October 13th – Day 8 of “The Commute”

Yesterday was a “fun” day here in quarantine. I decided to run a marathon. Problem is, there is no running or exercising allowed during the scheduled outdoor time. So. I decided to do it entirely within my room.

I started by measuring the length of the room – about 28 feet (assuming my phone charging cable is 3ft long). Then calculated how many “laps” I would have to run —

26.2mi * 5280 ft / mile / (56 ft / lap ) = 2470 laps

I decided to add in some for measurement error and just to make sure I did enough so decided on a nice even 3000 laps.

Here I thought “oh it’s just a marathon, should only take 5 hours at most” … boy was I wrong.. and I should have known; based on my 100 lap practice run the day before where I realized I was spending about 70% of each lap’s time in the ‘turnaround’ zone ; which means decelerating and then turning around and accelerating.

In the end it took me 8h45m to complete the 3000 “laps” , which is 31.8 miles… and my watch thought I went 53.86 miles because it didn’t quite understand how turnarounds worked.

You can find an awfully boring and poorly edited collage video of my run here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/131gLbR53kxwaUZT8DCP3nu6xtAuRyXBX/view?usp=sharing

There’s a point in there right after 5 minutes into the video (which was like my 1500 lap mark; so the half-way point) where I just look into the camera and go “this is stupid” . Let’s just say I was hurting by the end! And I’m pretty sore today … and sitting in a hotel room isn’t great for stretching / recovery

And on top of being a generally terrible experience, I also blew out my shoe … and I haven’t even gotten to Pole yet 😦

Other than that, everything is going great. I’ve been getting my 3 meals delivered every day. I’ve been sitting in a lot of zoom meetings (USAP trainings, SPT calls, WO trainings, etc). Weather has been weird. Super windy and rainy. Sun peeks out every so often which is nice.