New mind games

Anyone who has a Kindle will know that there’s a lady who lives inside it who can read your book to you, should you be otherwise engaged or too lazy to do it yourself.  They too might have tried this feature and will have also probably have chosen to leave the lady to twiddle her thumbs, on account of her intonation.  Or rather, relative lack of it.

But this gave me an idea.

We don’t necessarily have to be fully focused listening to something for the sub-conscious to take the information in, so an automaton voice could be quite useful for its monotonous clarity, even if the audible structure of the sentences don’t always make sense.

And since what I had in mind was a boring tempo run, I wondered if it might be an interesting way to inculcate myself with the contents of the book… rather appropriately a book on the subconscious.

Unfortunately the volume would not go high enough for me to be able to hear the words over the rumble of the running machine so I had to don earphones.  Kim was delighted!

This in itself had two side-effects.  Firstly I had to wear a t-shirt to clip the lead on to.  Secondly I had to hold the lead to stop it jumping around and being caught by my hands as I ran… the result of which would presumably be bye-bye Kindle lady as she jumped off the running machine console to land under my feet.

After a few dry runs and thus entangled I started to run and to listen.

I know that as we try to maintain a faster speed, so any surplus conscious processing reduces, so I had the perfect excuse to run slowly and I started out at 6mph and although I tried to go faster, settled on 6.5mph.  Around the five mile mark I realised I was going too slowly to meet my internal goal so I increased first to 6.6, then 6.7 and eventually 6.8mph.  With half a mile to go I increased again to 7.5mph in order to neatly complete 10 miles a few seconds under 90 minutes.  Average 6.67mph.

I have no way of measuring the results of the experiment, but it was certainly more of a positive distraction than the radio station I used to listen to when I’ve done longer distances on the machine in the past.

Why the longer distance?  I may or may not be running a leg or two in the Dargonne overnight Eye to Eye run in a few weeks time… it’s a 64-mile question that I don’t yet have the answer to.  I’ve said I will run if Cliff bought me a ticket to ride (on the London and Brighton Eyes) but only he knows the answer to that at the moment.

But I thought it was worth getting ready just in case!

Of course, I suppose I could be persuaded to do more than a token amount of it if there were a few leveraged monetary pledges for my favourite charity to encourage me and I will take any comments below into consideration…. though hopefully no-one will read this far through the post to take me up on the offer!