9 laps

If you run the same short segment over and over and over again you become intimately familiar with every foot and every view and every feature. I've covered this loop hundreds and hundreds of times. It is exactly 750 metres long. I've taken as little as 3 minutes to run around it and as long as 5. I have dodged wayward baseballs, leashes, dogs attached to leashes, dogs not attached to leashes, people, bicycles, lumps of poop, puddles, lakes, glaciers, front-end loaders, vehicles that are not supposed to ever be there in the first place, rocks, cracks, holes, the ever present crowd waiting at either of two bus stops. There is the young high school boy who sits in the bus stop with his feet up, the older woman who has a different wig for each day, the old guy and his son from the retirement 'villa' adjacent to the park, Penny who walks her Newfoundlander, Freddy who walks his German Shepherd, the guy who takes his dogs into the ball field and runs round and round and round. Some people have stopped showing up, maybe they moved, maybe they bought a car, who knows. Sometimes someone shows up once and never again. The news boxes have a different front page each day, the front-end loader clears ice left outside the arena every Thursday, the garbage trucks do their pickups for the arena twice a week. Sometimes the guy driving the truck pulls in, pulls out a paper, and spends an hour reading it. The maintenance guy for the arena walks his dog every morning. The crossing guard for the school arrives at 8, but I'm usually done by then.

And they all watch me.