Friday, 24 July 2020

Virtual Lakeland 50 – Day 5 (Ambleside to Chapel Stile; 5.6 miles)

It was another unexpectedly early start. I woke up at five past four, lay around for half an hour, then thought I may as well get up and take advantage of the quiet of the morning.

My legs felt surprisingly fresh (especially considering what I’ve already done this week), but for the first couple of miles I battled a general feeling of sluggishness caused in part by the lack of sleep and not helped by the elevation profile of the first 2 miles of my route:
Two-and-a-bit miles takes me to the highest point around here. Paltry by Lake District standards.

I’d had no intention before the last 100 yards of that incline to video any part of my run, but then the idea suddenly popped into my head. I waited until I’d turned off the B-road … and then promptly forgot, only remembering right at the other end of that lane. As I finished recording the first piece, I thought maybe I’d record one other little piece towards the end.

An hour later I had 12 video snippets recorded and it proved to be the most excellent distraction from what I was doing – so much so that my 5.6-mile run came out at 9.4 miles, bringing my mileage for the last five days to 44.4 miles and giving me just 5.6 to cover over the next two days (3.5 of which will be on Sunday, giving me a nice (almost)rest day tomorrow).

As the run progressed, I felt sure I was producing a dreadful, disjointed set of witterings that wouldn’t be fit to be seen, but I was surprised when I watched them back that it wasn’t as cringeworthy* as I thought. So, I’ve just spent some hours on a steep learning curve as to how to edit video (all done on my phone, because my laptop is too old to run modern editing software).

The YouTube video below (click on play button on the thumbnail below, or on this link) is the result:
Top tip: YouTube has a handy facility to speed up playback, so a 10 minute video can be played faster if you want to have a look but don’t want to spare that amount of time. If you do that it’ll also make it look like I was running faster than I was!

Excuse the dodgier bits of camerawork – I’ve never tried to record anything whilst running before, either scenery or myself.

(post-blog note: Gah! Just realised the caption at the beginning of the video says 'Thursday 24 July'. Should say 'Friday'. It took hours to process and upload, so I'm not going to correct it just now.) 

(*although both Mick and I dissolved into giggles watching the penultimate snippet, (the immediately post-run one) as I talked about doing more today and less tomorrow!)

2 comments:

  1. How on earth do you hold the camera/phone? I have trouble holding them still while I am just standing still myself. Well done with all the records.

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    1. I held my phone in my hand, at arm's length, trusing to the stability software to do its job (which it mostly did, although there are a few really shaky bits). It wasn't entirely comfortable running that way, particularly in the latter stages, when my arm started getting tired and I had to swap to my left hand, where it's trickier to avoid putting my hand over the lens. Little did I know at the time quite how much effort my shoulder/neck muscles were putting into holding up that phone - more about that in today's post.

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