Day 18 - Running naked in circles

A shoe's eye view of my running field. This could make for a very interesting set of photographs.

Running naked in circles. Of course, in running parlance, "naked" means without a watch or Garmin (which I admit is somewhat less exciting than this blog title may have implied). Circles are still circles.

Rhiannon and I share a Garmin watch, a Christmas present from my mum 18 months ago. A couple of months after we got it we both picked up injuries and, where I managed to come back after a further two months, Rhiannon seemed to move from one problem to another. So it's taken her a good year or so to find her way back to doing some running. During that time the Garmin has been mine. All mine. I'm a bit stat-obsessed so I time everything. And I come home and analyse my mile-splits and track the elevation and all the other wonderful things the Garmin allows you to do. I love it.

But now Rhiannon has started running pain-free again. This is of course excellent news, but it does mean I can no longer claim sole rights to the cherished watch. So today when, in tandem with her work colleague, she ran 6 miles home from work - not bad at all for someone who is only just coming back - it seemed only right and proper to offer her our Garmin. Which left me with the prospect of running naked. Garminless. No digital readout tracking my progress. No bleeps to tell me I'd covered another mile. Nothing but my own natural perception to tell me how I was doing. No clothes on.

Still, it needn't be a problem, I thought. I know that the field in the village has a handy circumference of quarter of a mile. So I can jog down there, do the appropriate number of laps in my barefoot shoes, and then jog home. Easy. It should have been. But I discovered today that I can't count laps of a field. I was only ever really trying to do 2 or 3 at a time, but I really could not keep track of even that. I had Marathon Talk playing on my iPod and I was swatting gnats all the way round. Maybe that accounts for it. And I had U2's One playing virtually in my brain as my tempo music (I've found I can keep up my cadence tempo by singing to myself now which is handy). Perhaps I was lost in that. Whatever it was, every time I reached the end of a lap I tried to think back over what I'd just run and I couldn't find it. All the memories looked the same. With nothing to distinguish them I couldn't count the laps.

So I may have run 1.5 miles today. Or 2.25. Possibly somewhere in between. On reflection I have to say that running naked is okay, and circles are fine, but put them together and I am thoroughly confused.