OnFootBlog.com

Organizers of the Marine Corps Marathon have announced that they will be switching up the course of the race some more this year, according to a Wednesday Washington Business Journal article.

Among the biggest changes: Runners will go by Hains Point about five miles earlier than in recent years. For those readers who are more visual: Hains Point is the site where J. Seward Johnson, Jr. plopped his “holy-crap-what-is-that-coming-out-of-the-ground” piece, The Awakening in 1980. (It was moved to PG County in early 2008.)

A Christian Science Monitor article yesterday told of a Minnesota office that puts employees on treadmills while they work.

Currently, it looks like this is a net power loss. But I have to wonder: If they used exercise bikes instead of walking machines, could the office power its computers with legs alone?

While my coworkers will be the first to agree that I can be a bit jittery, I don’t think I could manage typing while exercising. It would somehow be very unsatisfying, since I wouldn’t be able to swing my arms (not to mention being in a boxy office instead of a nice arboretum or neighborhood street).

Partway through the article, however, the author mentions something that I was happy to see: The Minnesota company has implemented the idea of “walking meetings.”

As anyone who has been in a running or walking group can tell you, exercise is often a good lubricant for conversation. Even whittling can serve the same purpose, as Ben Logan attests in The Land Remembers.

A boardroom full of treadmills?
I would be willing to get out of my chair for that.

We just moved to Hampden, in the northern part of Baltimore.

It’s near a bunch of stuff including my workplace, a few farm markets, two grocery stores, JHU, MSU, Notre Dame / Loyola, an MTA light rail stop, two movie theaters, two public libraries in the Pratt system … etc.,.

Forgive me for sounding like a bad PR writer. I promise that this post should be the worst of my gloating.

Anyhow, almost as cool as all of the stuff I just listed is the neighborhood’s proximity to the Jones Falls Trail. I still have yet to explore the trail in full, but here’s a start — a loop through a bit of the neighborhood, including Druid Hill Park and the Maryland Zoo.

Check out the map to see details. Some of this may be slightly off, as I used an old city planning document to get the path of the JFT for my route map.