It's All Obama's Fault

Thursday morning I went for a run. It was still dark out, but my plan was to do 50 minutes total along the sidewalk. Now that the snow has melted I’ve discovered that the sidewalk runs straight north almost to the Puget Sound. It’s mostly downhill on the way out, and then, of course, uphill on the way back. I ended up running only about 48 minutes because of it. I turned around at 24 minutes, expecting it to take me longer to get back since I would be running uphill most of the way. Instead, to my delighted surprise, I actually ran almost exactly the same speed on the way back making it in at 48 minutes. Close enough. I let myself off the extra two minutes for good behavior. Someday I’ll have to drive the route to see how far it was.


However, this blog concerns something that happened in the first ten minutes of the run. As I said, it was still dark out, and although the sidewalk is pretty good, there was one place where one of the segments had heaved up out of the ground, probably from a tree root, and it was sticking up about three inches higher than its neighbor. My left toe caught that lip in the dark and down I went, knees, heal of the hand, forearm and shoulders, a very awkward looking shoulder roll back to my feet and I kept moving. I was cranking under my breath, but I was still going. The heels of my hands were the most painful parts at the time, but I could tell my knees had been pretty banged up. At any rate, it was too dark to examine them, and I didn’t want to slow down so I pushed on and forgot all about it until I got back to my apartment. Unlocking my door, standing on the well-lit landing, I finally looked down at my legs and saw this:

It turns out I did take some skin off.

Of course it’s always a mistake to judge the severity of a wound by the amount of blood (and that isn’t even a lot of blood). If there is a lot of sweat, it dilutes the blood and makes it flow further and faster than it otherwise would, so even a little bit of blood can cover a lot of area. I washed these and the other abrasions off pretty thoroughly when I showered, and then ignored them.

But I realized, it’s all Obama’s fault.

Well, not Obama exactly, but it is the government’s fault, and he is the head of the government so we’ll blame him. Does Washington (D.C.) not care about its people? They should know that sidewalks with cracks in them are hazardous. They should know that running is hazardous. People get injured like that in countless numbers every year. Why isn’t Congress doing something to mitigate that? Like mandating knee and elbow pads for runners, or providing everyone with free head lamps, or outlawing running during hours of darkness?

I mean, if this administration can’t protect me from the consequences of my own choices, what good is it?