Distance: 10.05 km
Weather: Sunny!
Temp: 7-8ºC
Wind: light
Calories burned: 702
Average pace: 5:50/km
Total distance to date: 1120 km
I again ran clockwise today but I had a feeling this was not going to be a great run, despite the weather being absolutely perfect. I opted to not wear a jacket and that was wise, as I would have overheated, especially with the sun out.
The day started out with me oversleeping. I had a late breakfast and set off to run a few hours later. Despite the excess sleep, I actually felt a little tired just doing the 4K walk to the lake. Hence the whole ‘I have a bad feeling’ thing. I started off and my initial 1 km was off by a full three seconds — 5:13/km. There’s pacing yourself and then there’s just plain slow. I pressed on and finished with an overall pace of 5:50/km, six seconds off my previous run. I’m not too happy with that but I’ll chalk it up to mitigating factors (excuses!):
the sun was out; the sun also tuckers me out a little when I’m not used to it
I was over-rested and felt ‘off’ because of it
I missed Wednesday’s run due to hail (!), making it harder to build off of Monday’s run
I experienced some cramps
I stopped briefly to pause two times. The first was when I came upon a truck on the path that had two men shoveling out gravel to fill in potholes (I had already passed the woman running a small tractor that was smoothing down the gravel). It seemed safer to carefully walk by than continue running. And it was a convenient way to catch my breath. I next paused at about the 6K mark and that was because I was plain pooped. I pressed on after that till the end, though. The whole run felt hard.
Still, I am obviously far off peak condition so I accept this as just another step to getting there. Excelsior!
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sun and cloud mix
Temp: 5ºC
Wind: calm
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:44/km
Total distance to date: 1110 km
Today’s run was much the same as Friday’s but with one change — I ran counter-clockwise. I was interested to compare this to my last few runs because CCW around the lake requires a smidgen more effort as it is has a fair bit more uphill parts.
This turned out to have no impact, as I easily beat my previous average pace by 9-10 seconds (iPod =10, Nike+ site= 9, me=wishing Nike would fix this nonsense so the two would agree with each other).
Animal-wise, the geese were back. No hissing incidents though a (likely mated) pair crossed in front of me when the trail intersected a path leading to a viewpoint on the lake. There was enough space between them to charge forward but I moved around instead because I wasn’t in the mood to test how quickly a goose can snap its head forward and pack me in the leg. The clouds of bugs were back in the usual spots and I swear they have mutated to giant size. Yuck. I’d say I hope the cold kills them off but that’s mean and spring starts tomorrow so also quite unlikely.
Not that it felt overly spring-like. A mix of mostly cloud and a little sun and hovering around 5-6ºC, still unseasonably cold for this time of year. The last few km of the run were hard but I worked to maintain pace and managed to stave off cramps though I felt a little bloaty because I foolishly drank a little Coke Zero before heading out.
Chart:
Mar 19
Mar 16
Mar 7
Mar 5
Feb 6
Feb 3
1 km
5:10
5:08
5:06
5:02
5:06
5:06
2 km
5:20
5:22
5:22
5:17
5:15
5:21
3 km
5:26
5:32
5:30
5:24
5:21
5:31
4 km
5:31
5:37
5:33
5:30
5:25
5:37
5 km
5:34
5:42
5:35
5:33
5:28
5:39
6 km
5:36
5:47
5:38
—
—
—
7 km
5:38
5:49
5:40
—
—
—
8 km
5:41
5:51
5:42
—
—
—
9 km
5:43
5:52
5:45
—
—
—
10 km
5:44
5:53
5:47
—
—
—
Bonus chart! It seems the Nike+ site now shows split times for your runs. Neat. No idea how accurate the data is but here it is, anyway. I have used a new plugin to generate the table called Websimon tables in the vain hope that it would make table creation a bit easier. What would be nice is if the Nike+ site allowed you to export your data to…anything. Maybe in the summer.
Yes, I have been bad. I fell off not one wagon but two of them. The first was posting something every day to the blog. My fear of spamming nonsense and/or haikus in an effort to get something, anything up froze me not unlike the proverbial deer in the headlights and I ended up posting not a thing. In fact, that will be my next topic — drafts of posts that have never seen the light of day and why they were kept shuttered away.
