try just to be happy that I am still running. I have a 5K in less than two weeks that snuck up on me. I’ll keep running indoors or outdoors and hopefully I’ll be ready in time!

Dear City of Indianapolis,

Please stop throwing a parade every time I go downtown on the weekend. I’m flattered that you think I’m so awesome that there needs to be a parade every time I grace your metropolis with my presence on the weekends. But next time, I swear I will plow through your bright orange blockades to get into the parking garage.

Thank you,

Jennette Fulda

In June I tried rendezvousing with my mother to visit the tea room when I was detoured by the gay pride parade. Last Saturday, I drove downtown to take part in the Cultural Trail bicycle tour and couldn’t get past the roadblocks for the Circle City Classic parade. How many parades does this city have in a year? And is there a parade warning list I can be put on to warn me the next time a marching band stands between me and the parking garage?

Despite the barriers, I was able to drive downtown, pull my bike out of the trunk and figure out how to properly reattach the front wheel in time to make it to the bike tour and without suffering massive braking failure. The Indianapolis Cultural Trail is a project I discovered because of my recent Starbucks addiction. Whenever my coworkers and I escape from our cages to pay too much for coffee, we walk past signs saying “Cultural Trail.” One day, there were even men jackhammering designs into the road which were later painted bright colors to denote the trail. All of this made me wonder, “What the hell is the Cultural Trail?”

I visited their website and discovered the trail is “a world-class urban bike and pedestrian path that connects neighborhoods, Cultural Districts and entertainment amenities, and serves as the downtown hub for the entire central Indiana greenway system.” I also signed up for their newsletter and learned that they offered bike tours at the beginning of each month from April through October. I was curious, and I was looking for new and interesting ways to stay active, so I signed up.

A group of about 15 people met in the parking lot of the Central Indiana Community Foundation and I could tell I was in the right place because Gail, the organizer, had a big map of the trail. (She also had a mandatory waiver I had to sign in case I hadn’t reattached my front wheel as well as I thought I had.)

Her husband, Brian, president of the Central Indiana Community Foundation and founder of the Cultural Trail, showed up soon afterwards to lead the tour. Since only about 5 blocks of the trail have been built, most of the tour involved biking around downtown and visualizing how pretty the trail will be when it’s all done. It was like a realtor showing you a house and telling you to envision yourself living there, even though it’s all drywall and carpeting for now.

I had a lot of fun on the tour, whizzing through parts of downtown I would never bike down alone for fear of traffic. It also made me excited for the day when the trail is done. Here are some highlights in bullet points so I don’t have to think up paragraph transitions:

• Part of the Cultural Trail will weave into a corridor behind some restaurants with patios and a brick road, giving it a European feel. A garden will be planted with herbs local chefs use in their recipes.
• Although there have been some attacks on the Monon Trail recently, in comparison to the thousands of “touches” the trail gets every year, the crime rate is amazingly low. I might try pitching this to my mother so she’ll feel better if I bike to work. Or I might look up Brian’s phone number and tell her to call him directly :)
• Part of the Cultural Trail will follow a street that goes under a parking garage that was dark enough that I could barely see with my sunglasses on. However, I didn’t feel good enough about my bike skills to ride one-handed to take them off. An artist is developing lights with sensors that will detect your presence and turn on and off as you pass through. This sounds totally awesome and I would ride the trail just for this feature.
• One of the biggest advocates for the trail is the CEO of Eli Lilly, which is handy since drug companies have lots of money. The trail will pass by their campus and help connect the company with the rest of downtown.
• The trail will benefit some neighborhoods more than others. The Fountain Square area for instance, has some great restaurants and clubs, but is a little east of downtown and not exactly pretty.

  

  Whereas the White River Canal area is already idyllic and beautiful and was the most relaxing part of the tour.

  

Near the end of the tour we had to ride back to the parking lot, but our route was directly blocked by a marching band. We biked through a park trying to cross over, but then had to backtrack. I don’t know what the mostly black attendees of the Circle City Classic thought of the 15 white people on bikes who rode through their festival and almost became part of the parade. I only hope we drove fast enough that they didn’t get a good look at my face.

When we got back to the parking lot, I won a t-shirt because I have a birthday this month. Woo-hoo! Go October! I was much happier with this than the other prize, a bag of Cultural Trail mix, which looked delicious, but I would probably have scarfed down all at once and felt guilty about later. They sell the mix at The Best Chocolate in Town on Massachusetts Avenue and $1.00 of every bag is donated to the Cultural Trail fund.

The trail is privately funded, but right now they are concentrating on finding $1-million-dollar level donors. If I had that much money lying around, I’d be happy to donate because I love this city’s trail systems and I’d love to be able to bike around downtown more easily. I’ll have to wait until they start taking donations like the $20 in my billfold to help finance the project. I’ve noticed that projects like these don’t just happen, they have advocates, usually only one or a couple people who are really focused on getting the project completed. I don’t have the energy to deal with all the bureaucracy that a project like this would stir up, so I’ll just give money instead when the time comes :)

Then my brain kicked in and I realized I’d just run past a water fountain, which the woman probably stopped to drink at after she passed me, considering that is was 86 degrees with 53% humidity after all. Heatstroke averted, brain A-OK, if operating at slower levels.

It did make me momentarily wonder if an earlier moment during my run had also been a delusion. I wasn’t a quarter of a mile down the trail when a shirtless, barefoot man wearing nothing but ripped jeans and naked sex appeal walked straight across my path. He had shoulder-length, brown hair and 6-pack abs. I had to look around for video cameras to make sure I hadn’t run into a Calvin Klein commercial. If I owned a video phone, I could have shot their next ad right there. Then he walked off towards the street, probably to his car. It was like a Bigfoot sighting. One moment he was there and then he was gone and I wondered if I’d really seen him at all.

