A short list of running workouts you've never done

It's become an urgent time for some real in-motion procrastination

I felt good at the start of my run early yesterday afternoon, almost bouncy, which so rarely happens that I felt the urge to take advantage by ripping through twenty perhaps untimed but legitimately up-tempo minutes. But when I stepped out the door, it was 90 cloudless Fahrenheit degrees outside with no perceptible wind, meaning that I had chosen a bad time either to go running or to immediately feel great while doing so.

I almost never feel too beat up to keep going once I’m out the door, but because I walk a lot and rarely do truly easy runs by myself—an admission I was forced to make after applying the combined 20-percent age-and-altitude pseudo-conversion I concocted from this post (~16.7 percent for age) and this one (~3.3 percent for 5,300’ elevation)—I just as rarely feel fresh. (One possible reason: I’ve probably run close to 100,000 lifetime miles in my 38 years of doing it. But because I’ve only kept formal track of my mileage for relatively short chunks of my running lifetime, I’ll never be able to solidly claim membership in this “club,” which is no longer tiny anyway.)

I elected not to run hard, which seems to be a part of every algorithm my brain follows once my body is undergoing self-propagated translational motion. But I did get a lot of sweat in my left eye at one point. That’s my good eye. I’ve been practically blind in the other one since birth, although I could navigate the world, slowly, if I lost the left one. I wouldn’t be allowed to drive, even though given my go-kart for grownups I’d be able to do that just as benignly as I can now. I might be able to read books if they were 2’ long and 1’ wide and contained no more than seven or eight words per page.

When this happened and I was clearing the fluid from my left eye, I naturally slowed down. Part of this was because I was on a pothole-filled street, but most of it was instinct; it’s not natural to keep moving at the same speed when your visual field is eliminated or diminished. This led me to spend the remaining twenty-five minutes or so of a pleasant easy run dreaming up ways runners like me who constantly put off workouts can pass the time in workout-ish ways.

Eyes Wide Shut. It’s generally not a good idea to run with your eyes closed or otherwise in total darkness. But if you can find a level surface extending for a couple hundred meters in most directions, and have some assurance that nothing is going to enter your path, you don’t need to see jack squat. But that faster you run with no visual support, the more your brain will wish that you could see and impose consequences even if you’re tell yourself you’re not holding back.

It’s instructive to go to a runnerless or sparsely populated track, choose a middle lane, and run 100 meters with your eyes closed either all-out or at what you believe is your race pace for a given short distance, like an 800 meters. I advise the latter, since you probably don’t know your all-out full-vision 100m time anyway, but are likely to have a solid idea of what you could run for two laps.

I’ve talked to a few other runners who have become bored enough to try this. Most have found what I have found multiple times over the years: You won’t be running within ten percent of the speed it “feels” like you’re running. This effect comes into play when running with your eyes open in near-complete darkness; I’ve had very satisfying evening tempo runs on intermittently lit multi-use paths that were pockmarked only by being slower than they “felt” for reasons hard to pin down.

Shadow fartlek. This is a good summertime session, but really only works if you live in mid-northern latitudes and either a few hours before or a few hours after noon. The goal here is to run hard when you’re in shadows and easy when you’re in direct sunlight. I should also mention that this only works if you run near structures capable of intercepting sunlight from above, such as trees, buildings, and other stationary objects taller than you.

Sometimes, you can even pick fixed time periods, like 2 minutes on/2 minutes off, merely by running along an east-west street and switching sides. If there are trees along the south sidewalk, you’ll be in shadows there but not on the opposite sidewalk if the street is wide enough.

I prefer to just wait for the light to change naturally. I also like to flip the above script and run hard in sunlight and easy in the shadows, where no one can see me retching.

"How Fast Are They Going?" I include rec paths in almost every run, and I’m usually just trying to accumulate minutes. This allows me the freedom to capriciously change directions, consciously dodge anticipated adversities (e.g., a gaggle of Karens strewn three wide across the path 100 meters ahead) while pursuing persons or events of possible interest.

This freedom has consequences. I will often be curious about the pace of someone running in the other direction; a runner might look speedy from afar but more pedestrian in passing or conversely. Sometimes, I’ll mine this curiosity and turn around about ten seconds after someone passes me so I can figure out how close I was to guessing his or her pace. I commit at this stage to not closing the gap for at least a half-mile or so (if I turn out to have been moving faster) or picking up the pace to keep the gap constant (if I discover I was the slower one). I also have a rule not to stalk anyone for more than a mile or so even if they are unwittingly leading me toward home.

In case you’re wondering if this has led to any interesting pursuits, it has not. I can usually tell when a legitimately fast runner or group of runners is approaching, especially when I spot University of Colorado symbology. I’ve seen Sage Hurta out there, and I don’t need to be reminded of how hard I would need to work to keep up with a 1:57 800m runner loping along to maintain the general glow between meaningful displays of fitness.