The second wagon I fell off of smells of sweat — running. I had one day with a good excuse when having the blood samples taken left me seriously woozy for the better part of the afternoon. But the next two days I had no such excuse, I simply didn’t run. I have made amends and am back on schedule.
Like my previous run I did the approximate 19 km route:
briskl walk 4 km to Burnaby Lake
run 10K around the lake
briskl walk 5 km back home
This is good for about 1200 or so calories burned, which if I keep to my schedule, should help in keeping me slim ‘n trim. That and declaring Doritos an enemy of the state.
First the usual stats:
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sun and cloud mix
Temp: 7ºC
Wind: initially brisk then light
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:53/km
Total distance to date: 1100 km
Overall the run went well. I was again primarily concerned with cramping up and moderated my pace to prevent that from happening. This resulted in my average pace being six seconds slower than the previous run, which is disappointing but understandable. And it certainly beats having to deal with cramps. Plus this was with a week and a half between runs and that’s just enough time to start losing the edge again. Given that I was still planning on doing 5Ks at this time I’m not going to beat myself up over a few seconds.
And man, I really start feeling it on the uphill parts of the walk back home. It brings to mind that R.E.M. song, ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’.
I have noticed that the black slugs I encountered in the past are missing, either gone for the season or wiped out in some great black slug extinction event I never heard about. I suspect the former. We’ll see as the days get warmer. In their place, however, is an abundance of geese. One pair were standing on the edge of the trail as I rounded a corner and the closest took umbrage at my presence, hissing and fluffing out his wings as I strode by. I captured this moment as best I could, Internet meme-style:
Temperature-wise I again didn’t need the gloves I took and the jacket could have been shed. It was a touch warmer than the last run but still not warm.
Chart as usual below (and a lusty boo to the Nike+ website, which currently is producing a Firefox-crashing script bug, forcing me to use Chrome to view or edit my running stats. To Nike’s credit they are promising a revamped site come the summer, one of the bullet points for which is ‘No more Flash’. I’m going to guess they are not heavily invested in Adobe stock).
Today I had some blood drawn for some standard tests prior to my check-up. It could have gone worse, it could have gone better. I’ll edit in the summary I write on Broken Forum. For now a haiku:
Draw some blood for tests
Fasting first leaves me woozy
Some pain then float home
Yes, Bejeweled is 10 years old and has been out for the iPhone (and iOS) for ages, so why review it now? Because I can!
And also because I have a scary number of hours invested in it, as it’s my go-to game when I tuck myself into bed but am too tired to read. Yes, Bejeweled is the equivalent of a warm glass of milk or sleeping pill for me, something PopCap probably won’t use as a bullet point in their features list.
In terms of presentation there’s nothing to really complain about here — the screen is bright and clear, controls work well and I’ve never noticed any performance issues. It’s a match-3 game and they are generally pretty hard to screw up. The one graphical failing is that the yellow gems, when they are turned into fire gems, look too much like orange gems.
The worst thing about the gameplay is the randomness. There’s no way to see what gems are coming up so you can only plan based on what is on the board at the moment and unless you’re in Zen mode the game will eventually give you nothing to match at some arbitrary point. You can delay the inevitable by keeping a hypercube in your pocket (made by matching five gems) because that matches with any gem adjacent to it and usually opens up enough of the board to present new combinations.
Compared to the now-pulled Bejeweled 2, this version (based on the PC Bejeweled 3) lacks the standard timed mode, which I enjoyed as a change of pace and replaces it with Diamond Mine, which would be more intriguing if the difficulty didn’t ramp up almost immediately. In Diamond mine you must dig down and uncover artifacts to keep the game going but because the random mechanics are still in place and you have a timer, it’s all too easy to quickly have no viable moves. This mode more than any seems to rely on sheer luck and the added depth of the gameplay is short-circuited by randomness.
