If I had those Google glasses I could watch TV and jog outside. Take THAT, nature! (Project 190, Day 10)

It rained last night and kind of looked like it might rain again today and so this morning I went running at the club instead of along the nature trail I like to run on, which means that I actually I think got a bit more of a workout than I otherwise might have, unless you count the fact that running on a treadmill is not as hard as running outside.

Physically hard, I mean: It's still mentally exhausting because I rarely see other people when I run outside and when I do it's for a brief moment, whereas when I run on a treadmill I see other people all the time and they do stuff like come up to the treadmills at the same time as me, then switch one of the TVs from "CNN Headline News" to "Morning Joe," and that's the TV I was going to watch but I figure I don't want to make a big deal of it, so I let him switch it and instead start up the treadmill and start running and it's nearly 10 minutes before I realize that the guy who put on Morning Joe

(Which is a completely stupid show by the way)

has not even gotten onto a treadmill and isn't in the area and he's gone somewhere else in the club, so apparently he can only work out if somewhere within a quarter-mile a television is showing Morning Joe, but that television cannot be in immediate proximity to him.

Leaving me with a dilemma: All I have to watch now is "Morning Joe," in which a host is saying that the next president will need more "national unity" than we needed on December 8, 1941 to address the economic problems

(Thereby I think indirectly invoking Godwin's law)

and the local morning news which never has any news and which today featured a cloud shaped like a monster, a picture sent in by a viewer, which, okay, I do stuff that too but frankly my cloud looked a lot more like Dumbo than this person's cloud looked like a monster, but either way, it's not something I want to watch while jogging.

And it's weird: I don't watch anything while jogging when I'm outside because nobody will drive ahead of me with a row of televisions, but yet when I'm inside I can't bear the thought of just staring off into space and not watching the TVs, probably because they're right there in front of me and also probably because if I don't look at the TV while I jog I either have to close my eyes or I'll be looking at the mirror and seeing myself but that is not an option, really, because I look disgusting when I jog.

I also could, I suppose, jog on the track, but that poses it's own problems one of which is there's always a class going on mid-track, so that the music they listen to drowns out my music for approximately half of each lap, and the music they listen to is just one giant pulsating disco beat, so as I come around by the class I get this:

[M. Ward's song Magic Trick is used for this example]:

Easy come, and easy go, sometimes without goodbye...
BADUMPBUMPBUMPTHUMPBOMPBOMPBOMP BADUMPBUMPBUMPTHUMPBOMPBOMPBOMP 
One magic trick, just one magic trick..
BADUMPBUMPBUMPTHUMPBOMPBOMPBOMP BADUMPBUMPBUMPTHUMPBOMPBOMPBOMP 

Which isn't my thing.   

Running on a treadmill, despite those mental hazards, is easier than running outside, and not just because there's hills and gravel and possibly bears outside -- you'll say "There's no bears in Middleton, Wisconsin" and you'll be right, right up until you see a bear on the nature trail and you'll die.

I haven't seen a bear, yet, but I did see a fox one night when walking home from the park with the boys and it watched us walk all the way up the road and was both kind of neat and kind of creepy because I was worried it was going to try to poach away Mr Bunches.   

But also, running on a treadmill means you're not carrying your body forward with each step, you're just hopping in place, and while I haven't worked this out scientifically or anything, it seems to me that running forward requires more energy because you are not just pushing yourself up like on a treadmill but also pushing yourself forward, the energy required to push 253 pounds horizontally and upwards being I think more than just to push it upwards.

Also, I can run for longer on a treadmill than outdoors.

SCIENCE!

Today's workout:  Run 2.5 miles,  30:30.
Latest Weight: 253.
Today's song that I really did listen to while I ran and that's why I mentioned it! Magic Trick, M. Ward

 

PS: I didn't think the cloud picture at the start of this post looked like anything; I just liked the way the clouds looked so I took a picture.