Subdivision treasure-hunting. This is a poor choice of workout-postponement if you’re already cranky; it’s a good one if you use moderate to inadvisable quantities of nonprescription (for now) psychotropic medications.

Run through a McMansion-rich subdivision, because no matter where you are in the United States—Boulder, Little Rock, Concord, Roanoke—you’ll see houses filled with people who buy their kids toys to leave poking out into the sidewalk or right in the street.

Traditionally, these have included a preponderance of the notorious, usually silver-painted scooters that first befouled America during the Clintons administration. There used to be more little red wagons, but those haven’t disappeared entirely. The unifying factor is that all of these things are easy to trip over; wagons are low and have handled, and scooters are just trip-bars welded together and fitted with wheels for ease of neighborhood terrorism.

The main idea here is to stay in the same subdivision until you count a given number of distinct pedestrian-adversarial items (say, ten) before returning to the nearest thoroughfare. This is likely to have you passing the same houses multiple times, which is fun because people who live in these places like staring for some reason. So do I.

If you run shy of inanimate objects to condemn, start counting Karens and Chads instead. Set the lower limit at 1.5 times the number of estimated stand-alone domiciles in the subdivision; you’ll be done in five minutes. And for locals, my favorite location for executing this session is the subdivision just east of Cherryvale near McSorley.

The human moment. I don’t know how many obviously struggling people you see while running. I see a lot. I see encampments, active and abandoned, under every overpass that includes a path and many that don’t. Boulder has always been a draw for homeless people who inaccurately perceive it as a left-leaning, open-arms place. But this phenomenon is happening everywhere. What’s happened in my hometown of Concord in just the past year is really, really heartbreaking.

In adulthood, I have spanned the prosperity range from comfortable to a basically null existence. I always had a home to go to if I was sober, and I turned my back on that opportunity, conservatively, dozens of times. These days, I am content to live on savings and a persistent lack of alarm about the future.

When I walk or run with Rosie, I stop along the creeks to let her swim. I often encounter obviously homeless people sitting there, waiting for whatever, usually alone, trying to stay more out of the way than people already want them. This usually leads to a few minutes of conversation and some pets for Rosie. I think the humans get more out of this than the dog does despite her eminent and implacable cheerfulness.

I’ve been thinking more about this lately because of Roger Waters. One of the founding members of Pink Floyd—which will go down in history as musically underrated no matter how much posthumous mainstream acclaim it gets—he’s been in the news lately for political reasons.

I don’t know what you think of Roger Waters; I don’t care what you think of him. I don’t know just what I’m suggesting here, either, other than for you to watch the clip below recorded at a recent performance in Boston, and be unexpectedly nice to someone who obviously doesn’t have many someones to rely on. It usually takes me already stopping for a different reason to bother with such social transactions, because I’m buried in my own array of devilishly self-organizing mires. But these transactions matter, and they’re free.

Waters is currently on a This Is Not a Drill tour, which will take him and possibly me to Denver next week. Despite his message being delivered with all the painless subtlety of someone with a recently shaved scrotum squatting down naked into a kiddie-pool of rubbing alcohol, it’s the passion that prevails.

Digression. Roger Waters, who is English, wrote The Wall (both the 1979 album and the 1982 movie, not just the three-part song “Another Brick in the Wall”) because he already viewed aspects of his own education as an imposition on his freedom, I think mainly because of the (comparatively minimal) influence of the Anglican Church. He's been railing for his entire life about people being used as pawns by “democratic” governments worldwide. This is nothing new for him; anyone who thinks he's an ancient ex-celeb angling for post-career attention has no idea. Waters isn't someone with a platform who's using it as a bullhorn for opportunistic nonsense. Roger Waters is and always has been creatively and personally fueled by righteous anger.

ABITW Part II was the band's only #1 song in the U.S. In fact, no other Pink Floyd song has cracked the top ten. I remember everyone singing the "We don't need no education..." lyrics at full volume during recess when I was in fourth grade, which I'm sure went on all over the country in the spring of 1980 (except at schools that removed that tune from the normal recess Top 40 rotation, as some surely and ironically did). Also, the song was in direct competition with disco, although that was fading quickly, and that explains the characteristic off-beat rhythm-guitar arrangement that otherwise surely wouldn't have been there ten years earlier or later.

I don’t think a song like this one—which contains two of the most iconic classic-rock guitar solos ever devised, both by David Gilmour—would even make it onto the radio today. I'm glad Waters’ and Gilmour’s apocalyptic feuding didn’t prove lethal to Pink Floyd until well after the group had composed, released, and performed a great deal of unforgettable music.