February 4, 2010 at 11:14 pm · Filed under Running
I fell off the treadmill today.
Or at least I stumbled and found myself being propped up by my neighbouring runner.
It was reasonably embarrassing.
I picked the machine directly in front of a bank of tv’s and was happily listening to my audio book, glancing from one flickering screen to another when one of them started screening virtual horse racing.
It turned out to be an animated version of the Dubai International, showing Frankie Dettori way back in the field, the fact that his image kept flashing and he was leaving a trail of light made me think something important was going to happen.
I was urging that horse on, “come on no 2!” and moving closer and closer to the screen until my shoe started squealing and I squawked and tripped. My neighbour pushed me upright and kept me in motion.
Turns out that horse racing seems to be the perfect accompaniment to treadmill running. I wacked the pace up and didn’t notice the pain until Alexandros had crossed the line, winning in an amazing show of determination.
Maybe I should get a treadmill installed in the local bookies.
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January 26, 2010 at 11:18 pm · Filed under Books, Equipment, Running
Two mile runs seem to be the new black (@JogBlog) and my latest spree of treadmill couplets must make me positively gothic.
I’ve slipped to beginner runner status again but I’m gradually pulling back and feel happy to be putting in some mileage even if its slow and single figured. The ballot results for the Great North Run will be revealed in a couple of weeks and as my name is in there I’m going to have to start a proper program soon enough. I might even start running outside again which will result in an investment in another GPS gadget and blog posts littered with pretty maps.
Still, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m scheduled for another 3.1km trog on the treadmill tonight and GPS is just a little bit over the top and besides, if I can wait til September I might get to try out this new toy from Timex.
Despite being practically a non-runner at the moment (and therefore a poor blogger), I am still regularly asked to review or promote running related stuffs on the blog. The latest request was to publicise the first UK running festival, which looks really quite exciting.
It’s called “Love Life Love Running” and is a weekend event aimed at runners and their families. It takes place in the grounds of Cannock Chase over the weekend of the 24th/25th of July 2010. There are two main events: a standard 10k held on Saturday and a rather intriguing 6-hour challenge on Sunday.
I’m particularly drawn to the 6-hour challenge event which is a relay based around a 7km course and can be run by teams of 2, 4 or 6. It suggests on the event website that you can make this as challenging as you like but I haven’t seen the rules so can’t imagine what this means, I’m presuming motorised bikes are ruled out.
As a family oriented event there are obviously events aimed at the kids as well, such as the mini zoom – a 60m course where speed is of the essence. Not my cup of tea at all but there’s a certificate available for every finisher so I could be persuaded.
Anyway, if you struggle to find the time to sneak off to running events it’s well worth taking a look. You can sell it as a family getaway!
Also this week I was sent a copy of the Ultimate Guide to Marathon Running to review.
It’s a large format, magazine style book covering everything from goals, nutrition, motivation, training, technique and so much more. I’m really quite impressed with it and for the price I think it’s amazing value.
I recently canceled my subscription to Runners World mag, not because I was disillusioned with it, but I wasn’t running a lot at the time and after a 3 year subscription I was beginning to notice that the same things would come round too regularly. The content of the Ultimate Guide to Marathon Running magbook is such that you can save yourself an annual subscription to A N Other running mag but still get your fix of motivational tidbits and of course it is solely focused on the marathon distance and event itself.
It has a good training section, discussing various aspects such as interval training and the long slow run but the final 12 week recommended schedules are a bit thin on the ground. There are only 3 schedules illustrated, a 4hrs + (or get round), 3hrs 30 mins or a sub 2hrs 55mins. Personally I think there’s a huge difference between a 4hr marathon time and a get me round time but I suppose schedules are very personal things, there are stacks freely available on the web and it doesn’t detract from what is otherwise an incredibly useful guide to the marathon.
