Miles for week 3: 14.5 (~2/3.5/2.5/6.5)
Miles for week 4: 15.5 (2.8/3/3.3/6.5)
Average resting heart rate (per Fitbit): 57 both weeks
Weight: 116 both weeks
CityStrides coverage of Northampton: 23% week 3, 27% week 4
Long run 7/8/2018: 6.54 miles; avg HR 142; time 1:23:22 (avg 12:45), splits 14:11, 15:09, 11:53, 12:35, 11:43, 11:47)
Long run 7/15/2018: 6.56 miles; avg HR 138; time 1:21:43 (avg 12:27), splits 13:09, 12:43, 11:53, 12:56, 11:59, 12:08)
These were only supposed to be 13 and 14 mile weeks but I’ve been going a little long in my exploration of new streets. It’s fine! Since my mileage is going to be lower than most training programs, I can totally go over, and the added fun of completing streets is extremely motivating. I made it to position #3 for Northampton! And I found this adorable 1901 brick cottage on a dead-end street:
I’ve been exploring other voices for the audio cues in RunKeeper; the default (Kat) is a typical “yady,” our term for automated female voices based on my nephew’s pronunciation of “lady” when he was tiny (“Dose yadies are yaffing at me!”) I tried Announcer Guy on 7/8 and Your Conscience on 7/15. It turns out the non-default voices all have little extra random sayings (“You’re doing GREAT!”), which is enjoyable briefly but will probably send me back to the default after cycling through them. I changed the cue from my usual 1 mile to a half-mile, which was helpful in figuring out that the first few slow miles are primarily due to the gardens rather than the hills. And weirdly, on 7/15 I ran significantly faster, even though it was warmer and much more humid. Maybe I’m not that much slower than I used to be. The variability is certainly interesting.
7/8 was a gorgeous day, much cooler than the heat spell we’d been having, clear and dry. I saw a kingbird chasing a crow; my friend Harold had just sent me an article about crows chasing ravens, so the kingbird comes out on top in that hierarchy. That’s why the genus is Tyrannus! I ran into an old friend walking with her new baby—ah, I was forgetting that was one of the things which made the run slower—and also stopped to pet an exotic-looking cat who was lying in the road. 
But I stopped on 7/15 too. Always read the plaque was my curiosity-driven inclination anyway, but 99 Percent Invisible stuck it in my head as a phrase, and I so I took a picture of the plaque on the side of Ninomiya House which I might not have stumbled over if it weren’t for CityStrides, and submitted it to Read the Plaque, who published it! So much gratification! This Vermont license plate with my initials jumped out at me because it was a green spot on a yellow car: 
One of the pleasures of this route is passing both the entrance to the trails on the north bank of Mill River where people walk their dogs, and the main entrance to the unofficial “dog park” on the south bank. Everybody, dogs and people, is socializing while getting ready to walk, and everybody looks happy!
The next Sunday was a great weather contrast; the humidity made all the outlines fuzzier and the colors softer. All the daylilies in Capen Garden (they have a planting for each year’s best variety) are flowering, and it’s chicory season; the fields on Burts Pit Road were a sea of blue. But already the catalpa pods are lengthening, the green crabapples are falling, and the first unripe black walnuts too.
