Even though this was a long run week (11 miles, the longest run of the year so far… what’s scary is that in 2-3 months the longest run of the easy/short weeks will be 10-12 miles. It’s funny how impossible that seems to think about in advance, but having done in before I know that if we do all the training and run all the scheduled runs until then, it will become possible. I’m going to come back to this in a second, but I’ve got to close these parentheses first!), I had a meeting that was meant to be over at 3 but lasted till 3:45, AND I ran so slowly I was nearly going backwards, I still made it to SnB last night—and I’d even showered! Most impressively of all, Kevin made tasty pasta with faux-meatballs over grilled zucchini for dinner, all in the few minutes we were at home.
I brought my shawl to SnB, since it no longer requires my whole brain now that the pattern includes plain purl rows. Being forced to work on it seemed like a good idea (especially since I’m now trying to finish it by mid-April), but I’ve been weighing the remaining yarn to figure out when it’s time to change patterns, and of course I didn’t bring my scale to the café. So I tried to estimate but was way of and ended up having to unravel a bit when I got home. Complicating matters, once I had the needle out already I decided to weigh the whole thing and it turns out the actual weight differs from what’s on the label (at least using my scale, which may be very wrong). So my calculations about when to change patterns were a little off. Fortunately, I hadn’t gone too far past where I’d gone wrong, so I’m back to where I was before.
But back to the building up slowly to running a marathon—people often find it funny that I knit and run marathons (someone should point them to Runagoggo), since they seem like opposite activities. But I actually think they’re pretty similar, at least mentally, in that you keep doing this relatively simple (and seemingly boring) thing over and over again, and eventually it all adds up to a sweater or a marathon. It’s not the most original thought ever, and it definitely won’t help non-knitters who think they can’t run that far, or non-knitters who think they can’t make a sweater, understand that they can in they tackle it in stages and follow all the steps completely, but it amuses me while I run.
The other way running and knitting relate is yarn mileage, since running has given me a very good idea exactly how far a mile is… so it amuses me to be able to run further than my yarn would reach if it was tied together and stretched out (my current stash mileage is about 5.7 miles, although I haven’t necessarily added in my handspun, since some of it may be folk art rather than stash). At the same time, thinking about a possible yarn purchase in terms of distance to run can act as a deterrent (do I really need a mile of yarn? Think how far a mile is!). But it’s also a neat way to think of the work that goes into finished garments… since an adult sweater could take a mile of worsted or sport-weight yarn (or more), and a pair of socks between 1/8 and 1/4 mile. Think how tiny the amount of yarn used per stitch is relative to the length of a step…
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