Current mood:

pleased

Last week's progress
Miles biked: 46
Lengths swam: 26
My targets for the week: 45 miles and 26 lengths

In case you're wondering, it's not a coincidence that I only just surpassed the cycling target. This was the first week in which I did an extra circuit (just adding a loop in South Park to a grocery run) in order to meet the target. In other words: this system is working for me.

Targets for this week: 50 miles and 27 lengths.


On Saturday I went on a fairly long ride, out to the towpath, then up to Garfield Heights (I think that road from the river up to Garfield Heights is the longest climb I've found in the area, and I made it without stopping, but my speed did get as low as 3 mph so I need to improve on that), and then home via an absurd detour because I kept getting lost.

I've discovered that I'm deeply uncomfortable on the residential streets of the ghetto. I'm not pleased about this, and I'm trying to figure out to what it extent it's rational and to what extent it's pure prejudice. I mean, the district between where I live and the northern trailhead of the Towpath is definitely edgier, more run-down and objectively more dangerous than the 'yuppie funnel', but I felt safer as soon as I was into Slavic Village, and I don't believe that's really any safer.

The one rational part of my discomfort comes from the tendency of ghetto households to have big beefy dogs that they don't chain up. They turned out to all be perfectly well behaved, and mostly just ignore my passing, but I'm still easily scared by strange dogs (as in, dogs I haven't just been introduced to by their owner) and enough successive instances of will it run for me? Can I outsprint it? will start to build into a generalised nervousness.

The really creepy parts of town though are the dead industrial estates. Not the stuff by the river—that area is very much alive so even though it's empty on the weekend it's doesn't feel edgy—but the decripit parts where most windows are broken and the roads feel even more like they've been cluster-bombed than the rest of Cleveland. There's one between Harvard, Union E.93 and E.78 (just looks like a mess of train tracks on the map), and one stretching SE from the bottom of the Garfield Park Reservation (just looks like a VOID on the map). If anyone wants to come with me for moral support (and perhaps with a car) I would like to go back to these places and take depressing photos (à la Worksongs), but I am not going back there alone if I can possibly help it.