CREDIT: The Ultimate Guide to Marathon Running is available now on the magazine newsstand from WH Smith, Sainsbury, magbooks.com and amazon.co.uk for only £7.99
As I don’t have a marathon on the horizon and my planned half is quite some time away I thought it would be the perfect giveaway for one of my real running readers. Just leave me a comment telling me why you deserve the magbook more than me and I’ll post the book off to the one that makes me smile. You can be cruel but if you hurt my feelings you won’t win.
On an unrelated note, I will just take this opportunity to plug my latest obsession – warriorwoman can now be found masquerading as Big Betty, riding and writing about the new Triumph Bonneville.
If I’m not on here writing about running then I’m probably on whatapalaver discussing the trials and tribulations of motorbike commuting.
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Tags: GPS, marathon, running festival
December 16, 2009 at 11:16 am · Filed under Equipment, Gadgets, Swimming
Entries for next years Great Swim series are open already. Christmas is not a great time to start contemplating squeezing into an overly snug wetsuit, the annual quality street box is already half empty and the strawberry creams are not improving my silhouette.
Christmas is a time for trying out new gadgets though so it’s time I reviewed my latest toy.
I was sent a swimming watch from Swimovate to try out for a week. It promised to count all my laps for me, freeing my mind to concentrate on higher level issues such as “what should I cook for tea?” and “did I remember to put any Stella in the fridge?”
It does more than that of course, storing my lap history and providing historical data such as distance, stroke rate, calories and efficiency.
It was the counting bit that appealed most to me though. I am always surprised at how inept I am at counting lengths. I start well enough, reciting 1, 1, 1 in my head til I reach the end and turn. Of course I then move on to 2, 2, 2 cos I’m bright and can count but I’m also easily bored so I start adding variety like 2, 2 and the next lap will be 3, next is 3, next is 3. If course when I get to 3 I think blimey that number is familiar I’ve already counted it. Then I have to go through the odd even calculation and match it to the direction of my travel. Basically I never get as far as 10 laps before I’ve stressed myself out and felt the need to re-enrole in kindergarten.
So it’s a lap counter, but a pretty good one. Beyond the first button press you don’t have to bother again until it’s time to get out of the pool. The motion sensors apparently pick up on the drift portion of the stroke at the change round. It will pick up tumble turns and your more sedate stop and turn technique. Provided you don’t change strokes within a length it will supposedly maintain accuracy.
I did my best to fool it but it was 100% accurate up to 16 lengths, beyond that I’m sure the watch maintained its accuracy but I didn’t and decided to just free my mind of the counting. Swimming with a blank mind is really rather freeing, it feels so much more like running.
It’s given me an efficiency rating of 73 which equates to below average which I suppose will be about right. They measure efficiency in terms of distance covered per stroke and I’ve always felt that I swim on the spot anyway.
It would be quite useful to monitor efficiency gains if you were trying to work on your stroke but I didn’t get to play with it long enough to see how responsive it was to minor improvements.
The battery is supposed to last for 1 year after which you have to send it back to the company to be replaced. I suppose that shouldn’t be a big problem provided they have a quick turnaround.
You can’t currently use it as a distance monitor for outdoor swims because it multiplies pool length by laps but I have picked up on some internet murmurings that suggest that might be about to change.
It could do with an overhaul of the user interface, moving through the history screens required me to pull out the instruction leaflet twice but all in all it’s a pretty good adition to the sporting gadgetry world and costs around £69 from Swimovate.
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Tags: Stella, Swimming, swimovate, watch
September 20, 2009 at 8:17 pm · Filed under Equipment, Gadgets
I can get over the treadmill boredom frontier by sticking a gruesome thriller on the iPod but the absence of a reliable data capture device (or sports watch) could call the end to a beautiful gym relationship membership.
I’ve worked my way through a number of fancy running watches over the years but my latest, the Forerunner 405 (reviewed May 2008) was just not designed to be a gym bunny buddy. Fortunately the Garmin Forerunner FR60 was released earlier in the year and appeared to be just what I required.
In summary, it’s a footpod/HR monitor which is ANT enabled meaning you can wirelessly upload data and connect to other ANT enabled equipment such as gym machines and the fancy new BC1000 Tanita weighing scales.
