distance perception, running

I keep fiddling with heart rate and rest and speed and weather (I can't change that last bit, but I can plan around it) to find my optimal pacing for running longish distances. I had the thought of running from home to the Old North Church on Sunday. This trip takes about 45 minutes in a car. On Sundays, riding the bike to Arlington Heights, waiting for the bus, sitting on the bus for half an hour, and then taking the red line to the green line (my usual combined route) takes somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 hours, depending on the waiting times between connections. My impression (I don't remember why) was that it's 18 miles. Google maps claims that a running route that includes the Minuteman Bike path to Arlington Center and then (choose one) veers onto Broadway, ultimately going via Charlestown, or goes down Somerville Ave and follows the Green Line tracks from Lechmere would be about 12 miles. Huh. That's a pretty big distance mis-match between measured & perceived. If I planned on a 12 minute/mile pace to allow for crossing lots of streets and getting water somewhere, I could do that in 2.5 hours, not wildly longer than the usual way of bike + T. Whether I'd feel like ringing a quarter peal after that is another question.

The all too imminent bucket list

All this thinking about running a marathon (did I mention that? Having run ten miles a couple of weeks ago it seemed clear that I could manage a half marathon by mid-October. After that, what's another two or three hours? To keep my heart rate in the aerobic zone I'd need to be running 11 minute miles, yielding a sub-five hour marathon, in theory). It wouldn't be something to cross off the list, because it was never on the list. I didn't really have a list at all, but running a marathon wouldn't have been on it if I had one. I started thinking about what would be on my list if I made one now. There are some places I'd like to see, but mostly with my (one hopes) decades remaining, I'd like to provide competent and helpful therapy and be a good daughter. As it turns out, those items may be relevant sooner than I'd expected. My mother fell today, chipping the part of her femur into which the replacement hip was shoved (fortunately not cemented) 15 years ago. Surgery is still possible but unlikely - it will probably just have to heal on its own. She's in the hospital now. She and my father have both said not to come yet, and it's true there isn't much I could do besides grill her nurses and PT, I guess. The neighbors have already organized to feed my father, who probably would manage to feed himself anyway. My father said "she'll be bedridden." I know enough to know that that won't be the case, but she will be non-weight-bearing on the involved side for months, probably using a walker. She'll need to do some kind of rehab in a facility for a while, and then do home exercises for ages. I'm pondering going to NC every weekend for an indefinite period of time once she's at home, to help out. In the meantime, I have three weeks left of summer school (more like two, for the online sociology). The obvious thing for me to be doing right now would be to try to work ahead as much as possible, plus tending to household stuff so that I could hop on a plane the second my finals are over. Obviously that is not what I'm doing at the moment. There's a long list of chores that I've been putting off, and now they'll get put off even more. We were finally planning to get the side porch fixed, but I don't want guys doing stuff on the house while nobody is home, so that may get postponed again. I tend to think of myself as having the world's easiest life, leading a slacker existence, but it's probably about time to step up and be useful.