I would have very much liked to rub that plan out considering I’ve barely recovered from last weekends 10 mile hair cut run but dedicated half marathoners can’t relax on long slow run day.
You won’t know anything about that 10 mile haircut run as I’ve been too idle to blog about it but basically I went to get my hair cut at my old local, ran home along the Capital Ring, it rained heavily, it was a long way and it hurt, a lot. There it’s blogged.
Today’s challenge was to find the start of the Wandle Trail and run along it until I found a Rose and Crown pub where I could sit and phone for a recovery vehicle. I also wanted to try out and review the new offering from Adidas miCoach – the Adidas miCoach mobile, a free GPS powered app for the iPhone.
I’ve already tried the Adidas miCoach Pacer and was really impressed with the gadget and the associated website with its highly sophisticated training plans. It’s the training plans that set this gadget apart from the competition such as Garmin and Nike+ and the great thing about the miCoach mobile is that it piggy backs all this existing technology.
So you download the free app from iTunes, and link it to your Adidas miCoach account. If you haven’t got one of those yet then go online and get one – it’s free. There’s a little bit of set up to work through and you then get to select your training plan and coaching method. The coaching method is either heart rate based or pace based, I have both options as I have the mobile app and the pacer gadget but mobile only users can only use the pace option.
Back to the iPhone. Having set up your online account and chosen your training plan you can connect to your account via the app and then sync. All of your scheduled workouts will be available along with any custom workouts you’ve set up.
Ideally you would start with an assessment run that will enable the system to accurately assign your pace ranges to the 4 coloured zones used by the miCoach. I’ve found that the assessment is most accurate if you can attempt it on a treadmill, mainly because it is so hilly in my location that its hard to organise a gradual progression in effort. You can also set your pace zones manually which is the option I went for.
The training plans are brilliant but the race related plans aren’t quite geared up for the slow pokes like me. I initially opted for the “Run a Race – 1/2 Marathon Plan” but the longest run never got beyond 90mins which would only just got me over the 6 mile mark. I fiddled the system by selecting the Full Marathon plan and then jiggling the schedule around in the calendar (all carried out online). This has proved perfect for me and today’s run neatly fitted in with the 2:45 scheduled workout.
Having selected the workout you then get to fine tune the coaching environment.
I selected the voice coaching to be Instructional, which is the minimal option, only guiding me into the appropriate zone at the start of each section. The Full option would alert me every time the pace fell outside the desired zone and as it says in the guide this isn’t recommended in built up areas where the GPS accuracy can be a bit patchy.
If you want to listen to your iPod while running you have to select a playlist. I was initially disappointed by this as I like to listen to audiobooks and it didn’t seem to want to let me choose one of these. Then I discovered that you can now create your own playlists directly though the iPod app – this has probably been allowed for ages but I’d never noticed and yet it had always been high on my wishlist. Anyway I digress. Point is, I set up a new playlist with my chosen book – in this case the last hour of The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale and then the start of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
So, I found the start of the Wandle Trail, actually the end of the River Wandle at the point it meets the Thames, and pressed go on the Adidas miCoach mobile app and the Garmin Forerunner 310XT. The next 3 miles were fairly uninspiring as I wiggled across fairly built up streets, zigzagging across the Wandle but rarely along it.
The miCoach mobile performed well and matched the Forerunner fairly closely but all that stopped when we reached Colliers Wood and the route started along the river proper. Here the tree cover became dappled and then dense. The miCoach lady got a bit wobbly and started informing me of my km splits every 4 minutes or so. The Forerunner stuck to the truth – a regular but pitiful 8:30 min/km pace.
So unfortunately that miCoach mobile proved to be somewhat inaccurate for me. By the time I reached the fabled Rose & Crown 2hrs 18 mins later the Forerunner read 14.79km while the miCoach suggested I’d run a whopping 18.48km. I’m not going to hold this against the app though. It must surely be a feature of the less robust GPS gadgetry of the iPhone and maybe wouldn’t be a problem for people who run in less built up or covered areas.
Did I mention that miCoach mobile is free? I think it’s a remarkable offering from Adidas, they’ve taken a very accomplished gadget/website combination and done away with the need to buy the £100+ gadget (ie the miCoach Pacer). Generous or nuts?
Either way it’s a winner and I highly recommend it.
