Life is short and I want to pack as much as possible into it. Exercise for its own sake alone doesn’t grab me, which is why it’s always been hard to motivate myself to do stretching/pilates/weights. Running—if it’s outside, and especially with a race in my sights—is so much easier. (Podcasts make the indoors stuff a tiny bit easier, but not much). Any kind of running at all has some benefits, but I want to maximize them.
Serious runners (which isn’t me—I’m a having-fun runner) talk about “junk miles,” runs without a training purpose. This article interestingly points out that runs in between easy and tempo are particularly problematic because they tire you without being useful for training, but then also links to a Runner’s World “every mile you run has value” counterpoint, which is where I line up. But I’ve been thinking about the extras that I reach for and what else I could add on.
My personal baseline for place is running outside (that is, treadmill < indoor track < outdoor track < [outside-not-on-a-track = minimum to be enjoyable]), and that’s because I get to see things that change, and explore new places. Here’s my brainstorming list so far in various categories, which obviously supports a lot of overlap:
- Observation/enjoyment (in already-familiar places)
- Informal phenology, which my blog entries were kind of doing before I even knew what it was
- Admiring gardens and smelling flowers
- IDing wildflowers
- Seeing wildlife
- Meeting people, dogs, cats
- Watching construction over time (example: Live 155 from the demolition of the previous building to its completion)
- Noticing posters for events I want to attend, sales, etc.
- Exploration
- Randomly picking new parts of town, or streets I haven’t been down
- Running in new places (when we’re traveling for example)
- But best of all, now that I’ve discovered CityStrides (planning a whole post just on that), I’ve added the goal of running all the streets in Northampton—if I can’t finish them all during the marathon training, it will be a long-term project!
- Transportation
- Errands (I’ve often returned library books on a run)
- To and from scenic destinations (like the gardens on my typical long run, but also I’ve done things like run to the Connecticut River to see ice floes locally, and to all kinds of places when vacationing)
- For years I’ve been planning to run to the movies someday. The closest theater is 5.5 miles, though. 11 is a lot when I’m not training, but when I am, I don’t want to break up a long run into 2 shorter ones. Still thinking on this…
- Now that Valley Bike Share is available in Northampton and Amherst, I could run to the Amherst farmer’s market some Saturday to visit my friend Alex’s amazing Pop-Up Astronomy and then bike home (round-trip would be 16 miles, same problem as above)
- Thinking
- I think of long runs as the opportunity to “comb out my brain,” which is one of running’s biggest benefits for me
- It can also be an idea generating machine—I’ve come up with new projects, some of which survive the cold light of not-running thought, some of which do not
- Writing incubation (especially characters’ voice & thoughts, sentence level, etc…. larger plot structure comes more easily when biking, I find, presumably because of the relative speeds?)
- Problem solving in general
- Other
- Picking up trash—I tend to do this much more when walking, but have sometimes taken an old drawstring backpack specifically to pick up cans on my usual long run. It turns out this has a name: plogging!
- The occasional tag sale (not under transportation since it’s serendipitous)
- I’ve wondered if my trail running could get good enough to keep ahead of mosquitoes—I’ve tried it downhill and I think it helps, but running fast enough uphill might be a pretty hopeless goal. Theoretically they don’t like wind (varying numbers from 1.5 to 10 mph); when I’m hiking at 2-3 mph I get mobbed, not sure how much faster than that I could go…