Couch to 21k

The batteries on my scale have been dead for months, and I figured that was a convenient problem since my Wife is pregnant, and I'm packing on the pregnancy weight once again. On friday I took my daughter, Abigail, to an ENT that didn't have a baby scale. To get her weight, they had me stand on the scale, then had me hold Abigail to get her weight. It turned out to be very easy to subtract out her weight from mine because I'm now a cool 200 lbs.

If you know me, you might have noticed that I'm big on over correcting, so continuing on that tradition, I've decided to run the half marathon again this year.

The haf marathon is 1/16, so that gives me about 4 weeks to get off the couch and in shape to run the 21km.

If anyone wants to rock this one with me, let me know. I'll probably be training at very strange hours because of the Baby, but I'd be happy to meet you at the starting line.

Using Swype

I just got a new phone that lets me type using swype. So far I love it. As a matter of fact I am using it to write this blog post... I can't type quite as fast as I can on a computer but I swear its almost as good.

Right now I'd be willing to go out on a limb and say that this is the single biggest improvement in phone usability I've seen yet. I even have a qwerty key pad on this device, but I dont use it because swype is just that good.

I'm hooked.

Nice job swype!

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Pandora One Upgrade

So I've been doing a lot of nerding in the evenings lately, and I've started to hit my 40 hour limit on Pandora early in the month. I had just stopped listening when I hit my limit, but then I decided that I really love this product, and even though I may be one of the most fiscally conservative (cheap) men on the face of the planet, I decided that I really should support them by upgrading. So I did it. I whipped out my visa and let it rip. Two minutes and 36 dollars later I was done. My Pandora immediately converted to Pro and I was rolling.

Here are the highlights:

1. No action required, Pandora just started playing again right away and there was a new menu at the top of Pandora:

2. clearly the removal of the 40 hour/month limit is huge.

3. I got this email, that made me feel like I was really supporting something grass-roots which was nice. Even though this could just be a marketing strategy :-)



4. Probably my favorite thing though, is that I have this nice desktop app that I never have to touch, and it just sits there and streams wonderful music all day long. From what I read you need to touch it about once in an 8 hour day to keep it playing, otherwise it sleeps to avoid wasting bandwidth.


Overall, I'm very satisfied with my purchase so far. :-) These guys put out a great product, and I am very happy to be able to support them.

Getting Out and Running Again

Pat's Run is coming up, and a friend of mine recently asked if I wanted to run it. It's a really short run, but it's a GREAT excuse to get off my butt and loose some of the sympathy weight that I had put on during my wife's recent pregnancy.

When I had been training in the past, I was rocking a BlackBerry 8330 running AllSport GPS, but I recently upgraded to the HTC Hero, and that device seems to have a lot more power. (Though it's practically out of date already with the new HTC Nexus 1 and Motorola Droid out powering it now)

Day 1
Man that first run back was harsh.... I actually had some nasty kidney/back pain early on and couldn't run through it. (This may have had to do with the fact that we were also experimenting with making pizza earlier that night :-p) The Yellow on the map is where I had to stop.

Day 2
The next run was a lot better, I didn't have to stop which was a HUGE improvement! Unfortunately I forgot to charge my phone that morning so I had to leave the phone on the charger instead of recording my run.

Day 3
The next run, I felt so much better that I decided to run a little further when I finished my Short loop. I decided to do a little extra:

Day 4
Now normally I like to take a night off, but my buddy Michael on Facebook picked up the pace and crushed my last run and posted it all over facebook, so I had to get out last night and log a few more miles:

I have to say, connecting my Runs to facebook using AllSport GPS has really ended up being helpful in training. I am really starting to buy into this whole thing more for the social/community aspect, and less for the private workout logs that I had used it for in years past. I'm loving it.

If you want to, Join me on facebook, and We'll challenge each other to get off our butts and get out!