Tag: FitBit Surge

week thirty seven

Books Read:
50. In the Garden of Beasts — Erik Larson (oh my gawd still in progress)

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 33.93
to date — 1,409.05

Yes I’m still reading about Nazis. It’s a dense book. Well, not dense in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich sort of dense, but dense. Anyway, I’m just hoping that I finish it before I fly off to Stockholm. In three weeks. I swear, if I haven’t finish this book by then I’ll give up. Out of spite. I remember one of my English lit professors telling me about how she read War and Peace and she was about 50 pages from finishing and quit reading the book “out of spite”. Clearly, that story resonated with me. She’s an administrator now.
week-thirty-seven
Yesterday was the Eastside 10k, also known as the fifth race I’ve ever ran. I took it easy this week and felt pretty good when I left my house yesterday morning in the pouring rain. I’ve written a few times about how I prefer running in inclement weather, though that is usually more to do with the dearth or other people on the Seawall and the Eastside 10k had sold out as of Thursday. Anyway, I left with what I thought was plenty of time then to find that the line up for bag check was a block long meaning that I stood in line for about 20 minutes then made my way to the start corral with only a few minutes before the gun, which meant that I did not have nearly enough time to stand around and slip into some crowd-induced anxiety attack. I hoped to break 45 minutes in this race, a rather ambitious goal. I was feeling fine crossing the start line but I just didn’t feel like I was going to break any personal records and at the 2 km marker when the 45 minute pacer passed me I just settled in for a decent time. And it went all good. The rain was great and the route was great. A few times it felt a little slippery but it was all great and around half way I thought of quickening my pace and then at six a little more and then at seven and the whole time I was in my head comparing the route and its rolling hills to the rolling hills along Dallas Drive in Victoria and I kept trying to figure out if I was was running Stanley Park where would I be right now and then I can around a corner the there was the 45 minute pacer a couple hundred metres ahead and I thought maybe I could catch him and not die and just past 9 km near the bottom of the Dunsmuir Viaduct I passed him I crossed the finish line and clicked off my Fitbit Surge and of course it recorded that I’d only ran 9.98 km and then passed that same lie on to Strava so neither recorded my new personal record of 44:56 chip time for a 10 km run. I think that the Eastside 10k is my favourite race and I really cannot wait for my Chronos to arrive.

week twenty two + twenty three + twenty four

Books Read:
36. The Elegance of the Hedgehog — Muriel Barbery

Kilometres Ran:
these weeks — 133.27
to date — 825.96

It feels a bit like cheating at solitaire but I’m justifying it because I’ve fallen behind farther than I had ever wanted and this seems like the easiest way to get sort of caught up and move on and hope that this is just another blip along the way. Suffice it to say, I’ve done little reading and even littler writing. I should have just quit or postponed The Elegance of the Hedgehog because I simply did not feel like reading it. And not because the book was bad–on the contrary, it’s quite good–but simply because I was not in the mood to read it. But I stubbornly trudged on, if by stubbornly trudging I mean to say that I took nearly a month to get through it. And by get through it I must admit the latter third involved a lot of skimming towards the finish line. I should have put it aside and moved on to something else. But I didn’t and I do sort of regret it because it’s a good book. It was simply not a book I felt like reading in May and June, for whatever reason. And for that I’ve come to terms with the fact that it will take a miracle to get to 95 books this year. All is not lost. But 95 seems an unattainably long way off.
week twenty four
Running, on the other hand, I’ve not much faltered in the inspiration there. I’ve nearly erased the injury losses I suffered at the beginning of this adventure, and it’s looking like I’m going to be close to 1,000 km by mid-year. I do have two weeks in October whilst prancing through Scandinavia that is going to throw a hiccup into the plan–not a lot of running in prancing. But I’m hoping to front-load some credit into all of that. The other day I set out for a run and noticed that my Surge battery ws nearly dead so I took along my iPhone with WalkTracker Pro installed as a back up. My Surge survived, but the numbers at the end of the run were rather frustrating. Not only were the many of the splits between the two devices way off, by the end of a almost 12 km or over 13 km run (depending on whom your believe) the two were off by nearly 500 metres. And then of course Strava chimes in with its nonsense that barely correlates with either of the other two. So I have no idea what my actual distance is and I don’t know what the solution is. To make it more confusing, I’m to understand that my Fitbit uses my iPhone’s GPS when I connect them. So now I have three different numbers from essentially the same device. At least the overall times are the same across the three. Well, within a few seconds but I chock that up to a lack of button pressing synchronicity. The Scotiabank half marathon is next weekend. I’ve very curious to see what kind of time I can complete.