Moscow 3:30 am

Date	Place of exercise	Duration (minutes)	14 flights	Start time
24 June	Moscow	45	1:24.03	03:45

          This morning I woke a 3:30, and the sun already had everything completely visible. It was a tad grey. The most interesting thing was the five people, in three different groups, who were riding rented bikes.

These are the bikes that you can pick up at one place and drop off at one of several places somewhere else in the city. I had been under the impression that these bikes were mainly for tourists. These people certainly didn’t look like tourists at 4:00 in the morning.

Date	Place of exercise	Duration (minutes)	14 flights	Start time
25 June	Moscow	35	1:19.80	07:55

          I’m starting to like Moscow. There are lots of big apartment buildings, but each one is near a playground area for the kids. Whereas the play equipment used to be all broken and rusty, now most everything is brightly colored, well-maintained and plastic.

          The 14 flights of stairs have four places where, instead of simply skirting from the top step of one group of steps quickly around to the next one, I have to take a couple steps, open a door, one step, then open another door, and then walk to the next steps, and up. All’s fine, it just adds some time; but since I am in competition only with myself, it seems not to make much difference. Each time, I will spend a similar amount of time opening the doors and navigating around to the next flight of stairs. For purposes of comparison, it’s all good.

          The thing about today was that as I began, my legs felt fabulous. I bounded up the steps with the spring of a gazelle, and I kept the rapid movement of my legs, marching up. The feel was great.