So today I was told by a friend that my exercise over the past little while has inspired her to run again. She pushed herself to a 6km run this morning.

A cousin of mine has told me she’s been inspired to start exercising again as well because of the effort I’m putting in and the noises I’m making about it.

A few others have been making similar comments online as well.

I’m not trying to disappoint people, but I really haven’t been trying to inspire others to exercise with my aspirations of getting a little healthier. To be honest, the main reason I have been so public with my comments has been to give myself more incentive to stick with it.

The mentality goes something along the lines of…

If everyone knows about it and everyone sees me doing it, then everyone will also know about it if I fall off the wagon.

That really is it. I’m just trying to keep myself motivated by making the whole thing as public as I possibly can. No one likes to fail. Everyone hates it in fact. Even more so when that failure is out in the open for everyone to see. So to avoid shame, simply don’t fail :-)

@kiwigirlindc has actually been a pretty good inspiration for me. She’s gone from being an unhealthy, smoking, drinking woman to being a healthy, drinking woman that can run a lot faster than I imagine I’ll ever be able to move. And I’m pretty sure she doesn’t think of her own aspirations of health as being inspirational. ;-) But her success in a little over a year really did get me thinking that maybe I can improve over time too.

While I am very happy that people around me are really liking and being inspired by the fact I’m doing this, please understand if I keep my concentration on myself and just focus on the things I need to do for myself for a while. I don’t want to take away anything from your own efforts. Really don’t want to do that. But for now, as selfish as it is, I’m really not trying to inspire, just trying to keep myself motivated and avoid that public shaming ;-)

So…. On to the walk up the mountain tonight :-)

The wind is really blowing hard tonight. And its a cold wind, even if it is coming mostly from the north. Walking up from Gollan Rd was made nasty by the fact it was a head wind blowing straight in your face. I had to squint just to stop my eyes tearing up to stay moist. ;-) When we got to the car park at the top there, it was a lot more open and really not a good place to stop to get my torch out of my bag.

Those stairs up from the car park are the true effort in doing this whole climb. The walk up the road from Gollan Rd essentially just gives you a good warm up before you start up those stairs. While I’m not puffing much when I start the stairs, but by the time we reach the highest point, where it levels off going around the crater towards the trig station, I’m sucking in huge gasping breaths. At that point, I try to recover my breath a little so I can have a mouthful of water before continuing on to the summit of the hill.

At the summit I force Scott to take a few minutes of a break. I need to get my breath back and have some water before moving on from that point. Tonight, that was not a good thing. In fact, we didn’t stay there very long at all because of the wind. Scott was able to stand on the concrete block and lean into the wind probably a good 25-30 degrees before he lost his balance. Yes, the wind was that strong. But it was so cold that even I didn’t want to rest there very long. I stopped enough to let my calves get some feeling again, have a few gulps of water and then carry on down the the hill.

The walk back down around the crater is even more treacherous. Its steeper and a lot more loose gravel. It’d be a bad place to slip in the middle of the day, let alone at night. I find it is just as much of a work out, although admittedly easier physically, because you’re concentrating so hard on where you’re stepping in the dark. I think it’d be a fun challenge to do it without a torch one night ;-)

Ok, maybe not. :-P

We’ve been really lucky with the weather so far. We’ve always seemed to manage to get in between the rain or a (relatively) fine day so far. I think the true test for us both will be when the weather is really crap one evening over this winter. Will we still have the guts or the motivation to force ourselves to get out in the cold, wet, wintery rain and climb that freakin’ mountain? And no, unlike Muhammad, I cannot make the mountain come to me. :-P

Where I’m really getting stuck at the moment, and I really noticed it quite a lot in tonights walk up the mountain, is the fact I’m still smoking. Scott keeps talking about it too. We both need to give up our smoking vices if we want to really be able to get any sort of true fitness and health going. He has a wife (or as close to it as can be without a piece of paper) and 2 gorgeous children to give him motivation to quit. Me? I’m not sure public shaming will be enough to force me to quit smoking just yet. That really is something I’m really struggling with. I did try to quit just recently but the habit (more so than the addiction) is really hard to break. I need to find something that will flick that switch in my head and make me want to quit.

Being the geek I am, I had to find a way to include technology into this. I mean, I have a freaking amazing phone (sometimes) that can do so much. There had to be a way to bring technology into something as ancient as exercise.

And there is :-)

For ages, Nokia Beta Labs had a project on their site called Sports Tracker. I’d played with it, but never really had a reason to use it properly or a motivation to do so. Its targeted more for distance sports than for things like aerobics and the like.

In 2009 the software was listed as archived on the Beta Labs site. Part of the reason for this is because the guys behind the Sports Tracker software came to an arrangement with, and broke away from, Nokia to start a company that focuses on this software, among other things. Their intention being that they create a web community as well as increase the feature set.

The software on the phone is still free at the moment, so I grabbed a copy of that again and stuck it the phone. Here’s why.

  • GPS integration to measure distance and speeds travelled as well as altitude over the distance.
  • It uses the accelerometers in the phone as a pedometer to measure the number of steps and the frequency of those steps.
  • It plots your exercise over a map so you can see the exact path (within GPS limits) you took
  • If you have a bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor (such as the very hard to find Polar for Nokia it can track your heart rate over the duration of your exercise as well.

Thats just the very bare basics. It feeds you back a lot of other information as well. But those are some of the core features. The most important being tracking the distance covered. I’d plotted it on Google Earth to be about 2.1km long. But tonight we discovered, using GPS to track our path, that the distance was actually 2.75km long.. A fair clip longer.

walk-20100610

The summary of the walk

So here is an image of the summary of the walk. It doesn’t show you the squiggly lines of our speed over time, or altitude over distance, but it gives you an idea of where we walked, how far we walked, the energy used and the speed we averaged. And no, we’re not breaking any speed records here. ;-) I’m still way too unfit for that. Sometimes I feel sorry that I slow Scott down so much. I know he could push faster and harder if he wasn’t waiting for me. But we’ll see how it goes as I get used to it more.

I like having this on my phone. It makes tracking it so much easier. Up till now I’d plot it on Google Earth and enter it into my database after the fact. But having all this information done for me makes my records a lot more accurate. This is a good thing. :-)

Oh well. On that note, its time for me to hit the sack and get some sleep. Have a great day everyone. Till next time.