Unlike most of the others in the forerunner series, this watch does not have GPS, it is waterproof though.
I’ve had a few footpod watches before, including the Nike+, Polar 725 and Polar RS200SD and I’ve been impressed with all of them. In most cases they have proved to be accurate out of the box without the need for calibration and are ready for action from the moment you put the watch into training mode so there is no need to hang around stretching out your hamstrings while you wait for a the GPS unit to lock onto a satellite signal.
The footpod speed and distance monitors also have a huge advantage over GPS when it comes to monitoring pace. Pace readings on GPS units have a tendency to fluctuate all over the place while the footpod units prove to be more stable and therefore more reliable in any given instance.
What the footpods lack when compared to their bigger GPS brothers, is the ability to create lovely map trails of where you’ve been. GPS makes you feel like an adventurer, an explorer of uncharted tracks, but let’s face it, GPS isn’t for everyone.
If you run the same few routes over and over again the joy of the GPS map soon begins to wane and if like me, you spend a good proportion of your time on the treadmill, the GPS output would result in a terribly unsatisfying mess centred above your gym coordinates.
Garmin Forerunner FR60 in Action – Screenshots
Here’s a few shots of the Garmin FR60 as I move through the history screens for one workout. The final image shows the virtual partner screen which is one of the view options while training.
Garmin FR60 Compared to Nike+ and Polar
Nike+
The Nike+ wrist unit offers an accurate footpod with a minimal design. It’s ideal for social networking as it makes it so easy to upload stats via twitter, facebook and assorted other widgets. It’s the cheapest option as well but I can’t help finding it a bit disappointing, I just can’t stand the cartoon style display of the stats.
Polar
I really loved the RS200SD, the display was brilliant and the history data lent itself perfectly for being transferred to a training log. It has now been superseded by the Polar RS300X and I was momentarily tempted by it until I started pricing up the extras. The really annoying feature of Polar is that they require you to by all the necessary attachements separately. The ridiculous “flowlink” is required for uploading data to the web but costs £49.99 whereas Garmin include their usb ANT connectivity stick in the box along with the watch.
Garmin
Garmin has the edge over the competition, everything is supplied in the box and the connection is relatively straightforward.
Having uploaded the data it is easy to import the data files into sporttracks or other training logs.
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Tags: Forerunner, FR60, Garmin, GPS, Nike, polar, review, Sporttracks
September 15, 2009 at 10:33 pm · Filed under Event, Swimming
So the big day arrived, not quite the day that every girl dreams of, but as days go it was big enough to require the same sort of dietary preparations. 6 weeks of off and on Stella abstinence brought me to a point where I was prepared to at least attempt a public shoe-horning of my wobbly bits into the rubber encasement.
Sunday was a hot day and the combined sweat of 2402 lady swimmers had condensed on the marquee roof and was starting to drip onto the dressers below. Other peoples sweat, wet skin and rubber only combine to create more stress and more sweat. I successfully directed my right foot into the wetsuit but then started hopping around and cursing my full English breakfast as I tried to squeeze my left leg through my left arm hole.
There was no time for this sort of faffing, we were late and were already supposed to be sitting in the lake “warming” up. Despite expecting the seams to burst at any moment leaving me pink and vulnerable like a lizard shedding its skin, I did actually manage to yank up the zipper. After patching all my grasping finger nail holes with a puncture repair kit I waddled out in full glory looking like a fat, black, naked lady with a severe nicotine withdrawal problem.
Not exactly my best look but here we go – that’s me next to the tall skinny guy, who I will not be swimming with next year. I’m going to find myself some fat friends.
As per last year I secreted myself towards the back of the pack in a vain attempt to avoid mid-lake battles. This year though I wasn’t swimming in the last wave and had to cope with the chasing hoards of sub 30 minute swimmers.
