Zombies

Eryn has been interested in running faster, so I agreed to train with her, despite that running on the hip with metal in it makes me extra nervous.  I asked her if she wanted to use an application to track her time and progress and suggested Zombies, Run! which I had heard was fun and had a zombie story as the impetus for running.

She was very excited about trying it out and since getting it, she's been encouraging me to go running frequently.  Unfortunately, I felt the need to understand the application and listen for adult content, so for every 30 minutes of walking and running she and I do together, I'm doing another 30 minutes by myself to understand the app better.

Some things I've learned:

1. It's mostly age appropriate.  Not always, but she took the Scoobs growing marijuana and raising urban chickens in stride and that's been the worst of it except for a bit of swearing.
2. The zombies are fast.  You need to run when they show up and you should start right away so you have as much time as possible to outrun them.
3. Zombies don't stop because you pause the application to go into target.
4. Zombies don't stop because you stop the application because you're home.  In both cases, you need to finish evading the zombies first, or it's considered a failure.
5. Running with 165 ounces of detergent in your hand is not efficient.  If it were a real zombie evasion situation, you'd just whip the heavy bottle of detergent at the zombie to slow her/him down and put on extra speed.  In real life, you're pretty sure no one at home will be happy with an extra week of dirty clothes because you were really "getting into the story."
6. Running two concurrent rounds of Zombies, Run! after not running at all in over a year and a half and not significantly since your runner's toe kicked in ten years ago is asking for a lot of very sore muscles. I have a new appreciation for how much effort is involved in truly eluding zombies.

I was excited to see that the app syncs with RunKeeper by downloading and uploading the run files (it might work more directly as well; I'm trying to figure that out).  And we've add a few cemeteries into our running options (real ones) so that it's spookier.  I learned there are Rahns buried in our neighborhood, which is who the school and roads and parks are named after.