jmglov's blog
A blog about stuff but also things.
A blog about stuff but also things.
"Is this the lake we're running around?"
My sister uttered these fateful words on a sunny day in May 2024, knowing not the events she would set into motion. For the lake she was referring to, dear reader, was none other than Lake Mälaren, which:
is the third-largest freshwater lake in Sweden (after Vänern and Vättern). Its area is 1,140 km2 (440 sq mi) and its greatest depth is 64 m (210 ft). Mälaren spans 120 km (74.6 mi) from east to west.
I responded flippantly at the time, probably something to the tune of "How much time you got?", and she laughed, but unbeknownst to me, an idea was planted in the fertile soil of her mind, one which would sprout months later in a text conversation.
"So Josh," she probably wrote (I'm far too lazy to look up what she actually wrote) "remember when I asked you about running around that lake? Why don't you just do it?"
"OMG what is wrong with you?" I possibly responded. "Don't you remember me saying that it's like a million miles"–I have no idea how many miles 300-ish kilometres is–"in circumference?"
"Yeah," she maybe said, "but what if you didn't do it all at once? You know how Grandpop hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in fits and starts? You could do the same thing, right?"
She had me there. Whilst I certainly can't run 300-ish kilometres in one go, there's no good reason why I can't run around the damned thing 20-ish kilometres at a time. Just rinse and repeat 15 times and Bob's my uncle, right? (Actually, Will's my uncle, but that's neither here nor there.)
It just so happened that around the same time, in a great fit of irony, I ran down to the lake from my house for a swim, capped off as always by a dive off a 5 metre platform deployed for the amusement of beachgoers (save when the lake is actually frozen over, because diving headfirst into ice is discouraged by 9 of 10 leading brain surgeons).
I've done this hundreds of times, but when I hit the water this time, my left hand caught the water in a way that caused my left arm to rotate in a direction that the human shoulder joint is apparently not designed to do, and since I'm famously "over 35", that led to my shoulder hurting whenever I raise my left arm above my head. 🙄
So I didn't run for a few months, but I did start plotting my path around the lake, and last week, on a particularly mild December day (it was 9° C, somehow), I decided to take a run clockwise down the lakeshore, thinking I could always stop and walk back to a bus stop or tunnelbana station if my shoulder started hurting mid-run. My plan was to first run down to my usual beach (4.5 kilometres from my house), then continue down the shore to Alvik station on the Green line, which I guessed might be 15-ish kilometres from the beach. In addition to my usual Runkeeper app (which I plan to replace with a ClojureScript app in Scittle one of these days), I tracked my run with a new app I had installed, Organic Maps, which uses OpenStreetMap data and can export GPX files.
To cut to the chase (something I find difficult to be sure), I made it down to Alvik!
The run turned out to be 14.07 km in total, which meant that I got just under 10 km of the way around Mälaren. Only 30 more runs to go! 🎉
