July 2006

Stressful upgrade to movable type 3.31

I knew I should not have attempted this upgrade. I made the same mistake last year and it resulted in approximately 27 hours of high anxiety while I desperately scrabbled around every user forum trying to find an answer to "how the hell am I going to get my blog back?!".

Well at least todays upgrade anxiety only lasted for 6 hours - I'm obviously getting better at this.

Continue reading "Stressful upgrade to movable type 3.31"

July 2006

10km Target - Hit!

I ran for a whole 10k this morning.
Nearly crippled myself but I had to do it - that damn gym buddy of mine keeps setting new challenges.
It took me 77 mins which is better than I expected.
More details on the MotionBased site.

July 2006

New 6.6km Run

I've really started to increase the length of my runs now. I blame it on the Garmin Forerunner 305 as it seems to be encouraging me to try out new routes so I can play with them on SportTracks. Here is a satellite screenshot of my latest training run, I've taken all the images out of SportTracks.

This route takes me out from my flat, immediately along the Thames and up to Kew Bridge, up and over, back down Strand on the Green til I reach Chiswick Bridge and then a slight retracing of my steps til I make it home again. Nice ole route and not a bad length for my 10k training.

The red bits highlighted on the photo, represent the areas where I dropped down to a walk. Besides the fact that it is a really nifty feature of the SportTracks software, it is pretty abyssmal for a run - init?

I blame it on the weather, tis flippin hot! If you check out my heart rate profile, its clear that my heart rate climbs to around 170 bpm and then I quit and start walking til it gets to about 135 bpm and I can start again. I suppose this is enforced interval training and its meant to be good for you.

Continue reading "New 6.6km Run"

July 2006

Body For Life - 5 week update

So I am about 5 weeks into the BFL - Body for Life challenge and thought it was perhaps time to drop in an update and outline my progress so far.

Continue reading "Body For Life - 5 week update"

July 2006

Garmin Forerunner 305 Review

My last speed and distance watch, the Polar RS200SD was beginning to get a bit tatty, so I took the opportunity to try out the latest thing in sports watches - the Garmin Forerunner 305.

Continue reading "Garmin Forerunner 305 Review"

July 2006

Running Routes - West London

I've prepared 3 route profiles to encourage me to step up the pace a bit with my running. All are based around the bridges across the Thames in West London, so they are both flat and beautiful runs.

I have a 3.5k route from Chiswick Bridge to Barnes Bridge, which is my usual morning run, a 4.6k trot from Chiswick Bridge to Kew Bridge, and a whopping 6.3k route from Barnes Bridge to Hammersmith Bridge. I haven't managed the last one yet, but given that I have committed myself to the Nike 10k run in October, I had better start getting used to it.

July 2006

New London Off Road Routes

Well I've had a couple of fun weekends with Stumpy, trying to find reasonable off road routes to go mountain biking in London.
I've added a few GPS routes to the main site:

1. Mountain biking in Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common.

2. Long trek: Richmond, Hampton Court, Chessington and Epsom

Here is a MotionBased viewport of the long trek to the North Downs. You can folow the links to see more details of the route.

July 2006

Nike 10k Run - North vs South

I don't know what possessed me! I've just committed myself to the Nike 10k run to be held in Hyde Park in early October.

Why would I do that? I can only just stagger around a 5k course. Whats worse is that its a competiton - North vs South with the winner chosen on the basis of the average running time of all the competitors. My fellow southerners are not going to be happy to have me on their side - I'm aiming for 90 mins. Shameful eh?

Managed to bully my gym buddy to join me.

July 2006

Slow Start Up

After a few months of use I find that my computers always start to crawl at startup. I find this really irritating and my sony vaio is particularly problematic as there are hundreds of programs running at any one time.

MSCONFIG is a useful tool for clearing up unnecessary utilities from the startup but it can be difficult to determine which are the essential programs and which are those you can happily get rid of.

I found a couple of useful sites today:
The first one explains how to use MSCONFIG
and the second provides a tremendous searchable database of what all those programs are, and whether they are useful or not.

July 2006

Stumpy FSR - Girls Bike

Can you believe it? It seems that I am so short, that I have to buy a girls bike!

I went in to the bike shop to pick up a men's Specialized Stumpjumper FSR comp, but even the small is too big for me. The women's frame is only just ok, but I have to make do with the puffy colours.

I'm not really complaining, its a beautiful bike. I ended up getting the Specialized Stumpjumper FSR Expert, which is just a tad above my current skill level, but it was the only one in stock. What can a girl do?

I pick it up tomorrow, after they have removed most of the seat post length. Can't wait to have some fun this weekend. Got to get my skill level up quickly, you can't have a bike like that and then start behaving like a wuss on the trails.