Week 4, Run 1: Long but doable

Go me! Just back from my longest run so far, the first run of week four. I was running with a beta version of Get Running on the iPhone, so I’m glad it worked fine. I really couldn’t do it without the voice prompts, especially the ones that tell me that I’m halfway through, or that there’s only ten seconds to go!

Today’s plan was four runs in total, a three minute run and a five minute run, done twice, with comparatively short recovery breaks in between them.

I was pushed towards the end — especially as the last bit ended up being uphill again — but I just kept plodding on, and didn’t give up. I’m encouraged that I’ve come this far. I definitely couldn’t have managed today’s run a few weeks ago.

Helping me again today was a Tangerine-generated playlist. I’m definitely finding it better than the iPod/iTunes “Genius”. While the Genius is good, it’s fairly limited in its knowledge of music, and there’s a lot of obscure stuff in my library that it simply doesn’t have a clue about. Because Tangerine analyses everything by its beat, it’s much more capable of stringing together things from my collection that (a) work for running, and (b) aren’t anything like as mainstream as Genius’s choices.

Today there seemed to be a bias towards eighties obscure pop, and nineties obscure goth, but there were a few things that didn’t fit either of those categories. In between Transvision’s Vamp’s Sex Kick and Passion Play’s Running on Empty (so appropriate!) I was grateful to Soft Cell’s The Night, which was the perfect tempo to keep me plodding through the last five-minute run. Nice!

Anyway. This evening’s picture is brought to you by another iPhone app, the rather nice Pano, which will stitch together panoramas in-camera. Neat trick!