It’s about 1:30am which seems to be the new normal time for writing these updates. Not that it’s a bad thing, but I’m due to be up early in the morning to get my walk in before breakfast. Let’s see how that one goes.
It was an early start today, too. Up at 6am and out for a 3.5k run – down the “long mile”, just past the Booths and then turning around and heading back.
It feels difficult doing intervals outside. I know that I should count lamp posts or similar, but it’s very difficult to judge. Instead I decided to try and improve the tempo that I run at. I’ve recently been running at about 155 steps per minute according to runkeeper – pretty consistently too, when I start digging into it. I’ve gone back to last November and the rate stays the same. So I thought that I should try and pitter-patter along with a higher tempo to see how it went.
I’d read that one should aim for 180 steps per minute, which seems like a lot, and it’s hard to judge, but with nothing to gauge it by I set off and took smaller, quicker steps. The idea was to try and get used to moving my legs quicker – even if I’m not striding out. I got there and back at 157 steps / minute, which is a reasonable increase. I could certainly feel it in my legs at the end. It was also my fastest time over the distance (19:30) which I’m pleased with, given the teeny tiny strides while running.
The rest of the day has been just getting on with things. I spent most of the day and evening working on the Shapie project. With some time this afternoon put aside for some WYZ work and following up some problems that had been reported over the last day.
We had music lessons as well. I was hankering after going out for a meal, but in the end I started boiling a ham while Joel had his lesson, and then roasted it after my lesson. I’m glad we didn’t go out now, as it was very tasty and I’ve got lots of ham for the children’s sandwiches for the rest of the week. The lessons were ok. Joel’s starting out properly on his grade 1 piano pieces now. Whereas I had been terrible and hadn’t practiced all week. Instead, we spent the lesson listening to Professor Longhair “Go to the Mardi Gras” and playing it on the piano. So I’ve had my first piano lesson and some twelve bar blues (in B#, apparently). It was good fun, and also a relief to do something different from the work and the cooking and sorting out the children.
On top of everything else, the day started with a discussion about possibly going over to Amsterdam (for some 3D scanning), and ended the day looking like I’ll heading out to Las Vegas at the start of May to the Collision conference. It’s been busy… and interesting.