Tag: running

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Everest

It’s kinda nice that after this entry into a new [arbitrary] year lots of companies trying to sell something email with a summary of what I did for 2019. I wrote about my cinema trips in this communication. I’ve now had an email from Strava with a link to my summary for the year. They had some flashy graphics and moving things but there was a summary for me.

2019 Fitness
2019 Fitness

I think the important thing to note from this summary is although I ran/rowed quite farand that not all exercise sessions were included the second law of thermodynamics still runs true for humans.

Energy in – energy out = getting fat

While my fitness has stayed mostly constant, there have been periods of time when I didn’t exercise much because of other commitments. I have recently been eating too much which means I have to start eating less to balance it out. Having to buy new trousers was enough of a warning and it’s time to get the fat burned. I have spent quite a large portion of the last decade aiming for a particular mass and not reaching it so it might be time to make my goal more reachable as we head into the 20s [also noting that it seems to be getting harder the older I get].

Recent exercise sessions have been run-walk rather than run because of extra mass considerations and so I hope to get back to full-on running soon. Also, my number 5 mess dress uniform was quite “snug” before I gained this extra mass and I need it to fit at the end of April.

Mount Everest is 29,029ft tall and it turns out that over a year I have gained slightly more than that in altitude.

Happy New Year all you readers of this rubbish.

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Not 4WD

One of the laces on my running shoes died just over a week ago. I’d been thinking of getting new ones as I was sure these were now two years old and running out of steam. I also know I had written about the new trainers when I got them as a way of keeping tabs on when I bought them. It turns out that was just about three years ago! Here’s what they looked like new:

New – three years ago

This is what they look like now:

Three Years Old
Three Years Old

You can see they are worn, with holes appearing, there’s almost no tread on the soles. So, I took a trip to a local running shop and went for blue this time:

New Blue
New Blue

I guess we’ll see how long these ones last.

By the way, this is the 1501 communication published on this site. Keep an eye out for more over the next few years!

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It Seems A Lot

A little while ago Sony Entertainment made a video giving a run down of my time on the PS4 and you can see that in this communication. I guess these types of videos don’t take a huge amount of effort to produce and they might even have started on Faceshit, I don’t know. However, the other day Strava came up with one for me. I use Strava to track my running and other exercise. This year I’ve also done some rowing on the erg and a little swimming.

Here’s my Strava video:

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An Air Powered 5k

This morning I spent a lovely few hours with old friends beating up an inflatable assault course and generally having a lovely time. First thing to note and to be honest although I’ve had the race number for a couple of months now today was the first time I noticed the devilish connotations:

The Number Of The East
The Number Of The East

The running was great fun. The obstacles more so as I tried to make sure I vaulted or somersaulted as much as possible. I even bunny hopped up all the “steps” on one of the obstacles. It was great fun, although I might have a nap soon.

Leaping Over A Wall
Leaping Over A Wall

My time doesn’t matter because we ran as a team. I’m almost tempted to do the 10k next year!

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Recent Running Routes

Sometime back I started using the Strava app on my phone as some friends were using it and they weren’t on Map My Run. The Strava app has the ability to use a photo taken as the main picture in the saved area rather than a map. I think it looks quite good and I have been trying to take a photograph whenever I am out running.

Here’s what it looks like shared to twitter:

So, here’s a collection of photographs taken while out exercising.

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Burn It

So, the xmas break, which requires food and alcohol, along with a significant drop in exercise has resulted in what I would call a considerable gain of mass. I have written about mass loss before and I wrote more here also. To lose mass you have to burn more energy than you consume. It’s that simple [and no, you don’t have a gland problem!]. Not a lot else to it, it’s the psychology of it all that will fuck you over. I like eating and I comfort eat. It’s the self discipline that hurts. I know that when I am a healthy mass and exercise I can maintain that mass and still have blow-outs now and then.

So, before I get to my numbers, here are some facts about fat and exercise.

  • One pound of fat is roughly 3500 kcalories.
  • 10 metres walked or ran is roughly one kcalorie burnt.
  • Daily intake for a man should roughly be 2500 kcalories.

So, my ideal mass would be <80Kg. However, I’ve not been that for a long time and I would be happy with <82.5Kg which comes in at 13 stone in old money. I am currently hovering around +90Kg. This upsets me greatly, but it is my own fault. Now is the time for action. Let’s just assume I want to lose 10Kg just to make the numbers easy. It’s worth knowing how long this will take and what effort I will face. I think many people are unrealistic about mass loss.

Some maths:

10Kg is approximately 22 pounds of fat to be lost.

22 pounds of fat is roughly 77 000 kcalories extra that needs to be burnt.

If I reduce my daily intake by 500 kcalories then this would take 22 weeks, as I would lose one pound per week. This is nearly half a year, which is a depressing amount of time to be on a restricted calorie diet.

If I maintain 2500 kcalories per day and run to burn the excess I will need to run 770 kilometres. Given that my average run is probably around 10km this means 77 runs. If I manage to run twice a week, on average, then this is over 35 weeks which is again an intolerable amount of time.

