On the third day of my new contract, I found the adrenaline woke me up at 5:30. I made myself stay in bed another hour, then rode on the Lakeshore for an hour. I got there about 7:00, and immediately began noticing that everybody I saw was fit, runners and cyclists. But what really stood out was that relative fitness was all they had in common. The age distribution was very broad, with substantial numbers of all adult age groups. The impressionistic bell curve normally peaks under thirty, but this morning the distribution would have been more like a mesa, and the male/female ratio, most times at least 2/1, more like 3/ or 4/ or 5/, was 1/1. I won’t go into why that was, because I don’t know.
What I do know is that it was a picture of a physically healthy society. But of course this slice is very self-selected. Now there are places on this continent where there are many healthy and attractive people, but in my experience they skew young. The large number of middle-aged women, unselfconsciously exerting themselves, mostly alone or in twos, not as often in couples as the few women you usually see, was what made today stand out, as a glimpse of a world I wish were more typical.
