iWrite- Gloria Pulley

I’m bad with technology.  There, I said it! I’m pretty sure that the cows from Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type have a better handle on technology than I do.  Typing up a paper and surfing the web is pretty straightforward, but anything beyond that instantly turns into a maze of pop ups and error messages.  Yet, I survive. 

Hearing this, it may come as a shock that I’m writing about how one piece of technology has positively impacted my life- my iPhone.  Not so much the actual phone part, but more of the iTunes/Spotify/Pandora/SoundCloud/YouTube part.  This revelation that technology isn’t all bad hit me one morning on a run in Hilton Head, SC.

Promising my dad that I would, I grabbed my phone on the way out the door around 5.  With one foot out the door I stopped and grabbed my headphones as well.  I’d give this a try.  Up to this point, I had never run with my music, and I was baffled by anyone who did.  Why risk the safety of my child (I mean phone) for something I enjoyed so little?  Five miles later, I understood.

Nothing particularly magical happened on that run but I did notice something that I had never thought about, I couldn’t hear myself breathing.  This sounds silly, but listening to myself breathe was something that bothered me, and often discouraging me from running farther than what my lungs could handle.  Flash forward year, I would not be caught dead without my music and have gone so far as to replace my running buddies with my headphones (thus beginning the downward spiral into my antisocial sophomore cross country season, but that’s another story). 

So, has my life really improved from this experience?  It depends on who you ask.  All I know is that I actually look forward to running, and I owe it all to my frustrating buddy- technology.

 (Considering it takes up the majority of my free time, there will be many running stories.  Prepare yourself.)