I thought that the description of the bicycles and exercise attire were well integrated into the story. I have a good image of the purple and mint striped bicycle that the narrator wheels out into the fresh air. In this opening portion of the story I thought it definitely would have been beneficial to include some more description of Rob. So far we have a lot of use of "our" to describe the couple-unit's emotions, but we don't even know what the husband looks like. I have an image of the author in some biking clothes with some sort of generic brown headed guy, I wonder if he's some sort of tri-athalete after the comment that the narrator "had no problem keeping up with Rob." She seems surprised to be able to maintain her husbands pace. Why is this? I think that the first section really has a lot of potential, I just think we need to see more of the couple's makeup.
I also really enjoy the idea of the wife trying to talk with the husband during the run. It's a funny scene, a wife talking while a husband is focused on his run. I think there's a clever gender commentary there. I think that you could even draw up this scene a little bit by describing how much she's panting while trying to talk to him during the run. I know that it's extremely difficult to maintain any sort of conversation during a run that is remotely strenuous, so maybe if she's kind of killing her lungs and exhausting herself by trying to talk to him it would make for an even lighter scene.
At the end it seems a little bit exposition heavy... I think that if you added a scene of another run that maybe shows the differences in their relationship that would be interesting. For instance, maybe Rob tries to communicate with the Syd at the end of the story, showing the change instead of the author having to tell us.
I thought this story was a cool take on the September 11th attacks. I like the concept of trying to get into the mind of an average bystander.
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