Friday, June 10, 2011

Plot Person

I'm rereading More's Utopia and going over notes and such. I'm reminded that I'm very much a plot person. Please, More, make something happen!

I ran a half an hour today. I walked on one little bit for a minute, and then stopped to turn on the oven for the break I was rising (and then went back out again for the last 5 minutes).

Do you ever use "map my ride"? It's a web thing that let's you map where you've gone and then gives you measurements. So I could tell that I ran just about 2 miles. (Yes, I'm the slowest runner around.)

And the part I walked? It's a Cat 5 climb on a bike. (That's the lowest category they bother to label. It was a short (but over 500 meters) 6% grade. And I couldn't make myself run up it. But I've biked up it.

And at 6%, it's REALLY hard. So when you see the pro biker folks riding FAST up 15% grades, it pretty much reminds me what a whuss I am!

But there will be hot oatmeal/wheat bread out of the oven soon!

7 comments:

  1. A question! You might have mentioned this a while back, but I recall you were working for a while on running in a pair of those FiveFinger shoes. How is/was that going?

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  2. I love them!

    I haven't been running lots: mostly because right before school ends I get physically lazy. And then there's a ton of yard work to do. And then my bike calls out. But, I really have fun with them, especially when I go out on a trail, because you can really feel the softness of the trail and such. (Gravel isn't fun.) They're not quite as fun on asphalt (when I run from home), but still way more fun than shoes (during winter, because, BRRRRRR).

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  3. Hmm, intrigued by this, I tried entering my own morning's ride in mapmyride.com. It was a short one with a hill, in a well-known city full of cyclists. But "There was an error retrieving the elevation." Does this normally work for you?

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  4. Ah, evidently a transient problem -- it's working now. Nice. (It was also a Cat 5, which is no doubt why I was wheezing so hard.)

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  5. Hmm, glad it worked. I don't use it a lot, because most of my rides are pretty much familiar, and I have a computer to give me distance, and no hills that pretend to be categorized. But I wanted to see how far I'd run, and as long as the elevation thing is there, I used it. I would have thought the hill would have to be longer to be categorized. Maybe it's just a program thing and not how it actually works on bike races?

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  6. Not sure, but they say that Cat 5 is their own addition -- evidently they've extended the system downward for mundane use. Just as my daughter's swim lessons honor micro-accomplishments too subtle for real swimmers to perceive, there's value for the occasional rider or runner in naming the little conquests that are within first reach.

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  7. That's why all my students hate More's Utopia. Nothing happens in this book, they say. But -- but -- but -- I sputter. He BUILDS A WORLD!!

    I'm a sucker for utopian novels. I once designed an entire class (Utopian/Dystopian Literature, it was called, and every Goth kid in Pocatello, Idaho signed up for it, all eight of them) just so I could teach nothing but. Sigh. Good times.

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