How forgetting to charge phone gave me a run to remember, with no app readings to distract me from beauty of my surroundings
Without my running app tracking my every stride, I started to recognise nature in all its beauty
It was when I awoke at 5am that the terrible realisation came to the fore. The previous night, just prior to retiring, I’d performed my usual nightly ablutions. I did a quick clean-up of my bedroom, placing dirty clothes in the clothes basket, as well as tossing a mountain of squeezed lemon wedges and empty yellow tonic cans into the trash.
I plugged in my iPhone to charge it overnight then fell asleep. When I woke up, I reached for my cellphone only to discover the battery was at 3 per cent. This was the worst possible thing to see first thing in the morning – well, perhaps not the worst. There have been mornings I can remember waking up to far worse, but that didn’t make the current catastrophe any better.
I blame those squeezed lemon wedges. Where did I read lemon before bedtime was bad for your mental faculties? How else could I have plugged in one end of the phone so deftly and then have totally forgotten to plug the other end into a power source? That’s the sort of thing a serial alcoholic does, not me.
The worst part was I had to be out of the house in 15 minutes in order to participate in a fun run at Bangkok’s Rama IX Park. I was a special invited guest, so I had to show up looking prepared and fit and fashionable. There was no time to charge my phone.
For the past five years I have run with an app that keeps track of all my runs. It tells me exactly how far I run and my time down to the split second.