7.15.09

This morning I woke up and decided that today was the day that I got to work calibrating my Nike + system. For those of you who don’t know, Nike + is a glorified pedometer that takes the amount of steps you’ve taken and equates that into distance so you know you’ve run half a mile or whatever, all while keeping the time and giving you vocal reminders. This is going on while you listen to your iPod. The music will fade out and you’ll hear a woman say “half mile completed” or something like that, then the music will rise back up.

It’s a pretty sweet thing.

When it works right.

But on Friday I walked/ran for an hour and it said I only went 1.62 miles which is slower than a slow stroll. That was completely bogus. I got in my car and found out I really went a little over three miles and THAT means there’s a BIG problem. Especially if you’re looking at my little avatar off to the left that says how many times I’ve worked out and how far I’ve gone.

It’s not that the distance is what’s bugging me but it is a big thing.

My thing is this: for years I’ve had an injured hip, I hurt it on duty my first year in and since then I’ve had problems running. So much so that I have taken the walk test where you walk three miles as fast as you can for the past three years. Twelve laps is a bummer and I have future hopes of getting jobs that require you to be able to run 1.5 miles.

So I’ve begun my own rehabilitation. I walk and for the last one minute, I’ll run. Then the next week I’ll run the last two minutes. The next three minutes and so on and so on until I can run 1.5 miles after warming up a little.

I’m using the Nike + system as a stopwatch more than anything in this regard but I want to know when I’ve hit 1.5 miles and when I’ve hit 3 miles. If I can get my walking to a point where I don’t need to run and still go 1.5 miles in a good time, then hey, no need to run and no worries about my hip. I can just work on walking from then on.

So this morning I went out and went to the school next to my house. Every gate was locked though (it is summer time after all) so I hopped the fence and went to the track. I started the system and started walking and after a quarter of a mile it said I had walked .01 miles. But this is why I’m calibrating right? I end the calibration after the quarter mile and (surprise) it says I did not walk a quarter of a mile. It won’t let me say “yes I did” and reset itself to that, either.

What a bummer!

I’m going to have to wait until the middle of the night and get in my car and drive to the 1.5 mile mark on my path and spray paint a little line so I’ll know to look at my timer, then the three mile mark too.

So I came home a little upset and went in and decided to upload a bunch of Led Zeppelin a friend had burned for me. I’ve always wanted to check them out a little more in depth and the last few days I’ve been working myself up into a frenzy to do this. But I also want to spend time with Kim so I don’t get on long enough to upload it all.

Since she was still asleep though I could. So I started and iTunes would only take certain songs and claim an error with others. Then iTunes would crash. It took me an hour to get most of their stuff on and I’ve figured out how to upload the rest though it seems to create a huge strain on iTunes.

Then I forgot to drag it into the playlist my phone syncs to and now I don’t have my Zepp for the day.

Bummer!

On the plus side, I did order Kim’s anniversary present. She should be pretty stoked when she gets all that smell-good stuff. I really hope she likes it.

That’s all for now.

-Russ