But it’s moments like those that make me glad I exercise.

The other minute of this time was spent thinking, “Holy crap, I just swallowed a bug.”

As I began singing that old kid’s song about a lady who swallowed a fly, I wondered if this meant I would now have to eat a spider to catch the fly, and then a bird to catch the spider, and then a cat and a dog and a goat. I don’t even know where to find a goat in Indiana. And dear Lord, how badly would all this eating wreck my diet?

Luckily, I hadn’t actually swallowed the bug, just caught it in my teeth as I was plodding down the trail panting with my mouth open, so I spit it out into my hand. It was green. I sighed (panted?) in relief as I realized it wasn’t a bug, just a teeny, tiny leaf like one of several scattered on the trail. No bug-eating for me. I’ll get my protein elsewhere.

While I haven’t had time to shop for all the cold-weather running goodies you guys recommended, I decided that 43 degrees was warm enough for me to attempt my first outdoor run of the winter. I put on my yoga pants, a long-sleeved t-shirt, and a light-weight jacket and headed for the trail. Then I turned around and headed back to my apartment.

No, I didn’t quit before I started. I had to grab a knit cap because my ears were already cold. Then I went for a run and it rocked! I ran 3 miles at a 10:09 pace, much faster than my Irish Festival 5K pace of 10:31 back in September. So even though I’m about the same weight as I was then, and perhaps a pound or two heavier, I can outrun potential thieves and villains much faster now. Cool! My fingers were cool too, freezing for a mile and a half before they warmed up, so gloves are a must next time. After two miles I unzipped my jacket and during the last half mile I took off my cap. This cold-weather running thing might work out after all, though ask me again when the temperature has a minus sign in front of it. I had such a great high after the run. Exercise makes me feel so alive and happy. Part of the reason I think I’ve been down lately is because I haven’t been exercising as much. Gotta’ change that.

When I was running across a bridge on the trail, I saw a man on the observation deck watching the flecks of ice in the river and my first thought was, “I hope he doesn’t push me over the railing as I run by because I’ll freeze in that water!” It’s got to be one of the most bizarre thoughts I’ve ever had when running. Why would anyone want to push me off of a bridge? And why was I so concerned about the cold water when the fall itself would probably break my neck? The cold must make me kooky.

Which is why it is so odd that I was ecstatic that it was warm enough this weekend to go running on the trail. Maybe it’s because no one throws balls at me out there – at least not yet – though I did need to watch out for dog poop. Is there a plastic bag shortage I should know about? Because it wasn’t so poopy out there last year. I know the physical changes in myself over the past two years are obvious, but it’s attitude changes like this that I find the most fascinating. I’m now the kind of person who likes to run outside and who cooks her dinner most every night. I’ve heard that over the course of every seven years, every cell in your body replaces itself at least once. I don’t know if this is actually true or one of those urban myths, but sometimes I wonder if my data got slightly corrupted and now I’m a copy of someone I never was.

Either way, running in the fresh air was fun and uplifting in ways I can’t really describe. I’m able to run much farther now than I could back in the fall. Whenever I saw another runner passing by, I felt like we were in a secret club of people who know how great running feels. If you’re not in the club, you just can’t understand. I know, because I definitely did not used to have a membership card. The idea of exercise for fun seemed illogical. In the Venn diagram of my old life, you’d have to place me outside the circle of “People who enjoy running,” but now you can put my name right in the middle.

Last night I discovered I can now squeeze into those size 14 jeans I bought on the last day of 2006. I know most women try to convince themselves they are a size smaller than they actually are, but I must have some brain synapses crossed because I typically try to convince myself I’m a size larger than I am. I actually missed the time I was a size 24 and went right from a baggy pair of size 26′s to a pair of 22′s. I get so used to the looser feel of my jeans as I shrink that I don’t believe the next size down should feel as tight as they do when I first put them on. I also like to keep muffin top a product of my stove and not my waistband. I find it amazing that I only have to lose about 10 pounds now to get down to the next size.

Yesterday I realized I have four big milestones crammed into these final 26 pounds. First, when I finally fit into a pair of size 12 jeans and thus no longer have to shop in the plus-sized section. Second, when I weigh 172 and have lost 200 pounds. Third, when I weigh 169 and am officially no longer overweight according to my BMI. And finally, when I hit my goal weight of 160.

Besides those goals, I’m also looking forward to Daylight Saving Time this weekend because it will finally be light enough in the evenings for me to run on the trail again, assuming it gets warm enough. The treadmill is fine, especially for getting in my TV shows, but I’m sure my downstairs neighbor will appreciate it when I stop pounding on his ceiling. Hopefully I can finish watching Justice League: Unlimited before that happens though. Will Lex Luthor become president? I have to know!

That’s still up one pound from two weeks ago, so my weight chart is getting as jagged as a hacksaw blade. Maybe I can manipulate my weight loss so I draw a picture on my chart. If I gain weight next week and then lose it and then gain it again, I’ll have a pair of vampire fangs!

I think the weight lifting is going well because it is causing me pain. Last night when my cat started kneading my chest right above my boobs, I yelped as if he’d pawed my nipple. I evidently have muscles there. And they hurt. I was going to go look for a bench at Goodwill or Play It Again Sports, but it is snowing again, so I’m going to stay home. I’m so ready for winter to be over, even if it means I have to buy a whole new wardrobe again.