A Simple Life of Luxury

Tilmann Heinig has just done a 500m kitesurf run with an average speed of 50.9 knots. It doesn’t count as the official world record as it was recorded using a GPS and there is lots of discussion not only over the accuracy of GPS recordings but also the fact that it records the actual distance you have travelled rather than a straight line between two points 500m apart. In essence, if you travel on a curved line for 500m you won’t have completed a set 500m course. The world record has always been contested over a set course, so getting the world record is more difficult as not only do you have to travel slightly further than 500m if you take a slightly curved course, but you have to time your run perfectly, have the wind in the perfect direction to the course and do it in a set location…. No doubt the 50 knot barrier for the world record will fall soon though.

Of course, World Record rules could change as technology improves and allows better ratification, and world record or not, it is still pretty fast in my books!

Living on the beach with a large, flat salt marsh behind us means that there isn’t any great mountain-biking on our doorstep. We do of course have some really good trails nearby, but most of these are a 20 minute drive from the house and it would be really nice not to have to do that drive. So, yesterday I set of exploring on my bike.

I headed inland to Tre-Ddol, which involces a 4 mile slog along the flat road across the bog, once in Tre-Ddol I simply picked the nearest hill and cycled up it… And what a hill it was, brutally steep and I wasn’t quite ready for it. In fact I have to admit to being beaten by it, despite it being tarmacked and me being on a mountain-bike I was forced to get off and push the top part… I shall beat it next time! From here I cycled along some nice quiet country lanes amongst some nice scenery and some great views of the Dovey Estuary and then onto some nice rocky double track. next was a big climb along forest roads towards Moel y Llyn Towards the top I stopped and spotted a little trail through the woods heading down into Artists Valley. I thought I’d explore it ans seemed to stumble upon a trail that other bikers n=have been using. Towards the top were some half constructed boardwalks and then a tricky, rocky and rooty descent that got a little too steep and a little too technical for me in places… Again, i shall complete it one day.

This brought me out into Artists Valley where I follwed the road alongside the iver before heading back onto some nice double track and back towards Tre-Ddol. I finished off with some single track through the woods above TreDdol where there is some more constructed jumps and such like, most of whcih looked far too dangerous to attempt, athough i will be back to explore a little further up the hill to see if there are any easy options.

Then it was just a four mile slog back along the roads into the wind. Nothing amazing as far as the terrain goes, but a worthwhile ride all the same that I shall be repeating in the future.

You may have noticed a lack of entries about my new fitness regime for a few days… Don’t worry, I haven’t given up on it before the end of January. I decided to take a few days off running after a little groin strain last Wednesday, but did have a fairly active windsurfing session on Friday afternoon. I met a local student Andy at the train station after he’d caught the train complete with all his kit from Aberystwyth and for a change went out windsurfing from the middle of Borth Beach. I don’t very often sail from here as it means driving down with my kit rather than my usual walk across to the beach with my kit on a wheelbarrow, but I’m glad I made the effort as it turned out to be a really good sail. Well powered up and with some nice waves to play on. Anna and Morgan even stopped off on their way home for a little watch.

We were then away for the weekend so my rest from the training continued. I have however attempted a little run today, but after about a mile there was a bit of discomfort in the strained muscle so I thought it would be best to stop and walk home… I did get my heart rate up to a ridiculous 211bpm though! I shall try anice easy bike ride this afternoon instead I think.

Anna probably won’t forgive me for mentioning this, but her fitness drive to get ‘fit for snowboarding‘ is supposed to start today… I wonder what exercises she’ll be doing?

