Sunday 26 August 2007

Green waves

So another weekend spent in the sun and surf, and i reckon it's all starting to fall into place now.  I managed to catch a few of the 'green waves'  and ride them wave all the way to the beach.  I found by shuffling towards the front of the board you can keep going for longer on a wave, i guess if the board is losing momentum, tilting the nose abit forces it down the wave more.  Next thing is learning how to turn properly.  Ache all over today though, i nose dived a couple of times and had some big waves crasg on top of me.

Finally feels like summer is just around the corner now, it is the best time of year in Sydney. 

Wednesday 15 August 2007

Wednesday 8 August 2007

New Gadget

My Garmin Forerunner 305 finally arrived today, all the way over from the USA.  It's basically a high sensitivity GPS receiver & virtual trainer on the watch and wireless heart rate monitor all in one.

cf-lg

I've just given it a test run around centenial park tonight, and have been able to upload all the GPS tracking info, pace, altitude, heart beat  and awhole ton of other  metrics to my laptop.  Using the proprietary Garmin software, i can then sift through all these measurements in relation to a map.. pretty amazing really.  In this case, i ran 11.30km at an average pace of 13km/hr with a average heart beat of 165bpm.  I can see exactly at what points around the park i ran the fastest/slowest, and when i was about to have a heart attack etc.  The cool thing is that next time i run that route, i can run against the virtual me; the watch will tell me how far infront/behind iam of myself in realtime.  

 

garmin

The best part of it all though, aside the Garmin software, is that you can import this all this GPS data directly into Google Earth (see below).  Your route is plotted to pinpoint accuracy,  every little triangle represents when the device recorded a  GPS signal. If you click on one of those triangles, you get presented with the longitude, latitude, altitude, heart rate, speed and direction you were heading.  So, even if you aren't runng/cycling, you could forexample take this out on a walk/car journey then upload the data into google earth to check out your route.

 

gearth2 gearth

This is a very smart gadget, you barely notice it when running and i just love having a GPS device/map on my wrist that is synched with a heart monitor.  The only gripe i have is that it takes ~30 seconds to lock onto satellites. 

Then again, perhaps this is too much technology; perhaps i should just keep it real and run up snow covered mountains in Russia with bricks in my backpack like Rockie Balboa did? ..

Monday 6 August 2007

Easy

To get something clean, one has to get something dirty. To get something dirty, one does not have to get anything clean.

Last weekend

So I went surfing at Bondi Beach on Saturday and Sunday again.  Both days the conditions were ideal for learning..  fairly calm with 3-4ft waves rolling in, along with blues skies Cool

Some of the other more experienced surfers were out too, amazing to watch and you learn so much from just talking to and observing others.  Physically though I think you need powerful shoulders to be able to get the initial speed on your board, strong arms/abdominal muscles to be able to quickly get up on the board, and ofcourse balance/finesse to be able to avoid falling off straight away.  I fail on all 3 counts, but am thinking of doing some swimming to build up the arms/shoulders.  Not so much a problem this weekend, but one of the hardest aspects i'm finding is actually swimming out through the breakzone;   anything bigger than 4 ft and i'm knocked off my board and washed up on the shore.  I end up using about half of my energy just getting out to the waves.  

This article offers 3 techniques for paddling through waves: Pushing Up. Busting Through, and the Eskimo Roll.  I've tried all three and usually just try busting through, but i don't think i'm able to get the board fast enough and so end up gettting carries backwards eachtime, particularly when doing the eskimo roll.  I think i need to get a smaller, lighter board so that duck-diving is an option. Here's a good thread on duck-diving for anyone interested

 

Iam still blown away by how good is.  it is simply the most efficent way to trawl through unread news items. As you read items it scrolls them down one at a time and marks them unread (all using the space bar). And, it is all very well done with AJAX.  As I continue using Google Reader I've been looking through my reading behaviors and stats and have learnt alot about my reading habits.  If anyone hasn't tried this yet, i highly recommend it.

Currently reading Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, listening to Hed Kandi BeachHouse 2007, and watching Mantracker on Nat Geo Adventure channel.  

Sunday 5 August 2007

Is it just me

.. or is it getting warmer these days?  I wish there were more in the press to highlight the fact.