Anyone else face this dilemna? You're running in a residential neighborhood. Its dark, and you are wearing all black + a headlamp to make your corpse easier to find for the EMTs. You have three choices:
1. Run on the street. Pros: Asphalt is softer on your aching joints than cement. The road is usually a more direct route and has been cleared of snow and ice so that the agony -err running time is shorter to cover the same distance. Cons: 18wheelers driven by a bleary-eye trucker revving up on uppers trying to hit a shortcut through the suburbs to make his bonus. He won't even feel your bump.
2. Run on the cement. Pros: less likely to become a small lump of goo on the street, fast surface turns your 13 minute mile into a 12:55. Cons: hard surface turns your knees into bags of jiffy pop as you climb the stairs the next day.
3. Run on the grass. Pros: Soft surface is easy on the hulking frame pounding out the miles, Cons: rough uneven surface could cause an ankle turn, slow you down to a 15 minute mile AND THEN....there is the dog poo. People who are walking their dogs, cats and other farm animals like to let little fido roam on to the grass right next to the sidewalk and "make a deposit" at the sidewalk branch bank. This means that when I run alongside I wind up yelling eureka numerous times as the nice squishy treasure oozes through the bottom of my waffle stompers. This is eased somewhat by cold weather, where in the squish is replaced by a crunch.
Thus The Longest Run blog presents, You make the Call! 1, 2, or 3?
4.5 in 53:00 Am I actually trying for 800 miles? Hmmmm that would mean 4.30579 miles for the next 26 days. That would be crazy.
Comments
I will run with you in Portland! But if we run four miles everyday I might die, unless we spend like an hour running everyday.