The older I get, the tougher it is to keep my weight where it should be. This summer I got on a diet and started exercising regularly. Progress has been slow but steady for the most part. The holidays were a bit tough, but I escaped without too much damage. Coming into the new year, I’ve been able to get things rolling again. It’s fun to finally be hitting a point where I feel better. I don’t realize how crummy I feel when I’m heavier until I get the weight off and I can feel the difference.
I’m not in great shape yet. I still need to lose another 25 or 30 pounds. (Though I just started lifting weights which is shifting my focus to body composition as opposed to purely weight. I’d been doing pure cardio before this.) I tried to run 3 miles yesterday. I made it 2 before I needed to stop and walk every so often. Not bad though, last time I tried it, 1.5 was about all I could put together.
If I can keep getting better at it, and my knees hold up I may run the Corporate 5K in April. Barring injury or some other unseen issue, that’s a very doable goal.
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I watched the finish of the New York marathon today. Even though I can barely put together a couple miles right now, I still love running. In highschool I ran cross country and track. My dad had been an avid runner for years and his stack of Runners World magazines fell to pieces as they became source material for collages of great runners that went up on my bedroom wall. There were two runners I idolized (as a teen I wasn’t smart enough not to do that yet) above the others. Bill Rodgers, because he was so good and I thought the gloves were cool. Even more than him though, Albero Salazar was at the top of his game and a Christian. That made him someone to emulate on multiple levels. His meltdown in LA was a bummer, but I was still crazy about him as a runner.
A humorous Alberto Salazar story revolves around the Continental Homes 10k. It was a great race that I ran multiple times. It grew to be pretty large and was even televised on national t.v. I enjoyed getting to see stars like Zola Budd and Mary Decker-Slaney in person. The last year I ran it (I think) CBS televised it and Alberto Salazar was a commentator. I didn’t get to see him though. I was busy running.
My mom had driven me to the race and had taken a bunch of pictures. We took the film in (weird to think about now) and got it developed. There was a close-up shot of Alberto Salazar sitting at the back of a truck. My mom says, “I don’t know who that is but a lot of people were paying attention to him so he seemed important.” I couldn’t believe it. She did so well without even knowing it.
So what brings all this up? I was watching the marathon and as Meb Keflezighi won it, the announcer mentioned that this was the first win for an American since Alberto Salazar’s last win in 1982. Immediately my mind flashed back to the posters on my wall and then I did the math. Twenty-Seven years ago. How can that be? It seems like it was just yesterday.
While I’m doing a brain dump on running, I’m going to throw a freebie out there. As I mentioned, I did a lot of reading and cutting from my dad’s magazines. Some were a bit older and this is how I had become a big Bill Rodgers fan. He was still running in the 80’s but his best days were really through the 70’s, so he wasn’t exactly a household name with my peers.
One day at track practice our coaches told us all to get on a bus we were going somewhere. This was odd, we’d never done that before, and we hadn’t been told we’d be doing anything different. They didn’t tell us where we were going or why. The bus took us to Horizon Highschool. (Same district as my school, not too far away.) As we were unloading I looked over towards the track and there was Bill Rodgers. I was pumped and exclaimed, “That’s Bill Rodgers!”, which got me a lot of blank looks. I started asking people if they had paper or a pen and pencil. I was completely unprepared. I ended up scrounging up a raffle ticket or something and Bill had a pen. I got his signature on this little scrap of paper. It was still awesome. He talked to us about running, answered questions and ran with us a bit around the track. A fabulous afternoon I intent to remember as long as I can.
Ingrid ran the Space Coast marathon today. This was her first full marathon, she has done a half before. I’m really proud of her. She set a schedule, stuck to it as best she could (life threw a curve into the mix here and there) and she ran her race. She finished in 4:26:01. Which is pretty much exactly what she planned.
The race is held in Cocoa, along the Indian River. It’s funny because I’ve never been there before, we’ve always driven by on the 528 as we motored on ahead to Cocoa Beach. It really is very nice, right there in downtown Cocoa. There is a little area called Cocoa village that is full of cool little shops and nice restaurants. I think we’ll definitely be going back just to hang out.
The race started at 6 a.m. Ingrid wanted to be able to pick up her packet and get ready, so we left the house at 4 a.m. That meant getting up at 3:30 – a quick shower for me, getting the kids up and in the van and then hitting the road.
The kids were my responsibility and I fed them breakfast in the car once we were parked in our spot near the start of the race. We had told the kids we’d be up early, repeatedly. Hannah still looked astonished as she stepped out back to go in the garage and said to me, “The sun isn’t up yet dad!”
Once it got close to 6 the kids and I went out to watch the start. They had a real astronaut come out and he cheered everyone on. Then there was a count-down with a video of a space shuttle launch and the runners were off. There were so many people on a pretty narrow road, that we missed Ingrid. Then we went to the van to watch a dvd until the sun came up.
The race went north for 6.5 miles or so then looped back down past the start. We waited and saw Ingrid go by as she was heading down into the second half of the race. She high-fived the kids and looked really good. After she went by we went over to the park and so the kids could swing and play on the toys. They were cold but a little running around took care of that. I had a bunch of snack crackers to help pass the time too – they took a couple little snack breaks.
