Entries tagged with “gadgets” from TRI-ing harder

I have many half-baked theories on what motivates me and might motivate other people.  Here are some of my recent ones:

1. Train with others
This is something that everyone who's ever trained in a group knows - training with others works you harder than training on your own.  Obviously, this assumes you're all of a similar level, and all training as opposed to just out for a gentle bike ride to the pub... On your own, it's easy to back off, tell yourself you've done enough, or get lost in the moment and forget you're meant to be training (my mind wanders terribly when I'm swimming, for instance). 

But if there are others around you will be able to challenge each other. One of you lifts off but the other will keep pushing, if your buddy sprints up the hill you have to follow them.  And these little races make all the difference in turning a mediocre session into one that will have you vomiting at the end.

Our friend Joe, over at Joseph Bloggs has been challenged by his brother-in-law to run the Grim Challenge, an 8 mile "Cross-country" jaunty in December (where "Cross-country" means cold mud, cold water and cold muddy water).  This is where off-the-cuff bravado gets you, Joe - beware!

And muggins here has agreed to do it with him... I figure I'll be done with the triathlon season by October and will have time to train up for some off-roading. And anyway, the ERR crew keep telling me how wonderful cross-country is.  Let's see where off-the-cuff bravado gets me.

Joe plays a lot of football (quite well too - or so he tells me), so is fit enough, but he doesn't do much "running" (as opposed to sprinting back and forth and falling over, which I think is the key skill in football).  So he wants to know how fast and how far he can run. This is presumably so that when he puts a nice little wager down on himself he can do it with some accuracy. 

We went out for a first run together this morning.  I very rarely run "with" someone else (as opposed to "against" them), but as I've said before it can be very motivating and gives two great benefits:

• it allows me to run at a different pace from my normal plod (we started off more slowly because Joe only has little legs, but then sprinted like a bugger when we started discussing Fartlek sessions)
• the time seems to go more quickly when you have someone to chat with

Joe measured out a route for us of abovut 2 miles on the GMap Pedometer. If you haven't seen this site, it's a fantastic tool for runner or cyclists, and allows you to easily plan or review a route you want to use.  It can even estimate the number of calories you'll burn (on a run) if you're that way inclined.

I also made more use of my Nike+ and ipod, just to track our pace and distance.  It really is a fantastic tool, and despite what I say about about real-life-people being motivating, I get a bigger buzz from Lance Armstrong saying "Well done" to me at the end of a long workout!  I'll do a review at some point, but for now, and at last, here is the point of this article: the Nike+ website lets you graph your runs, so here, Joe, is our run.  The 1st and 6th km are my runs from my house to the 'so called mid-point' between our houses. But the rest is pure Joe.

(This article was called 'Jungle disk and iPod problems on Windows', but as Dave from JungleDisk points out below, it's not really a JungleDisk problem, and I like their service so much I didn't want it to sound too critical.  I also appreciate Dave doubling my readership.  Hopefully the article will be useful for others though)

I recently bought an iPod nano (finally!). More on that, and the nike+ kit I bought with it anon, but in the meantime I had a problem today which I thought was worth sharing with others.

JungleDisk is an online storage service that works with Amazon's S3 storage service. I've been using it for a few months now to backup our photos. For about 30GB of data, it costs me about $4 per month, which is very cheap.  It's very easy to use, and I highly recommend it. There are clients for Windows, Mac and Linux.  But today it (edit: sort of) broke my iPod.

Body Mass Index, or BMI, is a metric used to indicate when someone is dangerously under- or over-weight.  Most normal people should aim for a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9, but it is important to note that it might not work well if you're athletic or pregnant!  Many top athletes are classed as 'Obese' according to a standard BMI test, so take the results with a big pinch of salt!*

I've written this Body Mass Index (BMI) Calculator partly to help me learn about writing tools for Movable Type, and partly because it seemed relevant to what I do for fun.  I decided to write one from scratch rather than link to someone else's because I couldn't find an example of a BMI calculator that could cope with a mix of Imperial and Metric measurements. Being a 1972 child, I was brought up whilst adults were largely confused by the switchover from Imperial (feet & inches, lbs & ounces) to Metric (cm & metres, grams and kilograms).  They doggedly stuck to a mix of both, and so I've grown up not really understanding either.  Like many people my age, I tend to know my height in feet and inches, but my weight in kilos.  No BMI calculator I've found so far can cope with this, so I wrote one that could.  I'm also a geek, and love to start again with a clean slate.

I also borrowed ideas from Google's calculator, which is great (want to know how many centimetres in a light-year, anyone?).  So my calculator also tries to let you type enter your weight and height in a way that makes sense to you. It can understand things like

• 56 kilos, 5 foot 11
• 145 lbs, 180 centimetres
• 87 inches, 12 stone 1lb
  

Give it a go and tell me what does and doesn't work!

*salt intake calculator coming soon...