I had a few new strategies for this year’s attempt at the Great North Swim. Firstly I was going to remember my nose clip and then stick my head in the water, I wasn’t going to bother much with my legs as they’d proved useless in unscientific pool timing tests, I was going to wear shoes (?) and finally I wasn’t going to get asthma.
The nose clip really helped as you’d expect and I’m still sure that legs are overrated in swimming; I tried to observe every swimmer that passed me and a good deal of the sub 30 minute swimmers did not appear to be kicking with their legs. Of course they may have been kicking like crazy up til that point but its good enough evidence for me.
Probably the most significant decision in my overall performance was to give the asthma a wide berth. No idea how I did that, I took on heavy quantities of caffeine in the run up to the event, stuck my head in cold water a few times but there also seemed to be less motor fuel hanging around on the surface of lake this year and that may have had something to do with it.
So all in all, I had another pootle round a stunning lake, positively enjoyed myself for a few hundred metres and came home with a new pb, knocking 10 minutes off last years time and dragging myself out of the bottom 1% and well into the top 96% of all competitors. Result!
The only disappointment was that I managed to look decidedly camp in my sprint finish photo, not that I need to share that with anybody.
Actual stats:
Time – 1:01:57
Overall – 4392/4579
Age/gender – 366/385
As Dan can’t be arsed to keep a record of his times, I will jot them down here for prosperity:
Time – 0:44:14
Overall – 3148/4579
Oh and I got a new t-shirt.
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Tags: "Great North Swim", Diet, Stella, Swimming
September 9, 2009 at 2:18 pm · Filed under Equipment, Gadgets
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Sainsburys and The Mirror have teamed up to offer a 26 day alphabetic giveaway.
Tomorrow (Thursday 10th Sept) is day I, as in I for iPod, and they are giving away the ideal runner’s gadget, an 8GB silver Apple iPod Nano.
The competition is free to enter and requires you to answer an apparently simple question. Check it out here: mirrorcashback.co.uk/sainsburys
I’ll be holding back for day 26, I think I have the idle spot for a jazzy zebra rug.
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August 19, 2009 at 9:59 pm · Filed under Swimming
The Great North Swim is now only a matter of weeks away. I’ve been swimming regularly but to be honest, the distance is the least of my worries.
I pulled the wetsuit out of the cupboard last month, dusted out the moth balls and then attempted the big squeeze……
Not good.
I forced the zip up but couldn’t straighten my arms and panic ensued within 30 secs. With no body glide I was falling all over the bedroom trying to trap the rubber under something solid so I could fight my way free.
I immediately pulled out my spreadsheet and started the calorie controlled route to a not so snug wetsuit but four weeks later I’m scouring the spreadsheet for dodgy formulas. Something must have gone wrong somewhere because I’m only about 2 ounces down.
I’m running almost daily and have now stepped into the serious measures zone. Stella has been eradicated (apart from Blog writing evenings) but if the scales don’t start playing fair I’ll have to join the bald penguin preservation society.
If I slice off both arms (rubber ones obviously), I’ll be able to move my shoulders and I’ll provide a new skin for at least two bald penguins, maybe even four, if they’re short.
As that seems an increasingly likely option at this late stage I thought I better get used to some cold weather swimming. So today I finally managed a trip to Tooting Bec Lido.
At 93 metres a length its practically open water swimming and the temperature was shocking enough to remind me that freezing mountain lakes will be unbearable without full body rubber protection.
I better make sure I don’t write too many blogs between now and September 13th.
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July 21, 2009 at 4:02 pm · Filed under Software
I took receipt of the latest wii fit incarnation, EA Sports Active, during the last heat wave in June. It was 33′ out and I decided to embark on a 40 minute challenging work out in the front room.
The kids were suitably intrigued by the contents of the box – a rubber strap with DIY handles and a special thigh mounted holster for the nunchuk.
I looked a right bobby dazzler, sweating with the excessive humidity and struggling to pull the strap tight enough around my thigh for it to stay closed.
It amused the children though, Ruby settled back into the settee to witness the spectacle and enjoy her packet of salt and vinegar snackojacks – all 127 calories of them.
