Feet on the Ground

This week I did a handful of gentle, exploratory runs to test how the foot is healing. The runs felt great, each a little better than the last.

This week’s pictures are not from any of those runs, but from a 50 miler on the San Gabriel River Bike Path, starting in the foothills of the mountains, down and across the Santa Fe Dam, and then down to Whittier Narrows, a trip that covers a lot of shifts in terrain, from mountains to cactus and desert to semi industrial to working class ‘burbs, with a natural riverbed contained inside a man-made channel off to the side.

It’s an interesting ride. Some parts are beautiful. Other stretches are not beautiful at all. There’s a stretch up against blue-collar back yards and broken down horse stables, James Ellroy’s El Monte, or the characters in Dave Alvin songs, so many of which take place along the 605 freeway on the other side of the river.

It’s a broken down stretch of old working class suburbs that doesn’t really seem like a part of Los Angeles at all.