Poetry in Motion

I’ve recently taken up running, in a vain attempt to revitalise my tar-stained, smoking-shrunken lungs. Make them feel a bit less like two wizened, blackened prunes wheezing away inside my chest.

One thing I’ve noticed, though – physical exercise is hard work. Especially when you’re not used to it. At the moment, I start to hurt after the first four of five paces, and it just gets worse from there on in. I do reach a kind of plateau of pain after about ten minutes: then I find I can run on at the same level of discomfort for half an hour or so, but it’s still sore, and the effort in making each pace is only the worsened by the certain knowledge that there’s countless more to go before I can ultimately collapse in a heap in the comfort of my own home.

Obviously what’s needed is some kind of distraction device. Something to engage my brain and stop its continual whispers of how easy it would be to just stop and sit down, or (depending on how far I’ve gone) just keel over and die. I need to keep my head occupied while my body gets on with doing what I’ve set out do. I’ve seen small mechanical pedometers which you attach to your belt, which, after you’ve set your average stride distance on a little dial, use a weighted spring to detect a footfall and click up the mileage accordingly.

Wire this up to a sunglasses-based heads-up-display, and you’ve got my idea in a nutshell. Take a virtual story out with you. The sunglasses superimpose a line of text over your vision, and the pedometer (after being suitably adjusted to both stride distance and reading speed) jogs the text along accordingly. If your pace starts to flag, then the story slows and creeps along your vision: if the pedometer catches you slipping into walking pace, it interjects three dots into the text, and shows you nothing until you start running again and the story resumes.

Of course, you need to make sure you’re running to a perfectly timed, perfectly written suspenseful short story; something that makes you want to read (run?) on, whilst avoiding the “even-though-I’m-on-my-last- legs-and-about-to-be-sick-I’m- still-jogging-on-the-spot-in-my-living-room-just-to- get-to-the-end” nightmare. Might be a good idea to run to poetry – that is writing with a built-in rhythm to it, after all. Blank verse might be a little tricky, but anything that rhymes should assist in the placing of one foot before the next.

“On again, on again, on again onward, Out of the valley of death ran the one lung-dead.”

Or something. Iambic pentameter is probably best avoided, unless you’re into speed waltzing. Quick quick slow, quick quick slow… Oh, for that third step respite…