Heart-Shaped Box

3 mile Heart-Shaped Box Loop

To keep things interesting, but still keep a finger on the pulse of how far I've gone on any given run, I often use pre-planned routes. When you can't get to a park with mile markers, don't have technology to take with you on the road, or don't want to do much more prep work than closing your laptop and stepping out your door, these Google mapped neighborhood runs are handy. On hotter days I keep the loops short, so I can hydrate & refuel in consistent intervals at a makeshift waterstation I have set up near home. It works out well because, despite early possible suspicions to the contrary, my neighbors, as far as I can tell, do not have designs against me, and leave my water/food supply alone while I'm spending hours at a time running patterns you might find in a box of Lucky Charms* past their windows at any given moment of the day or night. 

I've had this particular little 3 mile loop (the one shown above) mapped out for quite some time now. It's the least hilly of my running options that still covers the 3 mile range in one go**. Just yesterday, I was faced with a 13.1 mile run on my training schedule—the halfway half marathon, as it were, because there's only 8 weeks left of training!—and I went at it alone, as is often the case, running slight variations on this same heart-shaped pattern in just over 2 hours. 

This past week saw another kind of heart beat me to the punch: right smack dab in the middle of Tokyo. Joseph Tame ran his own half marathon with a course that resembles the ubiquitous Apple logo, as a thankful send off for Steve Jobs. I'm familiar with parts of the path he made this logo's run in, and am quite envious of the nice areas he ran through. If this is a race that catches on as something annual, I'd be interested to give it a go. 

See why iHeart Steve Jobs

Footnotes:

*Lucky Charms™ are not vegan. The marshmallows used to form such fun shapes for kids contain gelatin. We do not condone their consumption, only their use as a pop culture reference. 

**I have 1 mile loops that I keep handy for the sake of variety, and the convenience of easy miles (since these are basically flat), but only rely on these to fill in the gaps in longer runs. Though the idea of running a flat course half marathon is appealing, the idea of running the same 1 mile loop thirteen times in a row is very much less so.