Transitions

Morning weigh-in: 185#, 15% BF

 

Happy Birthday to my God-daughter, my beautiful niece Olivia!

 

Much done, nothing said for a week... The weekend before last was probably our last hurrah on the skis, with trips to Jim Thorpe (icy but OK conditions) and the Poconos (nice snow); on Sunday and Tuesday we ran outside. Thursday I did an indoor trainer class at Cutter's Bike Shop, then Friday I got out for a bit of icy towpath riding (and finished in daylight). Saturday was windy so we did some chores and housecleaning (dinner party that night, it had to happen anyway), but on Sunday Anne and I did a short morning run, and then an awesome afternoon bike ride. Nothing crazy, about 20 miles through Wassergas and Williams Township, and it was chilly when we weren't moving, and it was still a bit breezy, but with that ride it finally felt like spring was coming. (Of course, Sunday night through today has been more cold and more snow, which raised Anne's hopes for one last play-in-the-snow storm, but even this feels like a last hurrah.)

 

I Need A New Toy: On Saturday night we had some friends over for dinner, and to test our new Baltic Porter, "Hanseatic Doldrums," and among the guests were a few from the biking crowd. Talk drifted to training, and GPS and HRM, and, for the women in the room, privacy issues with web-based training analysis.

 

(I use Garmin Connect and MapMyRide, and I do keep my GPS data private for the most part, especially if the ride starts/finishes at home, but I make the data for my "away rides" publicly available (it's only fair: I search among other public tracks to learn new trails), and I'm comfortable with even the ones marked "private" being stored online. Then again, I own a mirror, and I know have less to worry about, in terms of someone studying my habits and training routes for purposes of sexual assault, than do some others in the conversation.)

 

Anyway, the conversation turned to privacy settings on training websites, then to methods of just keeping the data local and using analysis software on your home machine -- I believe I actually blushed when I realized I didn't have any training analysis software on my machine -- unless you count TopoFusion, and I don't because it's more like mapping software --  and I didn't even know if any was available on Linux.

 

Not to worry, I found a bunch online, and last night I fixed my lack by downloading SportsTracker. It looks pretty decent, I think I'll be giving it a try over the next few weeks to see how it compares to the online ones, and maybe grab some more for comparison purposes. Strangely enough, the SportsTracker mapping uses OpenStreetMap, which actually shows a lot of my local singletrack -- bonus!

 

Now all I need to do is get out there and ride, and run, and hit the gym, and get back into yoga, and also find time for my previous obsession/acquisition, GnuCash. Did I mention I picked up a guitar chord reference book, one I used as a kid?

 

Tonight is the gym, followed by a haircut, followed by Two Brew Tuesday at Brew Works.