It was a cop out and I can imagine Cliff et al shaking their heads in despair at me, but better that than no run at all.
It was raining this morning and I just couldn’t face the idea of running out into soggy mud & puddles… not today, at any rate. Fortunately we have an alternative in the form of a running machine, which regular readers know gets used a fair amount in the winter: one year, when training for a marathon, I actually ran 20 miles on it, though my mind was numb with boredom before I even got half way.
This morning, in a bid to stave off the boredom of looking at a wall for an hour, I grabbed the iPad and found a playlist of endurance exercise music videos on YouTube. I’m not a regular YouTube watcher so I have no idea how it works, but the concept of a playlist seemed pretty straightforward so I jumped on the machine and set off to the pumping music.
The military adage ‘proper planning prevents P poor performance’ is as relevant to this situation as it in in other areas of life: the third video was a Santander advert, the fourth an ad for a DJ (who didn’t come across as too inspiring from the endless stream of text scrolling across the screen), the fifth a track where the visuals were simply the text from the repetitive song. I had remained hopeful, but at this point I tried to skip the track and ended up out of the playlist and back in YouTube. And frustrated since it’s not so easy to control an iPad where you’re running.
Kim came to the rescue (of the iPad, probably, on reflection) and tried to find something to keep my mind engaged, but found only music with no video. Since the iPad is not really loud enough to hear over the roar of the running machine, she booted up the stereo and after a couple of tries, found some energetic Jazz Funk for me to run to.
My mind was still pondering the Santander ad: I couldn’t help feeling that the client here had not got great value from their ad spend. Aside from the fact that I’m not target market (trust me on that), the insertion was an unwelcome two-minute interruption into a music playlist. Even though the ad was humorous, in its own way, it left me with a distinctly negative feeling towards the company.
And towards YouTube, which has presumably taken money from its client but has clearly misunderstood the reason that someone might choose to use a playlist feature. I won’t bore you with the range of nascent solutions that I started to come up with, suffice to say that it doesn’t seem so very difficult to resolve.
Back on the running machine I had completed 50 minutes of my 60 minute run and with all the musical shenanigans was ready to give up. However, I’m a great believer in the drive towards general resilience through the setting of realistic goals and then seeing them through, so I was forced to push on through to the end.
I was still standing in the same place at the end of an hour, though the belt beneath me had travelled 7.23 miles, an average speed of… hmmm… I’ll let you do the maths!
As a vague appeasement to Cliff, after a cold shower to cool me down, I put on my FosterRuns Gore jacket and got out into the rain to wash Kim’s car.
No photos today, alas … I’ve just bought a MacBook Air and it’s too clever to simply allow me to download photos from my iPhone into my folder for November via a USB lead…