Fire Above, Ice Below

I was planning on running every day this week except for Friday, which is my work Christmas dinner followed by a trip to Lewes for continued work drinking - I will probably walk over the hill to Lewes from Glyndebourne though, which does count as exercise. I didn't get out today though, as I ended up having to stay late and I have still got rather a lot to sort out at home this evening too. However, I did do the same full route of just under 4 miles on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday - even in the snow on Wednesday. In fact, it was much colder Tuesday, although that may have something to do with the extra gloves and hat I wore Yesterday. On Tuesday I totally thought I was getting frostbite for the first 10-15 minutes, until the blood started pumping into my hands at which point I got chilblains instead.

So this is the route that I have been running, except that I haven't been running it from A to B, I've been running it from my house to my house, and in fact the gap between A and B has been lengthened into this:

The best thing about the last few days is that I have finally got my own, working mp3 player. I had to upgrade my phone and so I got one which could do the job as well, and it was free to boot. It's also good because it means that I have my phone on me while running in case anything ever does go wrong. At the moment it only has space for about 10 songs, but I've ordered a memory expansion so that should sort me out properly. AS it is, I've been able to notice a few things about good music to run with. I've found that longer songs work much better than really short and fast punk music, because it doesn't encourage me too run to fast and thus run out of steam and at the same time, by the time each song is finished I've run much further, so it feels less arduous. 

Best of all so far has been Iron Maiden and Agalloch - for a combination of steady rhythms and long songs. I'm tempted to try even more doom, Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride for instance, although I'm worried that the longer tracks by those bands might actually be too slow. Power metal is also pretty good, I had Sonata Arctica's Deathaura on my playlist yesterday which was pretty awesome, but the cheese factor might become problematic. I was disappointed that sticking on Faster by the Manics didn't make me go any faster, or maybe that was the problem, because I ran out of steam by the end of it. I shall experiment further - I intend to push up to an 8 mile run while I'm in London, and hopefully my memory card will have arrived in time to keep me entertained while I do it.