Butterfly mode was added recently and it’s always nice to see new content show up in a game you already own. The idea is interesting — random colored butterflies appear at the bottom and move one row up each time you make a move. If a butterfly reaches the top it is eaten by a spider and the game ends. So far so good. But there are two problems affecting this mode. The first is the same randomness. Too much of the game is simply out of your control. Making matters worse, the number of butterflies increases very quickly, making it even more difficult to find viable means to clear them. On the plus side, it may actually make you better at the base game because you need to use all the strategies in Butterfly mode to simply keep advancing. It’s not enough to match three, you must also work out ways to get butterflies to collapse back down instead of reaching the top, create chain reactions to take out multiple butterflies and so on. It’s a shame there is no difficulty setting because the games are ultimately too short to be satisfying.
In the base game the addition of glowing gems, created by intersecting two groups of three, is a nice addition. Match a glowing gem to two others of the same color and you get a satisfying cross-shaped explosion. It’s even better when one triggers another. In fact, explosions may be the best thing about Bejeweled. Matching two hypercubes ‘fries’ the entire board and gives you the hypercubes back, too. This is part of a major improvement over 2. In previous versions it was very easy to accidentally blow up stuff you were laying out. In this edition explosions have been restricted to adjacent gems only, so you can be a lot more precise and if you create a special gem in an explosion it will still be there after. Who knew improving explosions would be the best thing in a Bejeweled game?
Profiles, stats, achievements and leaderboards (local only) round out the presentation and all are presented well. There is also the Blitz mode that ties in with Facebook but I do not play Facebook games because they make my teeth itch, so I can’t offer any opinion there.
Overall, this is ultimately a slickly-presented but shallow match-3 game. At some point the game will decide it’s time for you to lose. Sometimes it’s on the second level, sometimes it’s on the 14th. But as a ‘I’m in bed and kind of sleepy but would like to engage my brain in some small way’ Bejeweled is A-OK. It’s available on the App Store for 99 cents.
P.S. WHY DID I WRITE SO MANY WORDS ABOUT BEJEWELED? I DO NOT KNOW!
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sun and cloud mix
Temp: 6ºC
Wind: light
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:47/km
Total distance to date: 1090 km
With conditions about as good as you can get for the first week of March, I set off on my second return run today and I had a nutty plan.
I was originally planning on running 5Ks this week to work on getting my stamina back up but I felt surprisingly good after Monday’s run so I devised a plan that would encourage me to run a full 10K.
First, I set the actual Nike+ sensor to track a 10K run instead of 5K. I’ve done this before and nothing bad happens if you don’t run the full length, you just don’t get the countdown in the last km if you quit early and your run report shows it was set for 10K when you only did 5K, you wimp.
Next, I plotted my route. Unlike Monday I did not take the SkyTrain to Burnaby Lake. Instead I walked there, a distance of about 4K. Once there I chose to start out on the south side of the lake and would quickly reach a point of decision: I could either run 2.5 km, turn around and get the 5K that way or I could keep running to get the 5K and if I was too tired to continue could walk the rest. But that would put me halfway around the lake and mean I’d have about a 10 km walk back home (and no transit tickets or money to cheat my way out of it). So this would encourage me to keep running to…avoid walking.
And it worked!
As the chart below indicates, my pace was slower even from the start vs. my 5K on Monday but that was deliberate. I wanted to avoid cramps if possible and the more measure pace did just that. You can also see after the initial few km of ‘oh god this is what it feels like to be running again’ my pace moderated and settled down.
In comparison to my first-ever 10K on December 30, 2009, I was actually three seconds faster — not bad for not running one in six months (and considering that first 10K was just the capper on regular runs that had me going up to 8K).
Temperature-wise I didn’t need the gloves I took and the jacket was probably optional, though I wasn’t overly warm wearing it. The air still had that last kick of winter in it. As the title of this post suggests, though, it is now warm enough for the bugs to be back. I had to wave them out of my face a few times but had no intake incidents.
Released in March 2011, Collapse Into Now is R.E.M.’s 15th studio album, coming 28 years after their first (Murmur, 1983). It also fulfilled their five-record contract with Warner and, as it turned out, was their last studio album period, as the band announced in September 2011 that they were ‘calling it a day’. Despite an interview around that time where Mike Mills, the bassist, had claimed relief at being free of the contract, Collapse Into Now doesn’t sound anything like a contractual obligation album. Instead, it is a fitting end to a career that spanned three decades.
