Marathon Madness · 9:12pm Apr 26th, 2015
Never run a marathon, it's a crazy idea.
But seriously, never again. Gonna downgrade to halfs for the foreseeable future and just work to improve my time as opposed to my distance.
Anyway, like last time I spent the majority of the race working through a backlog of unread chapters by means of a text-to-speech app.
• Most recent chapter of Rites of Ascension
• Last chapter of Luna's Protégé
• Most recent chapter of My Little Apprentice: Apogee
• Most recent chapter of Reformation of the Hives
• Most recent chapter of Unyielding
• First chapter of Across the Sea of Time
• First chapter of Midnight's Radiance (I kind of broke my personal rules on this one, it's the sequel to Luna's Protégé above and I usually prefer to get comments in one chapter before reading the next associated chapter. Oops.)
• Most recent chapter of Tales of the Tutelary Spirits (Part of possibly the best extended future fic series out there, look them up if they aren't on your radar.)
• Most recent chapter of Epic Unicorn History: The Beards of Harmony (This was posted on Dec. 31st, so I didn't even read it the same year it updated. 
Sorry Present!)
• There was only a couple miles left at this point, so I just switched to a once-through of the Rainbow Rocks soundtrack. IIRC Shine Like Rainbows was playing when I crossed the finish line.
Comments on those chapters incoming inside the next day or so. I'm already planning on calling into work sore tomorrow (my boss is a runner, he'll understand), so I should have plenty of time to hammer those out if I don't get to them tonight. I'm thinking of including a small-text "Marathon Madness story #X" line at the bottom of these, just for record-keeping and a small amount of self-promotion (not that I as a non-author have a particular need to self-promote, so I may not).
But first, I think I'm going to go lie down for a little while. My god do my feet and legs hurt.
Which Text-to-speech app are you using? I think I've asked you that before but I don't remember the answer.
Is Luna's Protégé any good? I can always go for some magic trio story.
I think i'd be too distracted to pay attention to the story while running anyways...
Yeah, wondering about the text-to-speech program myself.
3019503 3019648 I load chapters up in mobile Chrome, copy the text, share a single word over to Talk - Text to Voice, and paste the chapter that's in my buffer. It ends up being really laggy if the chapter is truly epic-sized, like 15k+ words, but only the app interface and not the playback, so even those work as long as you can get it playing in the first place. Most chapters are short enough that that doesn't come up.
I used to be able to just share the chapter URL and the app would load it, but one of the last site updates added a floating author details pane with blog posts and stuff, and that shows up in the text of the page before any chapter text which means you have to either listen to it or scroll past it in a slightly annoying interface. Just highlighting and sharing the text of the chapter over might work, but for some reason I don't do that and I don't remember why.
The app also can save MPGs of the voice over, so in theory you could load up a bunch of chapters and save them aside for more convenient playback. That adds some prep-work so I've never bothered to.
(I just realized I'm a chapter behind on Sugarfree from when I was super busy in December. I'll try to get to it in the near future.)
You crazy!
But in all seriousness, congratulations with the race! That's an accomplishment to be proud of.
3020066
Nah, it's a pretty dang long one. Think I might've lost a bunch of readers from how daunting it looked.
Good on you for keeping up on your running. I was pretty good about it myself until I had a particularly long hospital stay (then later, a surgery) and ended up losing most of my muscle mass in the process. Been slowly working my way back up since.
If there's one thing I learned about distance running, it's that you absolutely, positively need to distract yourself, or you won't make it. Never tried audio books, though. Just felt like there wouldn't be enough energy to keep my mind off the fact that MY LUNGS ARE ON FIRE
Guess it depends on what you're reading.
3021376 Audio books by way of listening to fics has worked out well for me. I logged over 300 miles in training this spring leading up to the marathon, and nearly all of it was spent in listening to stories this way. When I first started running I just listened to music, and while that worked fine too, this way I can kill two birds with one stone and work through some of my never ending backlog.
It's okay, I've only just started working on the next chapter as it is. :B
3023652 In truth that's why I've never felt too bad about it. The mild guilt and occasional panic only really sets in when I'm sitting on a story with multiple unread chapters.
My God, man! You were able to run a marathon and listen to several stories at the same time!? What is this higher brain function that you seemingly possess!?
Also...
Also-also, congrats on the marathon.