I did the cycle commute twice last week, first on the painfully slow Brompton and then on the super speedy Specialised Sirrus Pro. I was expecting to shave at least 10 minutes off my time on the road bike.
Here’s what actually happened:
I presume my current fitness level is the rate limiter and not my bike choice, so I may as well stick to the Brompton, with its handy frame mounted bag and potential for shoving on the train when I can’t be bothered to go any further.
The activity comparison movie was taken from Ascent the activity tracker or sports log for mac. Since I’ve started using GPS again I’ve been really impressed with this software, I’m even beginning to get over the loss of Sporttracks when I moved away from the PC.
The activity comparison window is one of the best I’ve ever seen on a sports log.
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.
**There is a link to my other product reviews on sidebar. Please contact me at angela@warriorwomen.co.uk if you have a product you would like me to review.
Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t run an awful lot of late, in fact if you want to be reasonably precise, I have run only once in the last month, which also happens to equate to once this year. How neat.
If we want to be 100% precise it could be argued that I’ve run a few more times than I’ve let on, for example, I may have attempted the occassional dash to the bus away from work and I sprinted to the train station last night after my blood doning session but all in all the consequences were ugly and should remain hidden from public conciousness.
I feel like I’m taking confession and will have to start with the hail Mary’s soon but in my defence, I do have some excuses.
For one thing, as the last two months of my fairly sparse blog writing will attest, I am far too happy for running. Running appeals to the miserable side of me, it’s the perfect alternative to a pack of Benson and Hedges and bottle of JD. Mind you it also appeals to the exceptionally jolly side of me as well, so maybe that’s not such a good excuse after all.
Secondly, and this one has to be foolproof, I’m working on a ridiculous placement that means I have to travel between 4 and 5 hours every day.
Not a chance that I feel like running after all that nonsense.
Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I have secured myself a proper job, midway between happiness and home and I forsee many exciting new routes ahead of me, incorporating the best of London’s seedy commons and the highly rated Wandle trail. Expect updates of the running variety in March.
In the mean time, what better way to spend one’s non-running time, than by analysing data from runs gone by?
RunSaturday is new website stacked full of new and intriguing ways to analyse data held across multiple sites and generated by multiple gadgets. I’ve been able to bring together runs from my Garmin Forerunner 405, Nike+, Nokia Sportstracker along with all my historical runs stored on SportsTracks. I can also bring in runs manually entered onto Fetcheveryone and analyse my stats from the Saturday morning 5k park runs.
All this makes RunSaturday the most comprehensive database of my running shame prowess, which is quite a lot of fun because the site provides loads of ways to share the data across social websites such as facebook and personal blogs.
Here’s a particularly ancient route showing the mammoth run/walk I did along the Capital Ring. If you click on the heart symbol you’ll see a colour coded route indicating the specific heart rate zones during the run. You can see similar images for speed but as I’m a one speed wonder you’ll have to upload your own interval workouts to see rainbows in this feature.
There seem to be loads of new features coming along, so I’d recommend checking it out for yourself. I’ll add more images from the site just as soon I manage another run but don’t hold your breath til March.
**There is a link to my other product reviews on sidebar. Please contact me at angela@warriorwomen.co.uk if you have a product you would like me to review.
So, here is the tube map showing progress to date, you may have to zoom out to catch the extremes, depending on the size of your screen:
**UPDATE** I’ve removed the image as it seems to be slowing the blog down and crashing folks computers, you can still view The Full Screen Map over here.
If you don’t know about google maps, it’s a particularly useful little gadget. Click on the “my maps” tab and then either plot a map manually or import a data file from SportsTracks or whatever GPS mapping system you have on the computer. There are a number of examples in the previous few posts. You can colour the map as you see fit and then copy the link to an embedded image. Very swish.
I’ve been including these embedded google maps to illustrate each section of the London Underground route but have been struggling to display all the sections together on one interactive block.
There are a stack of hacks for google maps out there as well but the two I have found particularly useful are, GPS Visualizer and Map Channels.
GPS Visualizer is an incredibly in depth utility. If you are into maps, you want to check it out. It enables you to plot multiple gpx tracks onto one image and will colour them according to an amazing array of variables such as speed or altitude. You could plot atmospheric pollutants with coloured blobs suggesting density or of course simple tracks showing how slow you actually run. I’m sure I could plot my geographical tube map using GPS Visualizer but to be honest I can’t be bothered to stay up all night trying to fathom out how to do it.