What I need to do is reduce my calorific intake while at the same time exercising to produce the desired results in a shorter (but sensible) length of time. I aim to be a healthy mass again by the end of March. This gives me three months or twelve weeks. I need to lose around 2 pounds per week. I can do it. I am determined to do it as some of the health issues that I have mentioned previously are back.

My progress isn’t going to be public. I am not going to start tweeting about this all the time. I probably won’t even mention it if I do or do not get down to the target mass.

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Blue Bell Hill

As I ‘ve mentioned before in this forum I do feel lucky to live here. My normal running route now takes in part of the North Downs Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty. This is a photo I took from the top of Blue Bell Hill overlooking the valley of the Medway.

Kentish View
Kentish View

I think the real view is much prettier, this doesn’t really capture it!

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Time

I’ve been feeling that I don’t have time to do all the things I want to. I’ve been adding to the “things what I do” list and unfortunately I don’t see a lengthening of the day to allow me to do these things. I think this means that I have to give up or lower my priorities of “things to do”.

Things what I have done regularly:

  • Running
  • Rowing [erg]
  • Listening to podcasts
  • Listening to music
  • Playing Gran Tursimo
  • Watching American Football
  • Watching Babylon 5
  • Write stuff on this website
  • Go to the cinema regularly

New things what I do:

  • Write music
  • Play on the PC
  • Play on the PS4 more
  • Watch Hawaii Five-O
  • Listen to more podcasts
  • Learn new music
  • CCF

I’m not too happy. All of these new things have to be prioritised. I could do with about an extra 4 hours a day to myself. I have to work and look after my family so once that’s all done I get little time to do all the things I want to. I don’t even consider myself to be a busy person. How do you get to do things if you are VERY busy? I don’t get it.

Now, I guess I am lucky that I do get time to do these things and I should be grateful and I think I am. I get to do things that I like doing, I just have to ensure that I balance my time successfully.

I have also come to the conclusion that I need at least an hour of “brain dead time” each day, preferably once the house is nice and quiet. I can cope with less than an hour if planned and I extend the time another evening. Oddly enough some things which I really enjoy don’t count as part of that hour. Gran Turismo is great and I play it a lot [not so much recently]  but it doesn’t count as part of the hour, it’s something I have to concentrate on and work at, the rewards are good. Cinema doesn’t count towards the hour but most TV shows do. I guess that means I need an hour of stuff to watch each day, to keep the brain fresh!

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Accomplishment

According to my Up by Jawbone band, I have completed 3,500,000 steps since I started wearing the device. This isn’t really the total amount I have walked because there have been periods of time where the band hasn’t worked properly and I’ve been waiting for a replacement and also I didn’t use it for about a year when I ran. So, ultimately, my real total of steps is far more.

Up Steps

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Sack Race

I saw an advert last night while watching Warehouse 13. Rather, I was fast forwarding through the adverts and saw a clip of Mo Farah in a sack race. I have no idea what he was advertising I was just reminded of some cunning shenanigans of primary school sports day.

I was at primary school in the 70s and early 80s. This was in the days when:

  • There were 3 channels on television
  • TV only started at 4 in the afternoon
  • Telephones could only be used to phone people and were attached to the wall
  • My phone number was 3 digits long
  • The height of television cool was The Rockford Files
  • Wrestling wasn’t American
  • A space-hopper was the toy of choice
  • BMX was new
  • The bike of choice was the Chopper
  • You had to be home by dinner time
  • AIDS hadn’t happened
  • The people trying to kill us were from Ireland
  • I actually spent quite a lot of time scared of being killed in a nuclear war and I worried about the end of civilisation

Oops, that went quite heavy! Perhaps I’ll enlighten you another time with tales of growing up in the cold war.

Anyway, this communication is mostly about primary school. I can vaguely remember a few things from primary school. It was always sunny [confirmation bias], we would quite happily wear shorts for school, I had a giggling fit in the 3rd year after either Matthew or I farted.

Primary School sports day: I don’t remember being involved a great deal. I never really enjoyed playing or watching sports as a child and I think I probably did it because we had to. During sports lessons there was a small group of us who would wait behind in the changing rooms while the rest of the class went on to the field and then we would go to the playground and tell the teacher there that we had been sent to play basketball. I have no idea if our teacher was aware of this, if he was then he never said, perhaps it was worth it for us to not be in the football practice.

Finally we get to the point where I refer to the sack race. Every year we would have a sack race as part of the annual “embarrass those who are unfit or fat” day. The idea is that you climb into a potato sack and then jump as fast as you can along a 60 metre track. This is shown on the television advert. This is also a very inefficient way to travel, but I guess being good at it is useful if you are captured and kept in a sack.

The technique to win, which has always stuck with me, is to put your feet in the corners of the sack and then run as normally as you can. The first time I saw this I was amazed. It was a boy in the year above me called Jon Sheekey [spelling probably wrong]. He lived down the Chelmsford Road and also had part of a pencil lead stuck in his hand [the things you remember!]. Jon put his feet into the corners of the sack and then ran, he was a pretty fast runner anyway, and he won the race by about half the length of the track. Sheer genius!

