Matt Gets Running

Today was never going to be a great run. The end of a long week, and a bor­ing, slightly frus­trat­ing day at the end of the long week. Still, I got out there.

Today I tried an exper­i­ment, run­ning to a spoken-word pod­cast instead of music. Tonight I ran to an epis­ode of Pseudo­pod, the hor­ror fic­tion pod­cast. Pseudo­pod is excel­lent — and I also highly recom­mend its sis­ter SF pod­cast Escape Pod.

The epis­ode that happened to be next in my queue tonight, though, didn’t end up appeal­ing greatly to me, either for its story or for its read­ing, which was a shame, but I got through my run anyway.

Appar­ently there wasn’t any big effect on my time, though, as the Run­Keeper log shows. I kept up a nice, steady pace, and got through 5km in 35 minutes.

I’m going to have to try this exper­i­ment again, maybe with Escape Pod — SF appeals to me more gen­er­ally than hor­ror does, so my chances of get­ting a story I like are slightly higher.

And at some point, I should try the scary option — going with noth­ing at all. No music, no words, just me and my feet and my breath. As someone who pre­tends toward Buddhist lean­ings, this should be a good oppor­tun­ity for some­thing sim­ilar to the prac­tice of walk­ing med­it­a­tion. Which may be why it scares me; med­it­a­tion can be such hard work…

Any­way. Sorry if this is a bit ran­dom and dis­join­ted today. Like I said, long week. Hope­fully I’ll be up nice and early on Sunday for a decent run in the morn­ing after a nice day of rest, at which point I may be more coherent.