We made a last minute decision on Friday evening and drove down to Gloucestershire to visit family.. Even morgan was a little surprised when we said we were going, he couldn’t quite believe that we would just go like that without any forward planning

Saturday was spent first visiting trying on some clothes my Mum had got from a local shop, then visiting my brothers to borrow clothes from him (which were a little too big!) and finally a drive out to Cribbs Causeway and a visit to TK Max to buy yet more clothes for snow-boarding. Anna now has a new Trespass jacket and a new fleece from the little shop near my parents house and a pair of Billabong trousers from TK Max. I have a new Dare2Be jacket which turned out to be top of the range once I looked it up when I got home… Typical of me to have all the technical features! Morgan did well with a new jumper, a new jacket, a new pair of trousers and some boots… We still have quite a bit to get though, trousers for me, and gloves hats and goggles all round… It soon mounts up and at this rate we’ll have to book a snowoarding holiday every year to make use of all our new gear! Although we’ll be able to wear most of it to keep warm on the beach here in Wales!

Sunday was spent driving home and we decided to simply follow the instructions provided by my Sat Nav. We did the same on the way there and it took us on our usual route, but on the way home the route was quite different to the way we usually go, although there was very little in it time or distance wise. It still gives us an alternative though which is always nice. Morgan slept most of the way home and didn’t wake up until we got to Nant Yr Arian, so we stopped off there for tea and cakes and a play in the playground… All in all a good weekend away.

I’ve recently decided to try to get a little fitter again, so as well as buying some gadgets I wanted some software to track my progress (or lack of progress as it may turn out to be). I’ve been looking at various applications for the Mac and evaluating them so thought I’d share my thoughts on some of them here. Hopefully it will give others in my position an idea of which applications will be best for them.

My main objective was to use the software to record any training sessions so that I could look back over time and see improvements. keeping such a journal also helps with motivation. My first port of call was a journal and scheduler on the Nike website. It was very nice, had a nice Flash based interface and did many of the things I wanted it to do, but really I wanted to be able to store the data locally so the next apps I looked at were iSmartTrain and WeightMania.

iSmartTrain
iSmartTrain allows you to manually enter data about your training sessions, or download them from a compatible (Polar) Heart Rate Monitor. It has a nice Mac style interface, (although it isn’t a full cocoa-based app) and I really like the main calendar view which allows you to see all of your sessions colour coded according to the type of activity (running, swimming, cycling etc.). The calendar view then has a nice weekly summary showing your weekly stats for training duration, distance, number of sessions, calories burned and a few other bits if info.

Also in its favour is the way it presents the graphs, allowing you to see most of this data in a nice clear format so that you can see the number of sessions, distance, time etc for each activity over a set period of weeks or months. All very clear and easy to use and at first I thought this would be the package for me.

iSmartTrain also allows you schedule events for the future, further helping to keep you motivated.

However, after the purchase of my Forerunner 305 (GPS and Heart Rate Monitor) iSmartTrain became less attractive as it isn’t compatible with Garmin devices and doesn’t have any mapping facility to show you the routes you have been on. For those without such a device though it could be ideal.

WeightMania

WeightMania is a huge app with so many options it is difficult to know where to start. More than just a training log, it is a complete lifestyle log allowing you to record not only your activities but also every single calorie, gram of fat, carbohydrate and anything else you eat as well as probably every bodily function you could possibly think of! It really does have it all, including a huge database of food types with their typical nutritional values. It also has tools such as body fat calculators, BMI calculators, BRM calculators and many more, and even goes as far as having recipe managers and grocery lists. For those of you who want to record and manage your entire lifestyle this tool does it all.

The Mac version has a nice modern interface and despite its numerous functions is relatively easy to use. You can of course just ignore the bits you aren’t interested in if you wish.

For me it was just overkill though and once again without compatiility for GPS mapping and connectivity to the Forerunner it wasn’t quite right for me. I also felt that I would spend so much time trying to record everything that there would be little time left to actually get out there and do some training.

Garmin Training Centre

To help keep me motivated I bought myself a new gadget, a Forerunner 305 GPS and heart rate monitor, armed with this my requirements from my software app changed a little. I now needed compatibility with the Forerunner 305 and something that would take advantage of some of its features. Garmin Training Centre software is a free download, so that made it attractive to start with, but once I started playing with it I found it a little limiting.

