Light Enough to Travel

Long run this morning. A bit late getting out the door. As I had no human company this morning I loaded up my iPod with fresh music. The only times I get a chance to really listen to music these days is either while driving, running or cooking. So I imagined this run to be 2 1/2 hours of listening time - something I'd never otherwise allow myself the luxury of. The new music was somewhat haphazard: I was listening to Pandora last night and heard a band called the "Do Good Tanyas" do a good cover of TVZ's "Waiting Around to Die", so I downloaded 9 of their songs. Then I saw that 2 Cow Garage, a "cowpunk" band that, with the Supersuckers, is about as thrashy as I get these days, had a relatively new album out and downloaded that. And I had a collection of various blues songs from artists I wasn't familiar with to sample.

Listened to the music in that order as I did a familiar long route up to Manayunk, over the 3 Bears hills of northern Belmont Ave., and around the northern part of West Philly. The music did do me well and the shifts in style served to perk up my pace when needed. Weather was chilly but I got warmed up as the sun gathered strength. The only other thing noteworthy was, in a bit of serendipity, I turned onto 65th St. at Haverford Ave. to avoid stopping at a light and passed a most beautiful library building, the Haddington branch of the Phila Free Library.

Todays numbers were 18.5 miles in 2:36:40. Yesterday was a Landowne Sycamore loop - 10 miles in an easy 89:36.