Walking in the park, and other exercise

cattitude and I spent a chunk of yesterday afternoon in Inwood Hill Park. The emphasis this time was on the "hill" part of that. In the last few months we'd mostly stuck to the river shore and the low ground near it, but I wanted to look at fall colors and decided my knees could stand it.

We didn't get a lot of fall colors: having had a very early spring, we're getting a late fall. Some of the leaves had turned yellow, red, or yellow, but most of them were still green. We're also getting flowers later than usual: not just dandelions and clover and lots of purple composites (asters?), but goldenrod, which I was sort of expecting because I've been seeing it next to the marsh, but jewelweed. On October 21st. Just a few plants, but still bright orange, not dried-out bits just clinging to the stem. (In a normal sunmer, the last of the jewelweed might be blooming on September 21st.

We spent a lot of time going up and downhill, including three flights of stairs, which caused a few twinges, but no worse. Lately I've been climbing some subway stairs on purpose, not just the ones I can't avoid (because those stations don't have elevators or escalators). This is less to test how my knees are than to rebuild muscle: stairs are good exercise for the thigh muscles, and some focused exercise at the gym twice a week doesn't really substitute for 8-10 flights of stairs every workday.

Since I'm still feeling my way here, and I know that if I overdo it I can lose ground in terms of knee pain, I'm mostly doing the stair-climbing late in the day, on my way home, and using elevators and escalators early in the day. That gives me more flexibility if it turns out something I'm doing involves stairs I hadn't known about, or if an elevator I would be using is broken. But I am seeing improvement, and glad of it.

( Since I'm posting about exercise anyway, this morning's gym details )