Last night I decided that I needed to get my butt in gear and start taking care of myself. I haven’t exercised in almost three months and it had been almost a year since I went for a run. So I grabbed my Nike kicks and my iPod Nano and hit the pavement.
The heat wave suffocating the nation hasn’t really affected my little area of West Los Angeles. (It’s been terrifyingly brutal in The Valley, where I work.) It was maybe 88°F but there’s always a nice little ocean breeze, even miles inland. I had to take a break pretty early in the run to help a Mitsubishi Eclipse (with Georgia plates) that was stuck in the middle of Olympic and Century Park East; poor guy was trying to push the car uphill to get it out of the intersection on his own. We managed to push it into the parking lot of the Century City Medical Plaza and then — after I gave him a hearty, “Go Gators!” — I got into a nice groove.
It took me just shy of 50 minutes to run the five miles, which I thought respectable.
And, of course, everything’s better with music. Here’s a list of the tracks I heard:
- Knockout, by Lil Wayne (featuring Nicki Minaj)
- Monkey Wrench, by Foo Fighters
- Skeleton, by Bloc Party
- Rehab, by Amy Winehouse
- Maps, by The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
- Airplanes Pt. 2, by B.O.B. (featuring Hayley Williams and Eminem)
- When You Were Young, by The Killers
- Sugar, We’re Going Down, by Fall Out Boy
- Life in Technicolor II, by Coldplay
- Hello, Goodbye, by The Beatles
- Black Betty, by Ram Jam
- The Boxer, by Simon and Garfunkel
- Little Lion Man, by Mumford and Sons
- See You Again, by Miley Cyrus
- Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row, performed by My Chemical Romance