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Keep On Running

Along with a recent communication explaining how I am logging my life, I’ve passed a few milestones these recent weeks. I’ve passed three million steps using my posh pedometer and now Map My Run has told me that I’ve just passed 300 workouts. Pretty awesome stuff.

20140421-065941.jpg

The next goal for me is to get rid of the last two kilograms of mass that I gained last summer and also to increase my distance that I run each work out. Recently I have been trying to increase my average pace to be in the top 25%, according to Map My Run, this appears to be about 8:30 per mile, which corresponds to 7 miles per hour.

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Pain

I have found a new running route that includes some climbs. Most of my previous routes just took me along mostly flat paths and roads. There were some small inclines but nothing of imposing height. After a trip to the Lake District when I ran up a mountain I have decided to make my run include a hill climb.

I run a circular route from my house, up the North Downs and then down the Downs again. The route I have chosen has the shortest route up the Downs and so, logically, it is the steepest. I have run that way four times now and have reached the top without stopping twice. Basically, it hurts!

Downs

This is my route up the North Downs. The contour lines get quite close together and so you can tell how steep it is.

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Fire Running

About 30 years ago I can remember playing a game of “fire running”. Every now and then in the good old days parents would burn the garden waste on a big bonfire. These were wonderful times of cooking apples and potatoes (not together) in foil in the embers and generally doing boy stuff with flames.

The best thing we ever did was place a plank of wood on a big fire. The wood was probably 1″ by 4″ by 10′. I am aware that wood burns but that just adds to the fun.

Start about 4 metres away from the fire making sure that the flames are high and it is burning properly. Then RUN. Don’t lose your footing as you run up the plank and over the fire. Jump from the top of the fire and then land with style.

This is what being boys and summer is all about.

 

Fire Running
Fire Running

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Considerations

Kneel
I haven’t been running for about 10 days and I really am feeling as though I need to expend some energy! I think I injured my knee during a 5 mile road run that I did on the 28th December.

Create Maps or search from 80 million at MapMyRun

 

I’m pretty sure that I injured my knee on this route. There was no cross country. Now, my knee only hurts when I kneel on it. I can walk and run fine. I went to see the Doc last night and he said that I should keep running. There are two things that might happen. The injury might improve and so that means I don’t have to worry or the injury will get worse which would mean I can actually find out what it is. I’m hoping to run tonight.

Clouds
Do I pay for some extra space on one of my clouds? I currently use Microsoft SkyDrive for keeping my computers syncronised. I have just had to change from having Skydrive Mesh installed (which I really rather liked) to having to install Skydrive (which I’ll get used to). I have had to change my working practises slightly to accomodate this change as Microsoft are turning off the Mesh service.

I can pay GBP30 a year for an extra 100GB of storage on my cloud which would essentially mean I can back everything I do at work and home up. I also own a NAS drive currently set up at 1TB. I also back things up onto that. How many back-ups should I have?

I am concerned about an EMP.  Not sure why but it does bother me!

Shatner
William Shatner (for it is he) recently tweeted and I’m going to quote him here as I really liked it:

Now repeat after me: Jedis and Yoda: Science Fantasy
Starfleet and Tricorders: Science Fiction
MBB

The guy is great. Although he tweets a lot and fills up my “friends only” tweet space. I have two accounts. See this communication.

These are my latest considerations.

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Excellent Equipment

Recently I have bought some running equipment. See my previous posts about losing weight, getting fit and running. I have been so impressed with these items that I have decided to “big them up” on my website.

Firstly I needed some headphones and so after a little browsing of the Amazon website I settled on the Sennheiser MX 680i earphones. I already had a pair of Sennheiser earphones for work and so I value the brand. The earphones are splash-proof and have the iPhone integrated remote. They are great.

Sennheiser MX 680i

Now that the winter is closing in I need a torch that i can use while running. That means looking at Petzl but Silva also make head torches apparently, I thought they mainly made compasses and navigation equipment but you live and learn. I did some online research and settled on the Silva X Trail Plus. This has a 140 lumens main beam, wide angle LEDs and a rechargeable battery pack. I love it. I can run safely at night and see where I am going and the state of the terrain. Brilliant. The specification is a bit cheeky though. It claims the light is 100g and it is, but the head band, and battery pack are not included in that calculation. The battery is carried on a waistband so it’s not really a problem.

Silva X Trail Plus

Check out my routes on this web page: http://t.co/npRiLuoZ

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Proud

I am rather proud of the run I did today. It was 4.85 miles, which isn’t the main thing. The thing I am most impressed with is that I ran around Burham Nature Reserve which is comething I’ve been meaning to do for a while. It was also rather hot today (26C).

[There was an iframe here that was linked to my MapMyRun account. But I have deleted the MapMyRun account. This is no more.]

This is a picture of the monument to the Battle of the Medway. Not to be confused with the Battle of the Midway!

20120725-130106.jpg

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3D Running Route

My iPhone app that records my running outputs to a website and from there you can get a Google Earth 3D view of the run. That’s pretty cool.

Nice!

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