The past two Thursdays I’ve started putting in my long runs. For me, that means at minimum a two-hour commitment of time. Usually, I run along the paths and roadways in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, but for these weekly training runs, I instead cross the Gowanus Canal and make my way through Carroll Gardens and Brooklyn Heights to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Summer mornings the Bridge boardwalk is chock-a-block with tourists. These Thursdays it’s French I hear as much as English. Cyclists, some meandering but most hell-bent on aerobic exercise, bell-tinkling only as necessary to avoid collision in the narrowing spaces. Water peddlers , camera-toting families, graybeards pointing out something or other to a nodding spouse. There are thousands on the Bridge at any one time.
Then off and down the other side, through City Hall Park and criss-cross the streets, near Ground Zero, shirt sleeves and ties, perky summer dresses, office wear. Next, out across the West Side Highway to my destination, Hudson River Park, an asphalt ribbon that takes me through parkland grasses, that remind of Fire Island dunes, and the end of the Christopher Street pier, with a clock tower on the Jersey shore, a man resting on the flank of his dog, both asleep on a park bench.
Once around the pier and I start to head back. I’ve a blister forming on the ball of my left foot. I adjust my gait, weight off the front foot, more central, think tai chi and the horse position, flatten my stride, heel strike, and the pain subsides a little. Stop for water. If only I had an exercise bar. Next time.
Enough left, though, for my return to Brooklyn. Like the previous Thursday, I weave through traffic to that address downtown, 45-51 Park Place. Where plans to build a mosque within a community center project have inflamed the land. I know the area well. Before 9/11 I worked three blocks away at the World Financial Center. On 9/11, I came out of the Park Place subway station to the sound of the second plane hitting the South Tower. Now, though, this strip of anonymous urban space is in every headline.
When I Google “Mosque at Ground Zero,” I get 120 million search results in 0.27 seconds. But these Thursdays I run by the mosque-to-be and there is nary a placard, not a single sign to suggest that this issue has Obama by the throat, as the right would have you believe, or, if the left guides your worldview, that the fervor of the protest is the most convincing symbol yet of our own emerging theocracy. But here it is as empty as a Vermont field. A story, like most in today's world, crafted from 30,000 feet in the air.
It is quiet, sunny but not humid for a Manhattan August. No tourists, or even commuters. Two blocks away are the throngs on the Brooklyn Bridge, toward which I run, picking up my pace, finally catching that second wind.
Next: Running for Your Life: Staying Motivated: Part Two
