"Running" in Delhi

“Running” in Delhi

6 am and I found a park just down the road from this guest house.  It was mobbed with people, walking, jogging, meditating, chanting.  I was the only person in lycra shorts and bright blue shoes, but I kept on going, trying to smile although my mouth was so dry that my lips just stuck to my teeth.  I passed one man, sitting, thumb and middle fingers together in meditation pose, and oops,  caught you peeking!

Once I had run the north, east, west and south paths of the park, I headed out on the road in an uneventful  run along the sidewalks until an earnest youngish man dressed in pristine white down to his wife-beater under shirt beneath his neatly pressed, white shirt.  He looked at me wide-eyed and said, “Excuse me.”  I always hate it when people presume to interrupt my runs to ask directions or something, but this man looked innocuous enough so that I stopped.  In his clipped British English he said, “What tis the different, ma’am, between plain walking that I am doing and the fast walking that you are doing?”

So, this is what it’s come to.  Fast walking is it?  I couldn’t possibly parade off, leaving the guy in the dust of my smoking 10 minute miles, but I wanted to say something like, “The difference, buddy, is that when I walk fast, I jiggle more like an old lady,” or, “The difference is that you will get a little sweat on your shirt.”  I mumbled something about heart rates and then stumbled back into my regular “fast walking.”  The guy is a bastard, plain and simple, and he just doesn’t KNOW about my racing record of first prizes in the Turkey Trot for three years running!  Imagine how mortified he’d have been if he knew!