We hung out there and at another part of the park where the finish was. When it got closer for Ingrid to come in – we went to a spot coming into the finish and cheered Ingrid on when she came into view. It was a really great day. A storm front was moving in – and we hit some heavy rain on the drive home, but everything was perfect for the race. Pretty nice.
The space theme was everywhere. The race volunteers wore orange or blue jump suits that looked like those the astronauts where. There were models and all kinds of cool posters of NASA stuff. There was also a costume contest with someone dressed as the shuttle, another as an astronaut and a number of Star Wars themed entries. The kids loved it when they saw Darth Vader running in the race.
I’ve disabled the Nike+ stats plugin that was showing my runs on the left. I haven’t run in months. My foot is still jacked up from stepping on one of the kid’s toys. I’m happy on the days when I can walk with minimal pain, I’m certainly not going out to run. So no point in having that up there.
I’m looking at my options to do something that is low impact. I need to exercise, but my favorite way of going about it just isn’t possible right now.
Another nice Amazon gift certificate purchase I made recently was a Garmin Forerunner 205
Ingrid and I used it for the first time today. It took a few seconds to acquire satellites but definitely within the 30-60 seconds listed in the documentation. Then I was off and running. Well, jogging and walking anyway. There are a few views available and the backlight is nice and bright. I had no problem reading the display in the dark of the pre-dawn morning. While I was running it would shift down my wrist a bit and hit the bone on the pinkie side of my hand. That was a little uncomfortable, but I’d just push it back up and I’d be o.k.
I ran with my ipod for music, so I went ahead and used my Nike+ too. Over 2.5 miles the Nike+ was off by .05 miles. Not bad for a pedometer, and I never did go out and set it, that’s the out of the box defaults.
When I got home my wife was waiting to go on her run. She left and when she got home she said, “This is the coolest thing ever!”. She had the same problem with the wrist bone thing – she said she’ll start running with a sweat band under the unit. She had done a 4 mile run with about a half mile of walking on each side of the run.
We took it upstairs while the kids ate breakfast and loaded the data into the software that came with it. It has some nice tracking capabilities but the map is pretty worthless. It shows no surface streets where we live. Basically we were just looking at a line shown over a white background. Since then I’ve already tracked down a couple people who’ve done the work to move the files over into google maps. I’ll work on that tonight.
Here was the one major bummer. As far as I can tell, it is only possible to set up a profile for one user. That makes no sense to me. Why should we buy two? My wife doesn’t care much because the profile is mainly used to calculate calories burned and to estimate target heart rates. Me I’m more interested in the calorie part, since I’m trying to lose weight. That’s not an issue for her, she’s very thin.
Of course – we can still figure that stuff outside their software – and it is possible to export data in an xml format. That, to me, covers the shortcomings in the software that comes with it. They’ve given the user something basic and usable but they aren’t forcing anyone to use that or pay money to have the right to use the data with something else. So that’s cool.
Well, the fires in Georgia made a lot of smoke, and now the fires in Florida are making even more smoke. I’ve put running on hold – it’s that bad. Walking outside is at times like walking around in the bottom of an ash tray.
I made some progress on my Nike+ app today. I finally got my head around exactly what data I am graphing, and I think I’ve found what I’m going to use to display that graph. JChart2D is a minimalistic charting library published under the GPL.
I was able to create a DOM object, pull in the xml file and get the data out into an array. All I need to do is a few calculations and then graph it. I haven’t actually tried the graphing part yet, but the JChart2D site has lots of examples and I think it should work out. If not, there are a bunch of other options.
I still need to get around searching for an ipod when it is connected. Thus far I’ve done everything on my windows laptop that has itunes installed. When I’m looping through the drives on the machine – hitting an empty cd drive causes the program to crash and my catch block doesn’t pick it up. As a very occasional java user – I was a bit taken back by that but there has to be a way around it. I just need to figure it out. I’ll be bugging the java guys at work when I’m ready to tackle it. For now I’ve just set it to the side and worked on other stuff that is key to getting the whole thing to work.
Ultimately though, I just want to be able to fire it up, and have it automatically go out and copy over any new files, without the user needing to tell the program where the ipod is mounted.
My wife liked the stuff I was showing her that I had been collecting on my runs and so I ordered a sensor for her as well. She isn’t sure if she’ll like running with it, so for now we will be using both sensors on my nano. If she really likes running with it, we will order her a nano – but for now I’ll be able to see how the software handles two different sensor ids. I think I know what it will do, but nothing beats finding out for sure. (She doesn’t already own a nano because she
I was digging around again and found someone who has done the same thing in C#. It is so obvious, there are probably more, but this is the first that I’ve seen that runs as a local app. I’ve downloaded the source for it but haven’t opened it up and looked at it yet. It will be interesting to see how someone else has approached the problem.
Oh – and I’ve exercised more recently than shows up in my run data on the side. But in Tampa – I did my work-outs on an elliptical trainer and so it wouldn’t work with the nike+ kit.