The maps produced are basic to say the least and the overall appearance and usability isn’t great. It is also lacking in features and just not quite up to scratch. I have to admit to not having explored its potential fully, but part of that is simply because it didn’t inspire me.

Ascent
Ascent is described as ‘GPS trainomg for the Macintosh’ and is fully compatible with the Garmin GPS devices. Simply plug in the device, and sync it with Ascent and your latest training sessions are added to the journal. Not only that but it overlays your route onto a Google Earth map and produces traces of your heart rate, speed, pace etc. All very interesting and it all works well.

The app itself is very Mac-like, but it does have a few little interface peculiarities that you need to get used to. For example, clicking on a toolbar icon with an downwards pointing triangle which normally indicates that the button contains a drop down list, performs an action. To get the drop down list you need to click and hold. Other than this it seems to do exactly what I want it to and does it very well. The maps are great as are the data screens and your training sessions can be viewed in a list or in a calendar view.

Also in its favour is the fact that it is still being actively developed and the developer is approachable and answers questions quickly via his forum. This is the app that I have decided to use and have now coughed up the registration fee for. However, there are still some improvements I would like to see.

The calendar view s OK, but I think it could display more info, entries could be colour-coded by activity and it would also benefit from a weekly summary similar to that of iSmartTrain. Also, the Summary graphs are very limited. and not very well presented. You can’t determine the period of data that is displayed, you can only select a weekly or a monthly view and you can’t distinguish between activites either. Instead all activites are grouped together and the total distance, time etc is displayed whereas I would like to see the total distance ran separately to the total distance cycled. Hopefully such things will be added / improved as the app continues to develop.

TrailRunner

I also looked at this app along the way. It looks really nice and although designed as a route planning app that allows you to plan routes on a map and then upload them to your GPS device it also allows you to import and analyse your routes /workouts. It has a diary feature for recording these workouts and an exercise planner.

The app looks really nice and is under constant development, but I never quite got the hang of it. I think part of this was because I was approaching it from the point of view of recording my training rather than using it to organise and plan my training. It is certainly worth a look, but I didn’t persevere enough with it. I may take another look at this one soon though.

TrackRunner

On paper this looked like the ideal app, all the mapping and data analysis of Ascent, coupled with the calendar and graphs views of iSmartTrain. Compatible with my Forerunner 305 and other Garmin devices and donationware too. The screenshots made it looks as though it was just what I was looking for.
Unforuntaley it just didn’t work properly. First of all you need some other software (LoadMyTracks) in order to import data from your GPS device into it and secondly I couldn’t manually enter data into it. Well, I could but I couldn’t change the date fields on it so I could only enter training sessions on the day I did them! It certainly has some potential, but was too buggy and crashed a couple of times so I soon gave up on it. I’m sure it will improve in future versions, but at the moment it wasn’t quite up to scratch which was disappointing as it looked so promising.

Summary

To round up, none of the applications were quite perfect for my needs, some came close and with a few tweaks any of them could be right, but I’m currently using Ascent and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the developers continue to improve it by adding to the graphing capabilities and improve the calendar view a little. I’m sure they will come up with other enhancements that I haven’t thought of too. lets hope that keeping a record of my activities keeps me motivated and helps me improve my overall fitness.

I thought getting fit was supposed to be good for you, but it only seems to hurt!

Running on the roads hurts my knees, running on the sand hurts my Achilles tendons.

I went for a nice run yesterday along the beach. Nothing too strenuous as I was trying to keep my heart rate down so my pace was a really slow 9 minutes per mile and I only ran 5 miles. The tide was low so the GPS generated map (left) made it look as though I was swimming rather than running, (in which case 9 mins/mile would have been good!) All felt good though and I enjoyed the run itself, but as soon as I stopped I developed a pain in my groin… Seems as though I now have some sort of groin strain which has now prevented me from going windsurfing today, depsite the fact that there has been a perfect wind all day and the sun has been shining.

