Tag: Strava

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.

week five

Books Read:
9. A Sport and a Pastime — James Salter
10. Poetryworld — Louis Cabri

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 28.61
to date — 120.64

A sport? I must have missed something. I kind of get the pastime part. Maybe there’s some baseball metaphor at work that I completely missed. Sounds like a job for George Bowering…. Anyway, I thought this book was alright although I found the narrator rather curious. He’s a character in the story, obviously, but he’s rather shady it seems. Not trustworthy to say the least. But strangest is that he seems to be around directly observing an awful lot of the arc of Dean and Anne-Marie’s relationship. Impossibly so. It reminds me of when people claim the Bible stories of Jesus are definitely all totally true because they’re from eye-witness accounts, including events that happen without anyone around to eye-witness them. He sweat blood? Really? You watched him and Satan hang out in the desert? Sure you did. Seriously, the amount of time that narratorwhatshisname spends watching Dean and Anne-Marie have sex…there’s a lot of sex. With an audience. Wait, am I also the audience? So, anyway, Poetryworld, another from the CUE Books archives that I’ve failed until now to read. And I should have gotten to it sooner because I loved Posh Lust and Louis Cabri is one of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. Poetryworld hurts my head, like a long series of tongue-twisters for my brain. I enjoyed this collection a lot. Worth picking up a copy, and I know where you can get one.

week five
My physiotherapist suggested that I try the Strava app to go with my Fitbit so I did a few runs and I’m confused. The thing on my wrist tracks what I’m doing and then it syncs with the Fitbit dashboard and Strava syncs with the Fitbit dashboard and the two take the same data and come up with remarkably different results. The distances are often close, but you’d think they’d be exactly the same, no? The times and splits, close. The calories burned, well, not close at all. And that’s fine because I assume that they’re both just guessing, really. But the information going into both apps is the same information from the same source. The only thing that I can think of is that the Fitbit dashboard is lying to Strava, but that doesn’t make much sense because Strava tends to be a bit more generous on the time tracking. And waaay more generous on the calories burned. I used to pay more attention to that caloric burn, because I would think that if nothing else I’d earned enough metabolical reserve for that post-gin-and-tonic bottle of wine. Doesn’t matter much, what with currently doing–and killing at, I might add–sober February. But if I start doing hot yoga, someone just put me out of my misery.