Brought to you by the people who make OpenOffice, the free office suite with yesterday’s user interface. (Does anyone know how to improve it? Anyone?)
Spreadsheets are nice. I merged all of the logs and records I have been keeping into one spreadsheet last week (not sure why I was putting them in separate files anyway). So for the last several days my life has been largely dictated by task lists and tables. The satisfaction of crossing things off a list never seems to lessen, for some reason. The Music section of the church web site went up today. I like how easy it’s been to add new content, and I think this site will work out pretty well.
In another sheet of the uber-log file is my skating record. Since late March I’ve been marking down all of my wheeled excursions. I’ve had to estimate distances and speeds since coming to Japan (no GPS tool) but according to the guesses (which I think are pretty close to accurate) I’ve skated 550-600 miles in Japan. Which is all fine and good, except that one of my stated goals at the beginning of the year was to be able to skate a marathon in under two hours. And I haven’t really had a plan to work toward that goal.
I thought at first that I would skate at marathon distances and then try to increase my pace to get under two hours. I think, however, that it’s better to attack the beast from the other direction—starting at my target pace and then steadily increasing my distance. So with the end of the year (and the skating season) approaching I worked out a plan to hit 26 miles in mid-November, starting at a distance of 10 miles at the beginning of this month.
The Sports Park (combined with Gmaps Pedometer) really comes in handy for this. I charted a 1-mile figure-eight for the purpose of measuring pace and distance. (Actually it looks more like a prize medal, or a dragon...) As long as the weather cooperates and the park isn’t busy (read: not a weekend) I can clock 4:15 miles at a pretty constant clip—only two sharp turns in the loop. The goal for this week is 13 miles tomorrow morning, and then 14 on Thursday and Saturday.
I’m still the only one in the Park (probably in the city) who speedskates, by the way. But last Friday I was out at the Park during the evening at the same time as a guy in a racing wheelchair. He was in lycra, too—professional—and hitting about 12 miles an hour by my guess. Pretty cool.