On top of this, the running has caused chaffing in places you don’t want to know about and I even have a mild case of runners nipple! I think I shall have a few days off before doing some nice easy short runs again.

I haven’t lost any weight either as it makes me hungry and there’s nothing better than a BIG bar of chocolate after a physical workout!

It isn’t all bad though as I’ve been enjoying it and I think the fresh air each day does me good, and those endorphins must be having an effect on my overall sense of well-being.

I’ve been doing well with my attempt to get a little fitter, or at least slow down the decline brought on my increasing age! I went for another run yesterday with my Garmin Forerunner 305. I had planned to take it relatively easy and keep my heart rate at around 150bpm, but as usual, the first few minutes of the run saw my heart rate go mad. This time it hit a maximum of 196bpm, much higher than my theroretical maximum of around 183bpm.

I haven’t decided why this is yet, I wasn’t running that hard, in fact I was taking easy, and I have a feeling it may be due to a poor connection between the sensor and my skin. After a couple of minutes (once I have worked up a bit of a sweat and the connection becomes better) everything settles down and my heart rate seems more normal… It could also be due to some interference from something as so far I’ve been running along the same route so this peak happens at about the same place each time.

It could of course  be nothing to do with the technology itself, which seems perfect the rest of the time. It could be that the technology is recording things accurately and I’m a freak of nature!

I shall have to try another run on a different route soon and make sure the connection between the sensor and my skin is good before staring off.

The Borth and Ynyslas Weather Station is now back online again.

We had some problems with it in December. First the temperature and humidity sensor stopped functioning properly. A replacement was ordered, but when installed it fried the main SIM board within the sensor suite and everything stopped working properly. I have since got a brand new SIM board and a new temperature and humidity sensor and spent yesterday morning up the telegraph pole installing the new components and getting everything working.

Once the new SIM board was successfully talking to the console I powered up the PC and got it doing its thing, manipulating the raw data and uploading it very minute to the live online display. The data logger still had a few rogue readings stored in it so I had to manually remove some of these data points but it all seems fine now and the live data is once again available online.

OK, we live a ’simple life of luxury’ here in West Wales, but we are guilty of not really getting away much, simply because we like it here so much. However, family holidays are always nice so we have finally decided to spend some of our hard earned money on a snow-boarding holiday. I’ve done a little bit of boarding here in the Welsh hills before now, but we are really all beginners. We were therefore looking for a nice family friendly resort that was as cheap as possible. After a bit of searching the resort of Kranjska Gora in Slovenia looked ideal. It was cheaper than elsewhere and seems to pride itself on being a great place for families and young children… Lets hope it lives up to that.

Now we can’t wait to get on the slopes and learn to snowboard.

Don’t worry, I shall get bored of posting this stuff soon, but I went for a run today and got my heart rate up to 180bpm for a short time… Very close to my theoretical maximum of 183bpm. After this though I did a nice easy run, trying to keep my heart rate within the aerobic zone. Although finding out what exactly this should be is a little difficult as every article you read seems to have different figures… Most seem to have the aerobic zone at somewhere between 60% and 80% of your maximum. This article here has a good overview of the benefits of training within your aerobic threshold, it improves your aerobic efficiency and helps prevent injury and over-training… It also sounds a lot easier than half killing yourself each time you go out for a run!

Of course, you still need to do some speed work now and then and get the heart going, but getting a good aerobic base to work from sounds like a plan. After my initial burst this morning I kept my heart rate at around 150bpm (70%) and had a nice steady run which I could have kept up for a while… Time now to start extending the length of the runs… I’ve got to have an aim otherwise I’ll never keep this up, and todays run was in the pouring rain so I should congratulate myself on doing it at all!