Distributed participation (Running Viral Day 6)

This is the sixth day since Boris Johnson told everyone to self-isolate. It is only the second day after he shut down the pubs. Today, the forest was jam-packed with people.

Running with my beautiful red Leki poles, I completed a predict-a-time 10k run today following a predefined course I had mapped out on Garmin beforehand.  My predicted time was 1 hours and 6 minutes but I finished 10.35 km in 1 hour and 9 minutes instead.  It was pretty close I guess.

The drawing I produced is shown above, and I called it "The trees are eating people" for no particular reason other than it didn't really end up looking much like what I had intended: a bird and an oak leaf.  But that's the beauty of being able to name a route you've made: you can call it whatever you want.

This week, including the first six of the CoronaVirus lockdown, I covered over 82 miles at pretty much bang on 10 min/mile pace.  I'm happy with this, and a runner friend has assured me that high mileage at a managed pace can help ensure continued fitness and PB smashing once the races resume.

Today's even was interesting from an academic perspective, insofar as the whole predict-a-time thing can be seen as an example of 'distributed participation' with a-synchronous tallying of results over a defined distance, without defining either the route or starting times.  I would say it's an interesting experiment in mass participation and rule-following / transgression. By the latter, I mean all those people who decided to run together anyway.

I'm feeling more morally ambiguous about this today than I was before (see day 5 for my 'rant'). I mean, what's going on in the grocery stores (while still very civil) is probably more of a threat than a few people gathering out in the forest.

Here's a compilation of tracks for week 1: