Hey hey kids! Math time!

It takes me 35 minutes to get to work from my house if I’m taking a train.

It takes me 25 minutes to take a cab to work.

It takes me 23 minutes on average to cycle to work. On one wheel. While eating breakfast.

It takes me 40  minutes to run home from work. And I don’t run fast.

I don’t like public transportation…

I think I love my shoes. It’s not exactly the best for sprints because I tend to drag my heels during lift-off and the heels are too chunky for me to do that. Then again, it might just be a matter of getting used to because you aren’t supposed to drag your feet while running ANYWAY.

They’re nice and light and feel a lot more effortless when running. I don’t think I managed to leap huge strides though, because of the heels but I should be able to do so once I get used to them.

Today’s 2.4km timing: 12:40.

The most feminine trait about me is probably my inclination to buy shoes. I’ve got more shoes than I have limbs- heck, I’ve got more shoes than I’ve got digits.

Today I bought running shoes because my old ones are ripped. The soles have come unglued and some parts of the fabric have come apart. It’s great because one of my first goals when I started getting the whole running routine together around 2 months back was to wear out my shoes.

This is how my new shoes look like:

They cost slightly over 75% more than my current shoes and weigh 240g each. Which is, I’d say, half as heavy as my current pair which is soaked with 2-3 years worth of quality feet juice.

As stupid as it sounds though, I think I chose this pair over another which feels quite similar (albeit at $30 more) because it looks very Asics. And that sounds stupid because the particular pair of Asics that this resembles isn’t pretty and neither is this so that’s really a non-reason.

Now, the dumb thing to say next would be that I can’t wait to get matching running attire.

No, I’m not serious.

==================

On a rather irrelevant note, I haven’t been unicycling much over the past 2 months (it all fits…). It might not be that I’ve lost interest in unicycling but rather that the obsessive compulsive part of me took over and made me run a hell lot thereafter. I think there’s a little streak of masochism in me. I like the cheap thrill of wanting to do something and then doing it for real.  I’d like to believe I’m a rather persistant and determined person but I’d be the first to admit to having the attention span of a 7 year old. I digress.

I have been lacking in motivation and inspiration to learn new unicycling stuff. It all gets rather mundane when the people you learn from are located half the globe away and communication is one-sided - I’d watch YouTube and read tutorials and that’s that. I am too lacking in patience to learn freestyle tricks and they don’t really appeal to me in the first case (due to lack of abovementioned masochistic factor).

But I will get back to it. Once I get over the rush of wanting to run <12 min for 2.4km and perhaps, if it catches my fancy, running 5km under 25min.

Oh yea, for the record, I still HATE running. It’s the most boring sport on Earth and nothing exciting ever happens unless you forget to breathe (see previous running post). Why am I running then, you ask? The same reason why I juggle - because I can.

I was told that I could run somewhat faster and easier if I could just widen my stride. This is accompanied by digs at despite how I had longer legs than the commentator, I ran at half the speed and look twice as tired. Or something like that.

SO TODAY I WIDENED MY STRIDE AND TRAVELLED AT 1.5 TIMES MY NORMAL STRIDE. AND I WENT AT 3/4 OF MY NORMAL RATE OF STEPS TAKEN. AND I WENT FASTER! AND FASTER! AND FASTER!

I probably looked quite a sight because I wasn’t so much running as a cross between striding and skipping. In slo-mo. The first lap was ridiculously relaxed. The second not quite. The third got worse. And I gave up on the fourth.

8:25 after 4 laps and I couldn’t breathe fast enough. I try to breathe every other step and the whole slo-mo striding screws with the pattern.
Next up: New shoes + Variations on the whole striding thing.

Ran.

2 rounds later, I realised that my timer was stopped. Restarted.

Time for 2.4km - 12:59.

Will hit twelve thirty next week.

I went running. 1.7km later (which is 4.25 rounds on the track), security guard scurries smack in the middle of my path and waves at me to stop (had headphones on). Closing time.

Timing: 8:32

Might run timed again tomorrow.

Had a badminton game today and since it was just beside the stadium, I thought I’d go run 2.4km and see how I fare. For those of you who’re not Singaporean, high school kids here are made to take a fitness test every year and one of the items is a 2.4km run. The fastest I ever was was a 12.5 min run (the distance is dubious though) and the last time I took the test (at 18), I was a 15ish. I’d usually average around mid 13s to 14.

The good news for today is, after 2 weeks of crazy-assed running, I clocked a 13:05 today. The bad news is that I think I slowed down very significantly between rounds 3-5 (I was running around a 400m track) because my time showed 3:40 or so at the start of my 3rd and I ran under 2 minutes for my final round. My next target would be to hit under 12 by end October.

More boring weekly updates to come in time.