I didn’t get a good night’s sleep on Wednesday night and was still feeling some effects of this today, so my overall energy level was down a bit. Stat-wise I was still pretty close to yesterday, though. BPM was down a bit (good), pace was up a bit )less good, but still fine).
On a more positive note, I still ran a bunch of the way and did it in my new trail running shoes that showed up way earlier than expected. I was thinking I’d get them by the middle of next week, but they came today. Thank you, MEC and Canada Post!
They are the Brooks Caldera 4 and they are the lightest, springiest pair of Brooks I’ve worn. I had the laces tied too tight, but that’s easy to adjust. The cushioning and support are great, though, and I’m already looking forward to running in them again.
Stats:
Walk 3Average pace: 8:03/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 7.62 km
Time: 1:00:24
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 25ºC
Humidity: 48%
Wind: light
BPM: 125
Weight: 172.5 pounds
Total distance to date: 22.89 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8
And yes, I do mean this specific scene, with the Yakety Sax music. I’m not sure what made me think of this again, but it still delights me as much as it did back in 2012.
There was a tiny smattering of Goldfish crackers left, so I ate them and another temptation is no longer within easy reach. The only other snack I had today was a small banana. That’s pretty good, I’d say.
To my surprise, I was down this morning, all the way to 172.7 pounds–my lowest since February and less than a pound off where I was on January 1st (171.8). This is encouraging.
I will not celebrate by stuffing my face with candy.
You see the phrase “As long as people wear masks and don’t lick one another” in an article in The Atlantic.
I was looking through some photos today and found some from November 2019 and it felt like looking back on a different world. Not just a different time, but a different place. I don’t know how much we will return to “normal” when the pandemic ends–especially as the world is also grappling with protests over racial and class equality, climate change and its accompanying litany of freak extreme weather (California on fire, multiple storms hitting the east coast simultaneously) and probably an alien invasion if things stay on track–but we will never be the same after this, I think. The memories will linger and carry into the next generation.
On the other hand, some argue, with some validity, that the average person has a memory comparable to the lifespan of a fruit fly, so maybe things will just go right back to how they were before and lessons will not be learned, or learned minimally as we slowly careen toward our next awaiting global disaster.
I want to say we won’t forget, in part because it’s going to linger around for probably at least another year or so in some form, that we are a good ways off from being able to put it behind us.
In the meantime, The Keg is running an ad that shows one of its restaurants bursting with activity, every table packed, people everywhere. I thought this was an odd thing to show with a virus rampaging across the world, but when I saw the ad again I noticed a small disclaimer at the bottom of the screen just as the ad started: Filmed before COVID-19. Now I’m really wondering why they ran the ad when they knew it was showing something that basically doesn’t match reality. Lazy, I guess. It’s an old ad and a new, more accurate one would just be depressing–a half-filled restaurant with all the staff wearing masks.
I won’t be eating in a restaurant until we have a vaccine, some kind of on-demand testing everywhere or benevolent aliens (maybe they won’t invade) make the virus magically disappear, like a certain sociopath south of the border mused it would. And though Tenet is now playing in theaters, there’s no way in hell I’m going to risk watching it in one. I can wait four months and watch it virus-free on a 60″ TV.
This concludes another kind of depressing post about the pandemic. Maybe in a year I’ll look back on this post and shudder over how bad things were then and how great they are now.
When I headed out for my post-work walk today I felt I probably wouldn’t run as much, I just wasn’t feeling it.
I ended up running more than yesterday and had a best pace of 5:50/km, even better when you consider I walked the first 25% before switching to running. Woo, I say.
Although I don’t show the comparison to the previous walk’s stats, my pace was four seconds faster, though everything else was pretty close to yesterday’s effort.
The heel seems to be surviving the abuse so far.
I am eager to get new trail runners so I can try running for even longer stretches.
Walk 2Average pace: 7:54/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 7.64 km
Time: 1:00:21
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 23ºC
Humidity: 48%
Wind: light
BPM: 128
Weight: 174 pounds
Total distance to date: 15.27 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8
Yes, I cheated in a minor way with some Goldfish crackers again. This time I stopped and let the guilt wash over me in real time. I behaved for the rest of the day.
I was up to 174 pounds even, I think that may have pushed me to the crackers. But I did work them off later in the afternoon with another run/walk.
Still, I vow to do better for the rest of this 14 day experiment. I’ve been pretty good so far, but I can be better than pretty good.
The biggest is that the entire book has been rewritten, so it is not merely updated, but now reflects the market as of 2020, with Gaughran offering additional wisdom he’s gathered in the years between editions.
The comprehensive resources have now been moved from the book to a specific area of his website, which allows Gaughran to continuously update them–a welcome improvement that ironically makes the book more useful even as you set it aside.
Gaughran does make a few assertions that he had not previously (or at least that I don’t recall). The biggest, for fiction writers, is that he flat out says you should write series. It’s just the way of fiction now, and unless you’re already a well-established author or writing non-genre fiction, he maintains it pretty much cannot be avoided. He presents clear arguments for this, but it still makes me sad, because I love one-off stories and prefer them to series. He softens the blow a bit by saying that a series does not have to be literal sequels, but can simply share the same setting or characters.
