Playing it safe at 6am
It’s 6:15am. I shouldn’t be awake at 6am, I’m a student, dammit. I shouldn’t be up until at least lunchtime Neighbours (If there is still such a thing as a lunchtime Neighbours. There was in the olden days when I was on the dole in Liverpool. I need to stop saying ‘in the olden days’ though as I said it twice yesterday at my first day back at university and I’m 42, not 92).
The reason I’m up at this unstudently hour is because I want to go for a run before going to university (I’m getting fed up of spelling university in full but Shaun tells me off if I call it uni although even my mum calls it uni and she’s hardly down with da kidz) for the first playwriting seminar of the year. I also want to go for a run early so I can try out my new Run Safe running light.
The Run Safe running light is a little light that attaches to your running shoe laces. It just clips on, so there’s no faffing about threading laces through holes.
The light comes on automatically when it senses motion, so you don’t have to worry about turning it on or off.
(Sorry about the blur but it turns itself off quickly and so it wasn’t easy to get a photo of my foot not moving.)
It’s a sensitive little soul though and will come on at the slightest movement, i.e. if it’s on a table and you walk past it. The box says it will flash for 520 miles but it’s going to be flashing in transit so I wouldn’t order it from America if I were you.
I was a bit worried about looking a bit of a dick with a red light flashing on my foot and I expressed my dick concerns to Twitter who reassured me that it’s ok to look like a dick if it’s in the interest of health and safety.
By the time I left the house, the sun had come up but I took my red flashing light for a run anyway. There’s not much to say about the Run Safe light really – you can see what the benefits are. It’s light (10g), easy to fit to your shoe, and turns itself on and off automatically. The only downside is that I could hear it clacking against my shoe when a quiet bit of music came on, so if you don’t listen to music when you run, that might be annoying (or I might not have fixed it firmly enough to my lace. Also, I have super-sensitive hearing).
A three mile run was on the schedule for today and I’d plotted out a roads-with-pavements-only route and dodged children walking to school (they start early, don’t they? I was pleased to see them walking though and not being driven. Loads of kids round here get driven to school. In my day I had to walk all the way from Essex to London to go to school (yeah, ok, so it was only about a quarter a of mile but that’s not the point)) and dog walkers.
I got back to the house at 2.87 miles and decided to carry on and do the final .13 miles and anyway, Liiines by Ghostpoet had just come on my iPod and I wanted to listen to that.
When I got back I was a teensy bit pleased to see that – although I had walked a bit – I’d done my three miles in 11.01 minute miles which is my old slow-average. Now I need to get back to my old not-so-slow-average which doesn’t mean that’s a fast-average but just a not-so-slow-as-really-slow-average.