Before getting to the album itself, a little background on the latter half of those 30 years is worth exploring.
First, this chart:
The last two albums are missing from the list but according to Wikipedia, the sales for them were:
Accelerate (2008): 350,000 in North America, combined worldwide sales of 627,500
Collapse Into Now (2011): 142,000 in North America (prior to the band’s announced breakup)
Out of Time is easily the band’s biggest success commercially and despite being a ‘dark’ album, Automatic did very well, too. The band changed course with Monster, going for a grungier straight-up rock approach but the majority of fans stuck with them. That changed with New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which (barely) failed to reach the coveted 1 million mark. The decline continued apace and didn’t reverse until Accelerate. Collapse Into Now sadly failed to catch on, performing even worse than the somnambulant Around the Sun. It’s hard not to imagine the tepid reaction factored in the band’s decision to break up.
R.E.M signed a gigantic contract in 1996 and at the time it was widely viewed as too rich but the band had proven their worth to Warner with multiple million sellers, so it seemed like a small risk at best. Two things happened, though, that made that risk much larger than it initially seemed. First came Bill Berry’s departure in 1997. While he left on good terms and went on to periodically play with the band, it created the first stirrings of break-up talk. It also coincided with a restlessness the band seemed to be experiencing. New Adventures has a number of good tracks but to me the album feels like an at times uneasy hybrid of the feedback-laden Monster and the darker, more acoustic sounds of Automatic. The impression is that of a band exploring and trying to find new things to stay interested and engaged in the process of creating music, with mixed results.
With their drummer departed the band seized on the chance to play with drum machines or to completely de-emphasize percussion, leading to 1998’s Up, an album that opens with the murmuring echo of “Airportman” and overall has a melancholy feel to it. The band shed most of the melancholy for the follow-up, Reveal (“Imitation of Life” is classic R.E.M.) but the arrangements were becoming ever-denser and elaborate, almost baroque (see: “Saturn Return”). By 2004 the band was adrift and Around the Sun, though opening strongly with “Leaving New York” is a muddled affair, none of the songs actually awful but likewise none distinguishing themselves in the mid-tempo morass that comprised the album. Sales cratered.
In 2008 they decided to strip things down and came up with Accelerate, a 34-minute album that lives up to its name, starting out with the propulsive “Living Well is the Best Revenge” and ending the same way with “I’m Gonna DJ”. In-between the album does slow down to catch its breath on a few tracks. Audiences responded by lifting its sales past Around the Sun. But something happened after that. It’s almost as if a large contingent of fans felt they had met their own obligations in supporting the band so when Collapse Into Now released, it debuted decently (#5) but sank quickly. (The negative-sounding album title and first track “Mine Smell Like honey” probably didn’t help.)
And that’s a shame (here comes the review) because Collapse Into Now is the band’s best album since 1996. It builds on the strengths of Accelerate by maintaining the energy and joy of that album while expanding the musical palette to include a better mix of songs and styles. Still exploring, the band reins in a lot of the excesses of the post-Berry era and for the most part delivers a worthy coda to their career.
Two of the same keys that worked on Accelerate are featured here — Mike Mills’ prominent backing vocals and keeping the percussion forward in the mix. At the same time the album breathes more freely than Accelerate so quieter tracks like the plaintive “Walk it Back” and “Oh My Heart” fit better as part of the whole. In a callback to their earliest albums Michael Stipe’s vocals are often pushed back in the mix. Not that he seems to mind, as he whispers, shouts and croons with enthusiasm throughout the record.