As with previous editions, Gaughran keeps the tone light but the advice is serious, well-researched and backed by his own experience and the experiences he has heard from other authors.
If you are interested in self-publishing or have just started dipping your toes into the experience, Let’s Get Digital is and remains an excellent introduction to new authors. As before, highly recommended.
Okay, so here’s the thing: my left heel is still a bit sore but it strangely gets less sore when I walk or run on it for awhile. Eventually it starts getting sore again, but I haven’t tested the outer boundary of this yet. I’ve done a 10 km walk so far and had no issues.
So I really have no idea what happened or is happening. I suspect my doctor would not know, either. I’m not sure an x-ray or ultrasound would reveal anything, either. I suppose if I minimized my walking as much as possible that it would eventually heal (ho ho) to the point where it would not be sore at all, but realistically, that’s not going to happen.
Maybe one day it will just feel better as suddenly as that day it suddenly started to hurt.
Anyway, it’s dumb and I have decided I am not going to let it stop me from resuming running, because I’ve been running more as part of my post-work walks. And I’m going to start logging these walks as workouts, which they are, because I sweat and stuff.
What I have been doing for the last month or so is walking to the end of the Brunette River trail and back, a route that covers a little over 7 km. It takes just over an hour when walking.
Today I ran more than I have since starting these walks, including a stretch where I clocked in at a pace of 5:58/km–on the slow side for running, but basically impossibly fast for walking, unless I was five meters tall, maybe.
Here are the stats of my walk, which I will include going forward (also the heel feels no worse for having done this):
Walk 1Average pace: 7:58/km
Location: Brunette River trail
Distance: 7.63 km
Time: 1:00:53
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 23ºC
Humidity: 50%
Wind: light
BPM: 128
Weight: 173.3 pounds
Total distance to date: 7.63 km
Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 8
Yes, 25 years ago on this day, August 24, 1995, Windows 95 was released. This might be the only time in history that a computer operating system was a genuine media event.
I worked at Computer City in Coquitlam at the time–the chain disappeared within a few years, imploding after a large expansion across the US and into Canada–but at the time it was possible to go into a store entirely devoted to computer-related stuff. And it wasn’t like Future Shop where other electronics or appliances were sold, it was computer stuff only. Rows of software. Endless aisles of inkjet printers. Miles of parallel port cables ready for purchase.
We had huge stacks of copies of Windows 95 ready to go, in both CD-ROM format and floppy disk (13 floppies in total). We had a setup with two Compaq machines showing how Windows 95 worked with both 4 MB of ram and 8 MB of ram. All of this seems so quaint now (it ran much better with 8 MB, to no surprise. The 4 MB minimum was really meant to make windows 95 look less like a resource hog. Memory was not cheap back then).
Quaint as it seems now, at the time Windows 95 felt like a real breakthrough for Windows and the PC in particular. It ditched the Program and File Managers of Windows 3.1, added the Start button, task bar and system tray–all of which are still part of the Windows 10 UI in 2020. In reality, of course, it heavily mimicked the feel of the Mac’s OS, but had its own vibe, a weird sort of smooth-yet-clunky and sometimes backward compatible thing where it excelled in some regards and fumbled around a bit in others. You had Plug and Play and it sometimes even worked well, but USB support was not in the initial release. We still had mice with balls back then and they plugged into the serial port and speaking of serial ports, IRQ conflicts were still very much a thing with Windows 95. All of its DOS underpinnings couldn’t be entirely hidden (that really didn’t happen until Windows XP shipped six years later–or Windows 2000 the year before if you count it as a successor to 95).
But even though I have undoubtedly blocked memories of things not working right in Windows 95 (native gaming was a bit undeveloped, though it played a mean game of Solitaire), I look back on it fondly. I had just gotten a PC the year before and after a year of running Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, Windows 95 truly felt like the future.
Here’s a shot from an emulator I downloaded today. You can quibble about it, but the UI still looks clean and simple to me–and better than some of the versions that followed (I always found XP a bit overdressed and Windows 8 was a spectacular misfire). Good times, as the kids say.
For the second day in a row my weight was up (sob), but my body fat was very slightly lower (yay).
I stuck to meals only today with two exceptions:
I scarfed down some sugar snap peas in the early afternoon and they were yummy (and perfectly fine as a snack)
I had a serving of Goldfish crackers mid-afternoon. These were somewhat yummy, but very much not on my approved snack list. But I did hold off on scarfing them and they totaled about 90 calories in total, which I more than burned off on my post-work walk/run. so not great that I broke my rules, but I think I’ll be okay, and the heavy guilt of eating those baked fish-shaped things will weight heavy on me for perhaps hours to come.
And with that I am halfway through my two week experiment. So far the signs have been encouraging and I’ve stayed pretty much on track. We’ll see how things go in Week 2.
This is the second day in a row in which I’ve had zero snacks–not even healthy ones!
Plus I did a 10 km walk/run that burned over 700 calories, so in all, a pretty decent day.
I did gain 0.4 pounds when I stepped on the scale this morning. I chalk it up less to the pizza I had last night and more to the fact that the pizza made me so thirsty I drank enough water to fill a pumper truck.
(The beef was beef and broccoli stir-fry, one of my rare sojourns into red meat.)
