This Week In Running – v5

On the Road

Another week of fairly uneventful base runs.  5 editions of my regular 5.9 mile route.  Its nice to see the time ticking down bit by bit every day.  I’m not really fixated on weight, but I’m pretty sure that’s going down, too; but our scale is a box somewhere that I haven’t been able to locate after the move.

For the long run, I was shooting for something over 10 miles.  I ended up with 10.5 miles, but kinda by chance.  I was running in a new neighborhood and the light up street signs were not lit, so I ended up taking a few wrong turns.  I eventually got kinda back on course, I found that the road I intended to run on was:

1. Very narrow.  Thankfully no cars at 5:15am.
2. Very steep, with a peak in the middle.
3. Very dark.  Trees overhanging the street and zero street lights.

I think I’ll skip that road again, at least outside of daylight hours.

I felt understandably tired after the run.  But the surprise a little later in the day was angry hips.  Was kinda bothersome for a bit, but faded before the evening.  Calves and ankles remained cranky a little longer.

Got to sleep too late last night.  Alarm went off this morning, I turned if off and went back to sleep for another 2 hours.  After messing around with the house and getting the kids rolling, I was able to get out for what I thought was gonna be an easy recovery run, but ended up with a pretty fast run on the Iron Horse Trail.

I’m pretty pleased that folks on the trail are a lot better at sharing the trail than I remember on the Erie Canal Trail back in New York.  People happily scoot over to let me by and there’s minimal silliness like folks trying to run or bike 4 people wide.  Nice!

Mini Review: iPod Shuffle 4th Generation

After 8 years, my 2nd generation iPod shuffle finally hung it up.  Still seems to work, but it no longer charges.  After being stuck in the red status for a week, it finally puttered out. It was the perfect player for running;  simple, small, and light.  My only real complaint with it was that you have to use iTunes to load it, rather than just treating it like a plain ‘ole USB drive.  Oh well, it was a noble run, but all good things must come to an end.

Enter a new 2016 4th generation iPod shuffle. I thought the newer players were the same as the older ones, with new guts (and another button, for Voice Over), but it turns out they’re pretty different.  Almost impossibly, they’re smaller!   Slightly smaller than 1 square inch, noticeably thinner, and lighter than my old one.

Outside of Voice Over (which I don’t really care about), the other major difference in how the player works is support for playlists.  I didn’t really care about playlists because I only listen to podcasts these days, but having a way to keep music separate from podcasts may change that.

The way they handle podcasts is overly clever;  they automatically group them into autocreated playlists (by default.)  I suppose that makes sense if you’re into binge listening.  The rub comes in that you’ve got episodes from 4 different podcasts on the player, you need to switch playlists to hear them (by holding the voice over button, which is hard to do when you’re running and the player is clipped on your back.)  Otherwise, it just repeats the podcast(s) in the current playlist.  I think you can get around this problem by making your own playlist with your podcasts in back in iTunes and then sync it over, but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.

Accessory-wise, the ear buds (not ear pods) are worthless to me and my big ears.  I think the charging/sync cable is an improvement.  Now its just 2″ long with headphone style connecter on one side and USB on the other, instead of a long cable and dock.  Sync is also noticeably faster (evident since most podcasts filers are 10’s of Mb.)

I think I paid $39 for my old one.  This one was $49 (before 5% off with my Target Red Card, woot.)  Thought that was a bit more than warranted, but then I realized that old one was 1Gb and the new is 2Gb.  For podcasts, 1Gb is plenty, as I swap content out weekly or so.  With 2Gb (and playlists) I can also bring some music along for a change of pace as well.

So far, other than clunky podcast playlist thing, everything is working great.  Hope I can get another 8 years out of this one.

The Wrap Up

Things are going pretty well, so I’m not gonna mess with the program too much.  I’m gonna try to add another half mile to the daily.

I think I should probably start scoping out my next pair of shoes.  These ones have about 250 miles on them. They’re holding up pretty well, but I think they’re about half a size too big;  my feet slide around a bunch after everything gets warmed up and stretch out.  Probably give some Asics a shot.

Pain is only temporary, pride is forever.