Iron rails & iron weights

Saturday, May 10, 2008
12:29:00 PM EDT
The women's train

Some cars on the Tokyo subway are restricted to women during rush hour, as some men apparently never learned the elementary-school lesson about keeping their hands to themselves.  Riding in a women-only car lets a woman take the subway without having to worry about roving hands.  Gender segregation of this sort would never happen on an American transit system.  Discrimination laws, and all that.  Yet this isn't to say that gender balances are going to be equal on all trains, as my LIRR riding over the years has shown.  Trains leaving Penn Station very early in rush hour tend to have largely male ridership.  Many of their passengers are construction workers or other types of skilled tradesmen, jobs held mostly by men.  Trains leaving Penn very late in the rush hour also tend to be your typical fiesta de chorizo, which makes sense because they attract nose-to-the-grindstone Type A personality sorts who work long hours, once again mostly a male thing.  On the other end of the gender-balance spectrum is the 7:32 from Ronkonkoma to Penn, which I took this morning instead of going from Medford.  I've noted in the past that it has a disproportionately high number of women, and today was no exception.  My (very rough) estimate is that women comprised at least two-thirds of the riders in the car where I sat.  Keeping in mind that men outnumber women among commuters in general, an imbalance especially pronounced on the Ronkonkoma line, this indeed was quite remarkable.  The 7:32 is one train where you won't see puddles of testosterone sloshing around on the floor, but instead have clouds of estrogen wafting through the air.  It was no surprise that a tall but slender woman in her 30's took the seat next to me.  Her slenderness meant that I had plenty of room, and indeed I was scarcely aware of her presence at all ... which would not have been the case had I been stuck next to an elephantine SCA.  We got to Penn on time, and although the 1 train platform was jammed a train came along in less than a minute and wasn't at all crowded.  That in fact was a bit unusual, as the crowded platform was a sign that there had been a lengthy gap since the prior train and that generally means that the next train to arrive will be packed.  Hey, I wasn't about to complain.

I stayed on the 1 all the way to Penn after work, there being too much of a crowd at 14th, yet still arrived just in time to get the 5:22 to Ronkonkoma.  As is normal for that train, its gender balance was close enough to parity that I really took no notice (the 5:41 is more heavily male most days).  I found an aisle seat next to a 50ish woman who spent almost the entire trip babbling away on her cell phone as if she were being paid by the word.  While I couldn't hear what she was saying thanks to my trusty iPod, it's a very safe assumption it was sheer twaddle, as the British would say.  It was a delay-free trip to Ronkonkoma.

Gym: I must be getting stupid or something.  While on my way to the gym it never occurred to me that given today's unseasonably warm weather the temperature in the gym would be approaching steam bath levels.  No sooner did I cross the threshold of Ultimate Fitness that it became apparent that yes, the temperature indeed was at excruciatingly high levels.  I would guess about 85 degrees F, which is utterly ridiculous for a place in which people will be engaging in heavy physical activity.  I nearly turned and left, that's how bad it was.  But somehow I pushed on regardless, running 1.5 miles on the treadmill at 6 mph, which made 7.5 miles for the week, and then ellipted for 30 minutes.


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