The standout tracks are the opening “Discoverer”, “Uberlin”, “Oh My Heart” and “It Happened Today”, all if which can easily stand beside the band’s best efforts. The latter features soaring, wordless vocals for much of the song, recalling a similar approach used in the chorus for “Orange Crush” from 1988’s Green. “Discoverer” is a speeding train of an opener, an energetic track that segues into the similarly up-tempo “All the Best” before pulling back for the simple acoustics of “Uberlin”. “Discoverer” reappears as the coda to the album’s final song, “Blue”, closing the circle and perhaps hinting at the band’s coming demise. “Blue” is a great example of R.E.M. going back to its older material for inspiration, with Peter Buck’s mournful guitar at the beginning echoing “Country Feedback” from Out of Time and Stipe’s spoken word performance calling back to the same album’s “Belong”. Heck, even Patti Smith shows up, providing ethereal backing vocals just as she did on “E-bow the Letter” from New Adventures.
In the end, the lack of commercial success for Collapse Into Now doesn’t matter much as R.E.M. is no longer an ongoing concern and the bandmates have vowed never to reunite. I wonder if it will some day become the ‘forgotten classic’ of R.E.M.’s catalog. It would be worthy of the designation.
Unlike most of the links I have listed under the My Links category, I am actually using this site on a daily basis!
While the name is a bit cutesy for my taste, MyFitnessPal is a fairly good tool for tracking diet and exercise and since I’m a wee bit off from where I’d like to be weight-wise, it seemed like a good idea to start using it. There is a thread on Broken Forum where a bunch of us have become fa(s)t friends and signed up. I was also having issues with the Livestrong app I had been using (and paid for), including an obnoxious issue where it kept popping up daily reminders on my phone, even after I had turned them off, so I was ready to make a switch.
MFP is much better-behaved and the website makes entering info easy as pie. Mmm, fattening, delicious pie.
Yes, I am back on the bandwagon again, the bandwagon being ‘writing something on the blog every day no matter what’. As always, this means some days will be what one might call content-light, while others will be a little meatier. I think I am dangerously close to mixing metaphors here.
Distance: 5.02 km
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 6ºC
Wind: gusts up to 50+ km/h
Calories burned: 351
Average pace: 5:33/km
Total distance to date: 1080 km
A funny thing happened a month ago.
I completed my run on February 6th and all seemed well. I had improved on my previous time and seemed back on track for a )hopefully) successful year of running.
The day after that run I was walking to the store to get a loaf of bread or BreadQuest as I like to call it. As I walked I felt a funny little twinge around my right ankle. When I got home I poked and prodded and discovered that the spot on my ankle that had been sore — and that I had just taken three months off from running to allow to heal — was every bit as sore as it ever was. Not wanting to risk further injury, I very reluctantly decided to hold off on further running until I could have it looked at.
This time I chose not to go to a walk-in clinic but to sign up with an actual doctor, the same one my partner has had for years — keep it in the family, so to speak. We had a consultation on February 29th and he told me the likeliest cause of the soreness was a small hernia. Unless it gets severe there is no specific treatment apart from icing it and basic monitoring. So I was cleared to run again. Woo!
Today I did just that. It was a chilly but sunny day and also windy as heck, with gusts over 50 km/h. I do not like running in the wind, so I waited until later in the afternoon, hoping it would die down. The good news is it clouded over in the meantime. Wait, that’s not good. As I headed out I quickly realized a single layer was insufficient and came back to grab my jogging jacket and a pair of gloves. The jacket was a good move, the gloves proved unnecessary as my route around Burnaby Lake proved an excellent windbreak due to the copious stands of trees alongside Cottonwood Trail.
The route I took:
Sapperton to Sperling/Burnaby Lake SkyTrain station. Total calories burned: about 10.
Sperling SkyTrain station to Cottonwood Trail at Burnaby Lake (approx. 1 km). Walked briskly.
Cottonwood Trail at Burnaby Lake, north side: 5:02 km.
Central Valley Greenway to home (approx. 4 km). Walked briskly.
My average pace of 5:33/km was down from my previous run of 5:28 but considering I’d been off for a month, that’s not bad (and better than the run prior to that when I came in at 5:39). At the 2K mark the cramps became fairly bad so I walked them off for 15-20 seconds and then finished the run without any further issue. The legs feel fine now, no soreness or pain.
I expect a little soreness tomorrow. And a good sleep tonight.
My next run will be on Wednesday if all goes well.
