A place for brain dumps.
So I just realized I haven’t been posting updates. Partly that has to do with not actually working out much, I pulled a glute and couldn’t do a whole lot. But that’s all done and I’m moving along. I did a 4.5 mile walk today and that kinda caught me up for the week of recovery. I feel pretty good, so I think the semi-injury is behind me. Also down 1.6 pounds this week. Full speed ahead.
I tried to do a 10K today, but no such luck. I’d like to say it was the rain that did me in, which is partly true, but I don’t think I’d have gotten around the likelake three times. Twice, maybe, but then the rain came.
Anyway, quick update so I can get back to figuring my plan for the next year.
Update: I could have put this in yesterday, but I didn’t do the math, yet. I’m down 4.8 pounds in the previous week. That’s partly due to a freakishly low weight on Sunday, but it’s still in the 3.something today.
Like I said yesterday, I got the Nike+iPod kit to motivate me to get on the triathon training, and I have to say I’m a fan. I have quibbles with the website, but those will get resolved eventually (either as upgrades to the website or my own hacking of the xml files on the iPod). The hardware itself is slick and the only issues I’ve had are user-error (the sensor was asleep when I was trying to use it earlier, I had that realization about 30 seconds after I gave up.
Tomorrow I’ll post my hacks to get it working with my New Balance running shoes. I’d glady pluk down the cash for nike’s shoes, but I have wide feet and Nike has decided they don’t want to sell shoes that will fit me. Even going up a half size or a size doesn’t help like it does for a lot of people.
Anyway, handy dandy Amazon whore link included here for your purchasing goodness. It’s $29, if you have a nano get one. Even if you only use it a few times, it’s worth it.
I’ve been mulling over the idea of doing a triathlon for a long time now. I’ve finally decided to pull the trigger. My goal is to be in shape for one by next August. My main reason is that I can’t seem to get myself in shape (and/or lose weight) just for the sake of losing weight. Now I have a reason to not eat the cookie, because, honestly I wanted the cookie more than I wanted to lose the eight hundreths of a pound of fat it would equate to (inaccurate math aside, that’s how my nerdling brain works). Now, since I can’t possibly train enough to compensate for every cookie, I’ll have to keep the food decent to lose the weight to even have a hope of completing.
Plus, about a month ago I bought the Nike+iPod kit and an iPod nano to match giving myself the excuse that I wanted to train for a tri. It seems lame to not actually do it after only a month. 
Today is day zero because I don’t have a plan in place, yet. I have the beginnings of one and general thoughts on how to split up the year. No plan doesn’t mean no work, though. I got in a run today (probably my weakest of the three), 1.19 miles in 18 minutes or so. I ran for 1 minute, walked for 3, I petered out 15 seconds short of the fourth interval. I will get faster, stronger and go longer.
What I do know, is that I will be blogging at least twice a week on what I’m up to tri-training-wise. I will have the plan in place by the end of this weekend. I will lose a pound a week, except test race weeks (if there are any) and maybe for a couple weeks before the big race.
So I took Merlin Mann’s advice to simplify my contexts and killed off a bunch of my useless ones today. I had over 20. Even subtracting a few that just weren’t ever used because they only existed because I was trying out some ideas that didn’t fly, that’s way too many. It turns out rather than separting them by what I could do I was separating them by what I wanted to do. This is exteremely bad, of course and no where near the point of having contexts.
I got so caught up in wanting to be sure I never saw a task I couldn’t or didn’t want to do that I became very skilled at hiding the things I really should be doing. Plus I could hide all the stale tasks I wasn’t working on, and wasn’t going to anytime soon. Stuff that really belonged in Someday/Maybe, or needed to get culled… really it was more like I had a half dozen Someday/Maybe contexts that weren’t serving any purpose.
I’m down to a 11, with a few more that will go away. I’ve split into three major ones Work (stuff I do for money), Hacking (stuff I do for fun), Chores (stuff I have to do at home) and Errands (stuff I need to do out and about). There’s a few other miscellaneous ones, like the one that depends on a specific computer with my music library before I can do work, but really this is much more managable.
My original thought was to schedule blocks of time to work in specific context. It was well-meaning, but wrong-headed. I don’t need to pick what context to work in, I need to know what context I’m already in and let my system filter it. I may need to ignore some tasks that I can’t do (say, “talk to so-and-so” and he’s out of the office) but that’s the price to pay to keep the whole list fresh. Also I’ve found that I end up scheduling project-specific time, rather than context-specific. It’s been working much better, the past few weeks I’ve been doing that.