"Where'd the hoops go?"

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Happy birthday, America. Hey…what two American presidents died on the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s birth, July 4th, 1826? My nephew Jonathon guessed Abraham Lincoln and his wife said George Washington. Both were wrong…and I like to think Jonathon was kidding.

The Plain Dealer reported again about the obesity epidemic among children. Same old stuff with complaints about the lack of time in the schools for recess and gym classes, among other things. It got me to thinking how Jack and I had been over to the elementary school down the street from our house the other day though, and the missing basketball backboards and hoops.

“Where’s the hoops, Jack?”

“They take them down at the end of the school year. I guess they don’t want kids over here making noise and fooling around at night during the summer,” he said.

Now…that makes a TON of sense. The baseball field there is a shambles…I’ve never seen it in use, and now they’re taking down the hoops so that even if kids wanted to play pick-up game, they couldn’t. I suppose they could go home and play some kind of NBA video hoops game, though I’m thinking they wouldn’t be burning as many calories. And Jack is probably right. There are likely some unruly kids who have made too much noise disturbing the houses immediately behind the school. I’m only six houses away and could hear the pick-up wiffle ball game that used to go on once a week on Tuesday evenings. A half-dozen teens would be playing until 11 p.m. in the school parking lot and making quite a racket. I loved hearing it and thinking some kids were still having fun the old-fashioned way. It stopped at some point and I’m thinking it was due to the noise. Too bad.

There has to be a better solution than taking down the hoops for the whole summer. We’ve got police cars in the neighborhood every evening and it’s not that big a city. Couldn’t they cruise through on the occasional evening when it’s getting too loud and remind the kids to keep it down? How about an 11 p.m. curfew on the court? I don’t know, but I’m sure taking the hoops down will not aid in the fight against obesity.

Well…it was VERY HOT and VERY MUGGY when I began my run. It was the fourth and I had a tight schedule…only 45 minutes for a run. I used every one of them, but was glad that was all the time I had. I could feel my strength slipping over the last 15 minutes with all of the water I was losing. The forecast was the same for the next week and I would be sure to run either early or late. Running in the shade at 7 p.m. means that it’s at least 10 degrees cooler and with none of the radiant heat you would get from the pavement when not in the middle of the woods. I love my Metroparks and will be spending a lot of workout time here for the duration of the summer.

Oh...it was John Adams and Thomas Jefferson...the president question thing...
Run duration: 45 minutes.

Training Heart Rate: 140.

Calories burned during workout: 765.