photo credit: Nick-K (Nikos Koutoulas)
The concept behind Marcothon was simple : run every day in December for at least 25 minutes or 3 miles.
My results:
Officially that is a “fail” but it is my fourth best month in the year for distance and time but by far my best for actual number of runs.
I’m counting it as a HUGE success as it has been the ideal “warm up” for my 2011 running challenge.
A few people have asked me recently why so many of my Tweets or Facebook Updates have “Reading : ” and what it means Continue reading »
I have been a bit negligent in blogging recently, including ensuring that my WordPress installation is up to date.
I’m building up for my running challenges of 2011 and breaking in my new treadmill so I am slowly building up my miles.
On incentive is the Marcothon group on FaceBook, the basic premis is to run for either 3 miles or 25 minutes in every day in December.
I have also been mucking around with Xcelsius for a parkrun project, more on that later.
To keep an eye on my progress I have built a dashboard to track my running over the current year and so I can visually compare my training year on year.
Since turning 40 (unbelievable I know) I have noticed a few changes:
We recently went shopping for a new sofa for the family room, to aid getting one the fitted I did a floor plan of the room in Visio.
I felt compelled to then do a plan of the whole house and garden!
I resisted!
I get annoyed by really trivial things:
I quite like (as an occasional treat) a Twix from the vending machine. It’s great because it’s chilled. But because it’s chilled it quite often breaks when it falls from the machine.
This really annoys me, even though I’m just going to bite it and chew it!
If you look at the left hand menu you will see the items:
These can be quickly accessed by using the following shortcut keys:
In addition, when you use Ctrl+1 to access mail, this takes you to the folder that you were last using, if you would rather jump straight into your In-Box – use (Ctrl+Shift+I).
Most would have said the weather was good, I beg to differ it was waaay too hot!
On the plus side I’m sure that helped bring out more spectators who really helped spur me on and yes the garden hoses and sprinklers WERE appreciated!
The golden rule is to have practiced everything and have no new kit on race day.
Due to the heat in the days leading up and the forecast I decided to treat myself to a new belt with a bottle holder built in. Unfortunately this was not really up to the job and my bottle jumped out the holder in the first few yards after crossing the start line.
Due to the excitement of the start I even forgot to start the timer on my watch so it was a few minutes after crossing the start line before my watch started. My watch gave me a time of 6:23:24 and my official time was 6:34:05. I had also made sure that my watch had a new battery but I had not double checked the settings and I ended up having to fiddle with it during the run to get it set properly. My Garmin FR50 was complaining over the last few miles of low memory, I’ll either have to buy a new watch or speed up: I’m “cheap” so I’ll have to keep up the training !
No real injuries to speak of, the plasters on my nipples fell off so I had to get some emergency vaseline from the first aiders at mile 8. I finished with a small blister on each heel, but this was due to the fact I did more walking than running in the latter stages.
Obviously I’m stiff and sore today but I’m keeping moving to prevent complete seizure.
Continue reading »
photo credit: therefromhere
I am a big fan of Google Spreadsheets, they give you most of the features of a desktop “office” based spreadsheet but your data is stored online, no more need to carry your data on a USB stick.
I’m also a huge fan of databases, SQL is a fantastic tool for querying data.
Now you can combine the best of both worlds: store your data in a spreadsheet and then summarise the data using SQL.
Continue reading »
photo credit: damianromero
Last Saturday (10th April) saw the the launch of the Strathclyde Park Parkrun.
After recieving so much encouragement from the folks at the Glasgow Parkrun I decided to give something back and volunteer to help. This is a win-win situation as I can run the ~4 miles from home to the park run, help out then run home so I’m doing my good deed for the day AND getting a run in !
Unfortunately on my run home after just 2 miles I got to experience just how bad “shin splints” are!
My other half was working so I had to hobble the last two miles home where the kids were great keeping me supplied with frozen peas.
To try and speed my recovery: 5 weeks until Edinburgh marathon (donate here: http://www.JustGiving.com/26Miles4CHAS) I did not do any running at all.
It’s only a tiny niggle now so I thought I would brave a wee short run: 3 miles, Chatelherault and back. My time was “down” but no new or reoccurrence of any injuries. Despite having wun ~25 miles in my new shoes I have swapped back to my old ones “just in case”, and I’ll stick with them until post Edinburgh.
Hopefully a week of short runs will set me up for a longer run at the weekend then I’ll get back on track.
I kept forgetting to start Google Calendar Sync when I started Outlook. I don’t always start Outlook when I start my laptop and I’m not always online when I run Outlook so puting it in my Startup folder is not really an option.
My solution, a macro that runs when Outlook starts that gives me the option of running Google Calendar Sync if I feel it’s appropriate.
Private Sub Application_Startup()
Dim response As Integer
Dim RetValresponse = MsgBox(prompt:=”Do you want to run Google Calendar Sync?”, buttons:=vbYesNo)
If response = vbYes Then
RetVal = Shell(“C:\Program Files\Google\Google Calendar Sync\GoogleCalendarSync.exe”, vbMinimizedNoFocus)
End IfEnd Sub
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