Map Channels is very easy to use. It requires you to have set up all your routes as google maps already but thats not a problem for me. You can then create maps with multiple map channels visible. If you set the colour and style of the track in google maps this will be replicated in Map Channel image. Incredibly easy and yet it includes a great number of style control options.
I’ve only just started playing with this one but I’m impressed by how well it has enabled me to display multiple, differently coloured tracks.
Today was the annual showing of the Christmas Bushy Park Time Trial and I’ve been looking forward to this particular event for about 340 days, since my first introduction to the wonder of the time trial phenomonen back in February. It would have been easy to stay in bed this morning, it was dark and gloomy and of course presents awaited. Still, you can’t really resist that level of anticipation.
As I cycled through Richmond Park in the light drizzle, I puzzled a little over the knowing looks I received from the exhausted reindeer. They obviously knew what was in store for me – that’ll teach me not to leave any carrots out on Christmas Eve. When I mentioned yesterday that a downpour was required to wrap up a thorough test of the Salomon pack, it really wasn’t meant as a Dear Santa letter. I could have waited.
The rain held off for most of the run and I was able to “enjoy” the 5k amongst good company. I was adopted at the midway point by a first-timer and her motivational cousin and was able to experience a vicarious boost that carried me over the finish line relatively unscathed.
I even remembered the new phone this morning so I got to try out the Sports Tracker Beta application. It required a little bit of juggling to switch on both the garmin and the N82 without dropping the phone into the path of a couple of hundred runners but then it is a bit overkill to use two different devices. Sports Tracker has been around for a while and I remember Jogblog took it for a whirl a while ago, but the new version is quite impressive. The phone application links flawlessly to the website offering a live update of your progress, with your route appearing online as you run. Pretty nifty stuff.
The website is particularly attractive and displays some respectable charts. You can view the page for the BPTT workout to get an idea of the detail available.
I can imagine this service being quite addictive and the stats will only get better as you add more workouts. I’m going to be using this again and have already downloaded the application to my N95, I’ll be interested to try it out on my next commute where I tend to have more trouble picking up a GPS signal. I’ll have the two phones going head to head against the garmin to see how reliable the reception is.
So, back to this morning, did I mention that it was raining? I finished up at the time trial and set off on the bike for 7 mile ride home. I was dreaming of roast potatoes and yorkshire puds when the sky starting lobbing buckets of gritty, grimey rain water at me. When I finally got home I was just staggered by the amount of water I’d managed to absorb and peeled the Salomon Raid Revo off directly over the bath expecting at least half a bucket of gulley water to come rushing out of the mini plug holes. As it happens the inside of the pack was still dry which is quite impressive given that no other part of me remained “dry” even my goretex jacket had failed under the onslaught.
I’ve been playing around with google earth trying to get some snazzy topographic viewpoints but even after I’ve discovered the button to exagerate the vertical displacement even my hilliest of routes look flat.
Here is an example of my assorted Broadmoor routes, where my max ascent must top a whopping 35 metres!
I then stumbled across a blog that explained my problem – my routes actually are as flat as a pancake. Check out the elevation profile for the run Krissy is currently contending with – is that crazy or what??? How can you run up a 3000m ascent and then continue going for 50 miles? Nuts!
Talking of nuts, has anyone caught the new advert for snickers, with B.A. Baracas? Coooool.
Its great to read blogs from folks on the other side of the world, but have you ever wondered where exactly, the other side of the world is?
This is a fun google maps gadget that allows you to dig right the way through to the other side. I end up in the ocean, slap bang in the middle of a rift valley just to the SE of New Zealand.
**UPDATE** The above site seems to be down at the moment, sorry for the disappointment that this may cause. It’s back online again!
Over the last 15 months I lost 20lbs! Unfortunately no whooping and a hollering is deserved as the net position sees this 20lbs declining to a mere 7lbs loss. I went through 3 clear weightloss phases and as the chart shows, I don’t have too much of a problem in losing weight but a big problem when it comes to maintaining a constant weight.
