January 2015 – Foster Runs

January 25, 2015February 15, 2015

Last weekend

Sitting here on the first of Feb, it’s already difficult to remember the details of my run last week.

And it’s also tricky to show you as my MacBook Air has found a new way to frustrate me. iPhoto (remember from before that this is the only way to get photos from iPhone to MacBook) started uploading 55 photos from my iPhone but stopped with 18 to go. It has clearly stopped uploading (maybe an hour ago now), but I still can’t close the programme because it’s convinced that it’s still working fine. Disconnecting the iPhone makes no difference at all. It’s an impasse.

So for those of you thinking about changing from a PC to a Mac, pause to think about the following. It’s great in that it starts as soon as you open it and it certainly looks cool, but:

It’s designed for (and presumably by) people with 20/20 vision and it’s mighty difficult (in some instances impossible) to increase the size of the fonts and have them stay that way
You can’t easily save files to the folder that you want them in (that’s not how it works here)
The cables seem to be designed to break (actually I’m thinking of the iPhone cable that is currently plugged in… we have about four broken ones in the house at the moment)
Despite not using iTunes, it seems to have a 695mb or so update every other week (the last update insisted on being downloaded three times before I assumed that the prompt is broken)… it’s almost like a pointed reprimand for not having bought the version with the maximum memory
You can’t see how much memory is taken up by the myriad updates… that’s clearly above my pay grade!
Actually, I could go on, but suffice to say that I wish that I hadn’t gone back to Mac… PCs have their own frustrations (oh yes!), but at least they don’t constrain the way you want to work

I’m sure that I will get some stick for this outburst, but only from die-hard Mac users, or those people who have not tried both. I WANT to love it, but it’s really hard to do that with the constant constraints to work around.

Anyway, last Sunday started very cold indeed, but it was warmer running than I expected… I had my outer layers unzipped after about a mile. The mud was deep enough to cover me in splatters head to toe, but sufficiently shallow to be really slippery! There was loads of water around (photos would be nice here… I’ll upload them if I am allowed to at some stage!).

Overall I ran 6 miles in 1.02… a shade under 6mph. You can see the details here: https://www.strava.com/activities/245835561

January 11, 2015

Six to the sea

I’ve been running around London this week meeting entrepreneurs: legging it up and down tube escalators and along streets to stay on schedule and managing well most of the time. There were even several days when I collapsed onto the train in the evening and realised that I’d not even stopped for lunch… though I’d had plenty of caffeine instead!

This morning was bright and sunny (though somewhat chilly) and it seemed like a good day to run to the sea… though not from here! Instead I drove down to see my folks and ran my short circuit there instead.

The circuit takes me down the ridge path to Ovingdean, past the church (with a nod to Richard Marsh) and then down to Ovingdean gap where stairs take you down to the Undercliff Walk.

For some reason it was hard work going along the flat Undercliff Walk despite having a fresh wind behind me all the way… though I did stop to take quite a few photos along the way.

At Rottingdean I turned back up the hill and past the windmill to get back up to Ovingdean.

From there it was a short run up to the ridge path and back to base.

Strava estimated the run to be 6 miles in under an hour (you can see the run here), though it was an hour on my watch… an average of 6mph. I suspect that this is considerably more leisurely than my sprints around London, with somewhat fresher air too. Oh, and way less coffee!

January 4, 2015

Monitored by Strava

It was a close to ideal Sunday morning for me… get up, make coffee, play guitar, read HBR, run. It was very cold and miserably grey outside and I went upstairs to put on my shorts (for a run on the machine)… but for some reason came down dressed for the outside world. My runners were still caked in mud from last week and dried to a crisp, so I followed myself around with a dustpan & brush once I’d squeezed my feet into them. I stood ready by the door and then had an idea.

I had installed the Strava app on my phone at some point in the dim & distant past and had even gone so far as to create a profile… but that’s as far as I had managed to get. Here was a great opportunity to test it out… so I agreed to the T&Cs and set it (and me) running.

Cold it most certainly was, but as I tramped along the road there was a faint glow behind the grey mantle… enough to make me very glad to be outside. I opted for the same circuit that I ran often through the summer and quickly reached the start of the mud… oh boy, this was going to be a muddy run!

As I’ve written here often before, mud comes in lots of varieties, though I’m sadly unfamiliar with their names. Today the mud was light, wet, splashy, slippery and moderately deep in places (though fortunately not sticky enough to relieve me of my shoes!). Realising that I was going to get muddy regardless of how careful I was, I opted for a ‘plough through the middle’ approach, as much to lessen the likelihood of slipping over as anything else. This meant that I was quickly splattered in mud, but better this than running on the complex gradients at the margins of the path, having a repeat of last week and landing in the mud face-first!

Due to the temperature and the general slip-slidyness my phone stayed tucked away in the pocket of my jacket and thus photos were few… these should give a sense of the day though:

More mud ensued but little else caught my attention during the balance of the run… the benefit of reading HBR before running is that my mind was more active in trying to assimilate the new input, so random ideas kept pinging out including an idea for a short article.

It was fortunate that I had left the dustpan & brush out, as the floor was covered in mud by the time I had extricated myself from my socks and running longs, whilst my runners were returned sodden to dry ready for the next run.

According to previous calculations my circuit is 5.75 miles, but Strava reckons it was 6 miles… at least the difference is in the right direction! More curious, according to my watch the run took 60 minutes, whilst Strava calculated it as 58.30. Thus the average speed was in the range of 5.75 mph to 6.15 mph… either way not bad for such a slippery day!

You can even take a look at the circuit for yourself https://www.strava.com/activities/236534713