hey that’s me

In many places the deadline to register has either passed or is quickly approaching. In Iowa you have until the 24th of October. Find out the info for your area.

Jeremy let me borrow his flip video recorder so I could see how it performed at the climbing wall. I’m not sure it’s the right tool for this particular job, but it is a neat little gadget. Here’s a clip of me climbing a pretty easy 5.8 rated route.

In honor of this summer phenomena this week I thought I’d see how “state fair” stacked up on Google Insights.

As the song goes the Iowa State Fair is the best state fair and it seems that we also care the most about state fairs, followed quite closely by Minnesotans.

The only other really interesting item of note is how interest in the fair comes and goes with fair season.

If I was a carny I’d be looking at deversifying my portfolio so to speak. Rube season, it seems, is July through October.

As an interesting side note, “texas state fair” is actually the top search term, but somehow Iowans still come out on top. Maybe we’re unaware that other states have fairs and just search for “state fair” a lot; really that’s not a horrible assumption as nothing can compare to eastsider night at the Iowa State Fair.

I hate to say it, but what a great night for a run. 6pm and it was already quite comfortable.

Started with my 2 mile loop and then ended with some stretching and my regular bicycle crunches (50,40,30,20,10). Thursday I think I’ll bump it up to 60 for the first set. The whole run went pretty smoothly. I was about 45 seconds ahead of my normal time when I got to my first checkpoint at the .55 mile mark. (4:30 elapsed) Then came the nice long climb up Beaver towards Forest. It usually takes me all of 34th to recover again, but tonight I wasn’t feeling too bad even right at the top of the hill. The long straight away down University started to drag at the end and turning on to 41st my legs were starting to hurt. I took a little walk break for 100m or so before getting to Forest again, and then, as typical, really pushed it down the last long decline and then up the little hill onto my street. Hitting 7:30 pace on that last stretch feels really good, and seems to slowly make the rest of my run faster.

I think I’ll run hills again tomorrow and then the “hard core” ab circuit, but now it’s time for sushi.

I think so…

Yet another crappy workout blog entry. It was cool enough today to got for my regular 2 mile jog. I had to drag Homer the entire home stretch down 41st street, but other than that it felt nice after some hard climbing last night.

I followed up the run with my regular ab workout which consists of bicycle crunches starting with 50, then 4 more sets with 10 fewer in each set (40, 30, 20, 10) and then holding the plank pose until I fall over.

Thanks to google insights I’ve been able to do the hard hitting journalism that my reader (hi Jeremy) has come to expect.

For the last 90 days every weekend has a nearly identical peak, henceforth reffered to as “a nipple” every weekend. I think what this graph proves is that when America isn’t working we’re thinking about *slash* searching for boobs. The July 4th long weekend further supports this hypothesis because Friday the 4th nips out unlike every other friday in our data set. Some people, we’ll call them “losers” must have had to work on friday however because, as normal, saturday is the day we’re really cutting glass.

If you dig deeper into the data you can see searches by state. I’d wager that there’s some inverse relationship between quality of boobs available in your area and number of google searches for them, as California, Florida, and New York all rank pretty low. There are of course anomalies like Maryland, but I think we could attribute that to either low internet availability or some sort of abnormal localized hatred of the female form.

In yet another section further down you can see modifying words in searches. It seems that America likes its boobs “big” though there’s an up and coming trend on “epic” boobs. I guess all my searches for “mosquito bites” just isn’t having an impact. Can’t fight the masses I guess.

Have fun playing with my data. Hope you come up with some interesting “insights” yourself.

What a hot and shitty day for an outdoor workout. It was way too awful to go for a long (2 mile, hey it’s long for me) run so instead I decided to run hills after doing my new ab workout. I started with 10, though that was pretty easy so I think I’ll move up to 15 reps of each exercise next time.

Details:
Standard Crunch x 10
Knee Up Crunch x 10
Hip Lifts x 10
Oblique Crunch x 10 x 2
Side Plank Dip x 10 x 2
Oblique Leg Extension x 10 x 2
Superman x 10 x 2
Bridged Leg Lift x 10
Pushup x 10
Heel Touch x 10 x 2
Bicycle Crunch x 10 x 2
Half Up Twists x 10 x 2

Hill Runs
Quick stretch and then a warmup run around the block

Followed by a heart attack inducing hill workout consiting of 10 sprints, well at least a fast run, up the hill by my house. I walk to the bottom of the hill and then immediately start again. After the final sprint I ran the warmup route again to cool off.

Here’s the whole thing in my nike+ profile. Sadly the nike+ tool does very poorly with this sort of workout. I’ve told them that they need to improve their handling of intervals or sprint workouts like this, but so far they haven’t listened, which is sad because really all they’d need to do is bump up the polling rate so that you had a more accurate second by second (or at least 10 second by 10 second) picture of your workout.

Soon this blog will host my thoughts on everything from rock climbing to politics to World of Warcraft to porn.  Working on coming up with a real design shortly.