Long time, no posting. This was a pretty excellent summer, I have to say. Not much time for posting. Work was a lot more challenging than you would hope for the summer and I was out running or riding most nights. My eating regime has definitely loosened, but I’m happy to say that I’ve maintained the weight loss goal that I achieved at the end of the winter. Now that I’m in weight maintenance mode, while continuing to exercise a lot, I eat with near impunity. This is good times!

Thanks to the running that I did over the winter, the transition to riding was pretty solid. Which is to say that I felt better on the first bike ride this year than I did at the end of last summer. After a few weeks of fairly casual rides I hooked up with one of Amy’s coworkers and he then encouraged me to join a local bike shop for group rides on Wednesday evenings. The bike shop rides usually consisted of 30-50 people that splintered off in to various skill levels and we found our place. By the end of the season I think we had both gotten to the point where we might consider making the jump to the top dog group, though I think that leap is greater than it might seem. So I dunno what next year will bring but it could be interesting. I did have to cut the riding a little short to start preparing for my first half marathon next month. Riding doesn’t really translate to running, as I have found. The endurance carries over, but the muscles are different and the wear and tear takes some getting used to. Amy was starting to get nervous for me and my lack of preparation, and so it was with a heavy heart that I hung the wheels up in the garage. I could conceivably do both, but not at the level that the group ride demands, and I’d like to at least say I gave the half marathon a good showing.

So yeah, at some point in the early summer my brother invited me to start using Strava. The best way I could describe it is that it’s a social network for riders and runners. You upload your activities to the website and it compiles all of the data into a nice little summary. Strava was actually started here locally and I was aware of it early on, but if memory serves it was a subscription model at the time and I’m not really down with that. Whether or not that was ever actually true, they now have a tiered service where the free option is pretty dang good. So I signed up to keep tabs on my brother’s activities, and it had the unintended consequence of further opening up the local riding community to me immediately. You can browse what they call ‘segments’ in any given area and see the times for everyone who has cleared that segment. From there you can drill in to individual profiles to find out where they are riding and who they are riding with (assuming they aren’t private). I’m able to find new rides, build a little network, track my personal progress, and also feed a little bit of a competitive beast that I have never really accepted I had.

Right, okay so I guess you can manually enter data in to the website but the preferred method is to generate some GPS data. The most accessible way for most of us is to use the inherent GPS capability of your trusty smart phone. Strava offers a pretty good free app that you fire up while you’re on the run or ride. I used the app all summer on my rides, and then when I started sprinkling some runs in there I carried the phone in my hand. You can pack the phone away in a saddle bag or jersey pocket on a ride, but the running is a pain. I haven’t found an arm band or hip pouch that doesn’t flop around obnoxiously so my low tech solution was to drop the phone in a sock and hold it. This was definitely adequate but not ideal, so I bit the bullet and recently bought a watch. The watch also came with a heart rate monitor which offers another layer of performance tracking that I like. I can technically pair the watch wirelessly to a sensor on my bike next year, but I think I will probably swallow another bullet and get a dedicated GPS unit for the bike. I do miss the immediacy of the phone – you can upload data directly to the web as soon as the ride is over – but the ergonomic benefits and the increased accuracy of dedicated units are too great to ignore.

Amy and I went out for an organized 10k trail run this morning and I thought I would see what Strava’s embed options look like. So here we are:

The run itself was
B…
U…
T…
FULL.

Typical morning fog hung around until 11am or so, and the leaves are changing pretty rapidly now. I came around a corner at one point, running parallel with the contours and I had a view down into the foggy valley, but the sun was breaking through in places and dappling the floor. The terrain was mostly great single track with plenty of roots and rocks to watch out for. I ran with someone I met recently for about two miles, but then he had a bit of trouble with his dog so I continued on alone and kept to myself for the remainder of the run. Just me in the woods. In my half marathon training I’m finding that I don’t much care for longer distances on the road. Even running around a gorgeous lake is pretty boring, but I refuse to resort to audio entertainment to distract myself. One of things I like most about being out on foot is getting in touch with my surroundings and listening to myself. So I think I’m more of a trail runner, but I am still looking forward to putting a half under my belt.

Yeah, so it’s been a great summer. I’m going in to winter in better shape than I was last year, and I’m eager to come out in spring even further ahead. I’ma keep on Stravaing. For better or worse, I don’t think you can delve too deeply into a profile unless you create an account yourself, but I can be found here if all my fan are interested. 🙂