I thought at first I should have a fabulous post with tips on how to get through your Thanksgiving dinner without feeling like you've eaten too much and how to fit a little workout into the holiday.  I'll get to that in December, I PROMISE,  but right now I have something else on my mind.

For the past 5 years or so I have had a Thanksgiving ritual:  I go running Thanksgiving morning.  I ALWAYS feel like sleeping in and tell myself I should really take the day off, but that second piece of pumpkin pie tastes that much sweeter when I feel like I've earned it.

I lived in the Bay Area from 1999-2005, and the last two years I lived in Oakland and Berkeley.  On Thanksgiving, I'd get up around 9 and the streets would still be quiet.  Everything seemed to be coated in a gray fog that would lift by the time I arrived home.

In Berkeley there's a park called People's Park that has a history too rich for me to go into here.  In 2003, my first year in the East Bay, I took my Thanksgiving run from my north Oakland home and ran by the park.  The scene was quite unlike the picture you see above.

I saw, on that cool, hazy morning, mounds of gray heaps staggered across the park.  The park was commonly used by Berkeley's large homeless population as a camping ground, but I had never seen it like this.  The scene resembled that of a graveyard, only instead of flowers, garbage littered the land;  where I should have smelled clean air, the stench of trash, dirty clothes, and unwashed bodies filled my nostrils.  What struck me most was that I saw not a single body move; they were tombstones placed strategically across this piece of land that once symbolized a thriving grassroots movement.

I took the same run in 2004 and 2005; the scenes were identical.  Whenever I've run on Thanksgiving day since, I always think of People's Park.  I'm sure there is some great lesson that I should be able to articulate by now, but it hasn't yet surfaced.  The gray mounds still haunt me.

I won't be able to take my ritual run this Thanksgiving morning due to travel plans, and I'll miss it.  I suppose the one thing I have learned since my People's Park runs is that it won't hurt you to be kind to your body or take a good look at the world on Thanksgiving Day.