Progressing

I've been trying to write this post for a few months now, but all I seemed to do was just add ideas or notes that I wanted to mention so I thought it was high time that I actually composed the damn thing.

Running

I have had a steady few months of running since my last Blog in March.  I managed 48 miles in March and 35 miles in April compared with a total of just 55 miles for November 14 through to February 15 combined!

Although I don't like running fast I have tried in the last few runs to lengthen my stride and increase my cadence (number of steps per minute) to try and start pushing myself a little bit more.

This should help reduce the amount of time on my feet for when I want to run longer distances and in reducing my waistline down to 34" although I need to ensure that I strike the right balance so that running doesn't become a chore and a slog each time.

I have applied this strategy to the last 2 runs so far; it was hard as I'm not used to sustaining that level of effort but its going well and it helped me to complete a 10km yesterday in under hour with times not seen since 2012.

Running Tech

I almost purchased an additional step counter in the first quarter of this year to count steps but as I'm already pretty active with running and walking I didn't see the point in the end.

Since March I have also tried to find whether there are any other running apps out there that are better that the one I currently use (Endomondo) which could provide me with more motivational audio cues like I used to get with Nike+ whilst still providing a similar amount of detail about my runs that I currently receive and like to review to see how well I'm progressing.

Over a few weeks I tried Runkeeper, Strava, Runtastic, Nike+, Micoach and then gave up as it seems that the features I would like are either on poor apps such as Nike + which its really inaccurate compared to the others or behind pay walls requiring monthly subscriptions to access; something that I'm not prepared to paid for.  So for now I'm sticking with Endomondo and if I wish to analyse my information further, then I can just add it to an Excel Spreadsheet and produce graphs like the following relatively easily:

I'm still using Spotify for my running music playlists as I'm still on a Student subscription but I'm almost at that point that I want to try something else as there are a couple of niggles with Spotify that I'm starting to find a little annoying.  These include its continued poor integration with local files, its inability at times to play sound and for some reason local files keep disappearing / become blanked out from my play lists.

At the moment though I'm waiting for Itunes to release their streaming service over here so I can try that.  If that fails I'm going to have to trial all the others I think until I find something that I'm happy with.