Fight or flight?

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I’ve been working up my walking fitness for the past couple of days after about a month of being a pure and total laggard. Ideally I am supposed to do a run/walk first thing in the morning, but that AM cold is so bad I end up pushing it to early evening. Today I figured 3pm was as good a time as any to go out and I plotted a route that takes me about 1.5 hours of mostly walking with brief stretches of running. 

All was well for the first 20 minutes until I got to a flight of 108 steps. I love those steps: a) ’cause they are challenging! that hill they take me up is STEEP, but the view from the top is excellent. b) it’s in an old area of Johannesburg, a ‘hood with houses dating back to the early 1900s, houses that were built for the mining wadosi in those days, and it ALWAYS renders me totally speechless how enormous those plots of land are. E.g. all up the 108 steps, on either side, are enormous plots of land with equally large houses. It makes me wonder about whether it’s the original families who still live there and if so, how they’ve managed to maintain their wealth. If not, how are they resisting the trend taking place in many other areas, of owners selling out to developers who then build tiny little condominiums or blocks of flats? I try to avoid thinking about all those on whose backs the residents have made their fortunes, and depending on how upset I am about the toyitoyi du jour (another day, another toyitoyi… the capitalist in me wonders at what point people will let go of baggage and just work?), end up thinking about it anyway.

So I got to the bottom of the steps and decided that I’d climb them backwards today. Just because. I figured it would, a) work out some underused leg muscles, and b) allow me to see the view on my way up. No sooner had I gotten to step #10 than I saw a guy with a big smile (like christmas had come early), sprinting from the left side of the road, turning, and starting up the steps. Did I mention the guy looked TOTALLY unkempt and EXTREMELY suspicious? He was clearly surprised to find that I was facing him and not away from him. 50 thoughts flashed through my mind at once. He was definitely coming for me. I was not fit enough to sprint up those steps, stay ahead of him, and get to the guard at the top of the hill… he would probably catch up with me at step #30. Wouldn’t he feel hurt if he was just innocently running up the steps and I was standing here being suspicious of him?

Fortunately my flight instinct kicked in and I lickity-split heaved myself off the steps and jumped down a 6-foot wall that’s just beside the steps, and sprinted my behind back to the main road. I looked back for long enough to see that he’d sat on the steps with a crest-fallen expression.  Now as I sit and type this I feel that maybe he was hurt ’cause he was innocently seeking out someone to converse with… but trust me, at that moment in time, my instincts were screaming “GET AWAY!“

Yes the area is secure, they call security guards to say a suspicious black female’s pretending to run in their ‘hood all the time, and it provides me with security ’cause the security vehicles usually drive slowly beside me until I leave their patrol area. But like with any ‘perfect’ system, there’s a blindspot and that staircase is it.

Next time I plan to go that route, I’ll do it early morning when (hopefully) the crazies aren’t up yet, and there’s a great deal of resident foot traffic. And yeah, ye olde fitness regime really needs to get pushed up several notches, want to be able to rely on Bolt-like (hey, I can always aspire…) sprints whether on high or low ground. And naturally I’ll keep listening to my instincts and keep those eyes in the back of my head open.

 

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