(Note that all the graphs can be enlarged by clicking on them)
Fortunately, I have discovered some new tricks for my arsenal. The first is The Hackers Diet, which is a free ebook/webpage designed by John Walker of Autodesk/AutoCAD fame. He reverts back to his engineering roots to develop a nerdy yet satisfying approach to weightloss and weight maintenance. Particulalry appealing is his approach to trend monitoring, to avoid the boom and bust nature that most dieters will be familiar with.
This annotated chart makes me giggle and reminds me why the daily scale ritual tends to leave me so apprehensive. With the hackers diet you continue to monitor your weight daily but you enter the figures into an excel spreadsheet that plots the trend based on an exponential moving average to smooth the noise. Moving averages are explained very well in his section on Signal and Noise. If you haven’t already noticed, I ought to point out that this diet is only going to appeal the real data fiends out there, its not called the hackers diet for nothing. After application of the smoothing, the above chart now looks like this:
The point of this is that the red smoothed line, illustrates the very satisfactory weightloss situation, suggesting that the diet and required monitoring could proceed without need for prozac. I’m convinced that I keep stopping perfectly successful diets because of the misery I feel when the scales tell me the wrong number, regardless of how transient that may prove to be.
Each individual data point (daily weight) will either appear above or below the trend line, below is obviously great as it means that it is having the effect of pulling the trend even lower. The odd appearance above the trend isn’t too worrying either as individually their impact on the trend is insignificant. You can get even more deeply into the system and determine your bodys energy balance, going as far as planning your required intake etc. I’m not going to look at this just yet. It suits me to develop the system for monitoring purposes, possibly using it alongside the BodyForLife program that I’ve had success with previously.
All the excel spreadsheets designed for Hackers Diet are available free on the site mentioned above – they really are worth delving into if like me you go crazy for complex excel constructions and his manual is extensive, explaining the process far better than I have.
My second great discovery is the PhysicsDiet, which is an online fitness log/charting site developed to support the Hackers Diet. So many geeks have been successful with the hackers diet that complementary programs are popping up all over the place. The physics diet uses the same maths as the hackers diet spreadsheets but visually it is far more exciting. I’m going to maintain both the spreadsheet and online version for a while but I think I will use charts like these to post my progress:
This shows the January results and so long as I can keep the chart green, I’m smiling.
I’m still intent on running home once a week, so today I repeated the exact same running route as last week. I again finished the 10k distance in 1hr 20mins, and was strangely within 15 seconds of my previous time.
Given that it was direct replay of last weeks route, there isn’t much point me repeating the sporttracks image. Instead I’ve used it as an excuse to introduce my new discovery – everytrail.com. I first came across this on The Trail Runners blog which is certainly worth a read.
Everytrail allows you to upload your running tracks directly from your GPS unit, add waymarks and photos and provides a really simple way to share the route as an iframe on your blog. Non of this is all that new really but I’m particularly happy that I can also directly upload the gpx file. This means I can plot out a route on memory map and upload it without actually having to cover the course with my garmin. I used this feature when I needed to plot my friends planned commute. I was able to stick it on the web for him to peruse at work and determine whether it was a manageable distance.
If you use another mapping package that saves the routes in an alternative format (eg tracklogs), you might want to try out GPSBabel which is a free tool for converting routes into the gpx format.
Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!
I had a Wandle Trail run penciled in for today.
So you download the free app from iTunes, and link it to your Adidas miCoach account. If you haven’t got one of those yet then go online and get one – it’s free. There’s a little bit of set up to work through and you then get to select your training plan and coaching method. The coaching method is either heart rate based or pace based, I have both options as I have the mobile app and the pacer gadget but mobile only users can only use the pace option.
The training plans are brilliant but the race related plans aren’t quite geared up for the slow pokes like me. I initially opted for the “Run a Race – 1/2 Marathon Plan” but the longest run never got beyond 90mins which would only just got me over the 6 mile mark. I fiddled the system by selecting the Full Marathon plan and then jiggling the schedule around in the calendar (all carried out online). This has proved perfect for me and today’s run neatly fitted in with the 2:45 scheduled workout.
So, I found the start of the Wandle Trail, actually the end of the River Wandle at the point it meets the Thames, and pressed go on the Adidas miCoach mobile app and the Garmin Forerunner 310XT. The next 3 miles were fairly uninspiring as I wiggled across fairly built up streets, zigzagging across the Wandle but rarely along it.