I was a bit disappointed by the character choice on the new game. It may have been insulting but I have nonetheless become rather enamoured of my little wii fit avatar – short, fat and challenged in the t-shirt department which is just too short to pull over my bulging umbilicus. The choices are far more limited in EA Sports Active, you are just a delicately modified version of their average joe (or joleen), try as you might, you cannot create a tubby lard arse. Some may consider this a tick in plus box but personally I prefer a bit of a weeble-like character to remind me why I’m running on the spot in the middle of the living room.
Realism is the key to this game. The characters are real and the exercises seem real too. I started having to walk round a 400m track kicking my legs up behind me to kick my buttocks, then followed this with the knee raises. All very proper stuff but BORING! No slalom skiing on this game or balancing on a wobble board to flip the fish into the mouth of a penguin. This of course will be seen as a big plus for many people, proper, serious, sporty folk perhaps.
I moved on to squats and the machine was insistent that I wasn’t trying hard enough. My knee collapses as it approaches 90 degrees and the only way I could get the machine to accept my exercise was to plonk myself onto the sofa, wait 2 seconds, clamber up and repeat.
More running and stretching exercises followed before we seemed to loop around and start again. Doh! Not more track exercises. It kept moaning at me for being too slow in the buttock kicking exercises. I was all hot and bothered and moany, so Ruby who by now had finished the snackojacks, pushed me out of the way and offered to help me burn enough calories for my own pack.
With a seating change, I lounged back and watched the calorie counter tick towards my treat allowance. Ruby was going great guns so I encouraged her to keep going til we’d burnt enough for a packet of Doritos. A perfectly ideal way to lose weight I think.
There are a few other exercises thrown into the box. There’s your standard boxing routine which never fails to get you going and a rather intense speedline skating routine which has you squatting for speed and then leaping over numerous obstacles. I really enjoyed that one and it didn’t half make the thighs burn.
The kids haven’t touched the game since its first outing, it’s not as fun as the wii fit (not that they’ve touched that for months either) but then I don’t think EA Games are really touting this as a game. It’s a personal fitness trainer and if you are serious about committing to a program and don’t mind exercising in front of the telly and the children you probably would see some benefits from taking the 30-day challenge.
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Tags: ea sports active, games, knee, nintendo, review, wii fit
July 21, 2009 at 1:29 pm · Filed under Swimming
I’ve been promising myself since March that I will start swimming again very soon.
The Great North Swim was approaching at a fair ole rate and given that it threatened to kill me last year with previously unknown asthma issues I didn’t think I should take my training commitment too lightly.
Good intentions were fine back in March, but its July now so I suppose I couldn’t have taken a lighter approach to training if I’d actually tried.
I have now swum though, so it’s all back on track.
Public swimming is a funny old do. Can’t say I actually like it that much. I like the swimming bit but other wet people can be so annoying.
It’s an absolute war of wills. Two swimmers fighting over a single strip of pool, locked on a course for a head on collision, determined not to give an inch til one smacks the other in the chin. A slow motion, watery, game of chicken.
Why do they always insist on swimming in my lane? I make a careful assessment when I get into the pool to determine a clear line that I might be able to squeeze up and down in but when I look up after 3 laps all the newcomers seem to have chosen my lane to try and muscle in on.
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June 27, 2009 at 3:44 pm · Filed under Cycling, Event
As promised earlier, here’s the route map for the London to Brighton 2009 Bike Ride, courtesy of RunSaturday.
I’ve also added the speed splits from Sporttracks just to illustrate how painfully slow the process was. I’ve currently got my log set up to show running and jogging paces but its quite interesting to see that I was walking for at least 7 miles of the ride and barely jogging for another 4 miles.
Go early is my recommendation!
And here’s the GPS elevation, its bound to be slightly inaccurate but it gives you a feel for the route.
You can click on both images to enlarge.
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Tags: bike ride, Cycling, GPS, London to Brighton, runsaturday, Sporttracks
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