I did my run in reverse today. I needed to get something to FedEx which is at the other direction from my usual route. I thought it would be a good thing to drop that off at the beginning of my run, rather than coming back and getting it and running it down at the end. The reason I run my usual route is it gives me a nice uphill, but early enough in my run that it isn’t horrible. Also, I only need to cross a major street once. I do various variations where there are options, but except for choosing a different side street, I’ve got a pretty familiar route.
As I was running I was thinking about shaping charts I need to do. I was aware that I kept having to stop in my mind and run my route in the usual direction to keep track of where I was when I had options. At one point I went the way I usually go, because it just didn’t click soon enough to reverse it.
Reverse Shaping
Does that seem at all like what it is like to do the other shoulder and neckline when you are knitting? Even when you are following carefully constructed instructions, you are likely to make more mistakes on the reverse side than the other. A couple of things come into that:
- Muscle memory (and that happens really quickly),
- An unbalanced pattern (even if it was balanced, it becomes un-balanced by the shaping)
- Beginning at a different place within the pattern than at the other side.
In the pattern I was thinking about the pattern appears to be balanced, but it isn’t quite, then you start taking parts of it away with shaping, and you aren’t starting the pattern in the same place as you had on the other side, that is all harder to process than we expect. It leads to little mistakes, which can be frustrating.
Different Results When You Reverse
The reverse side may not look the same as the original side. How the pattern is worked may open up problems you didn’t anticipate, like, in the pattern I’m thinking about, too many stockinette stitches in comparison to the other side. Doing a reverse run, I found that things were a bit different too. It made it more difficult to see traffic is some situations, the running surface was different on the opposite side of the street, and ultimately, I don’t know that I recreated the hill I usually run up. I covered the same territory, but it wasn’t quite the same.
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