Progress Update - Feb 06

Running Time (Goal: 100 Hours)
February : 04:44 (7 attempts)
Year To Date: 10.32 (17 attempts)

Books Read (Goal: 25)
February : 9
Year To Date: 12

This Month

• Winning By Jack Welch
• The Broker By John Grisham
• High Country By Nevada Barr
• On The Road By Jack Kerouac
• The Zahir By Paolo Coelho
• Black Beauty By Anna Sewell
• Story Of My Life By Helen Keller
• Mary Mary By James Patterson
• The One Thing You Need To Know By Marcus Buckingham

Previously

• The Tale Of Two Cities By Charles Dickens
• On Bullshit By Harry G. Frankfurt
• At First Sight By Nicholas Sparks

The inertia

I went for a run this morning after almost three weeks. And boy, did it feel good!!

Why the gap, you ask? Well, I haven’t really been doing well. The month began all right but then I started feeling some pain in my chest. I didn’t think it was serious but I didn’t want to take any chances either. The physician asked me to take it easy for couple of weeks.

During one of those weeks my tooth started giving me trouble. They (my teeth) have always been my achilles heel (I am not sure if I can use that metaphor but you get the point). I could probably buy a lifetime supply of toothpaste with the amount of money that I have spent on them. I finally caved in and had it extracted. The surgeon asked me to take it easy for couple of weeks.

I guess you know what happens when you take it easy for such a long time. The inertia builds in and it forces you continue taking it easy. It took me almost four days to fight it off. The good thing about the inertia, though, is that it works both ways. Now that I’ve started again, I’m hoping it will force me to continue running.

The Zahir

I haven't been running for past three weeks 'cause of bad health. It has allowed me to spend extra time on reading. I recently read a very interesting novel by Paolo Coelho. The review is in another blog I participate in. Click here to read it.

The iPod

Long time ago I used to run with a Sony Walkman. It was quite bulky and inconvenient. I mean who listens to audiotapes these days :-). I tried CD players but they skip a lot. And yes, even those that boast of the anti skip feature. It didn’t take me long to switch to a flash based MP3 player when my wife gifted me iriver FP 799T. I think it is one of the better MP3 players out there. It comes loaded with features. Some of the things I liked were:

• Standard arm band (iPod, in contrast forces you to fork out another $29)
• When you wear it on the arm (usually during running), its screen is slightly tilted towards you. This makes it easier to work with it without breaking the stride.
• 40 hrs of listening time for a single AA battery
• Decent amount of memory (1G)
• Reasonably priced (around $160)

Things I didn’t like about it were

• Navigation button is difficult to operate. If you don’t click it in exactly the right angles you won’t get the desired effect
• No bookmark feature for audiobooks or podcasts
• The ‘cool’ factor is missing
• Music Manager is no match to iTunes

I think I read it in The Life’s Little Instruction Book something to this effect: once in a while you should just get what you really want. So I decided to gift the iriver to my brother and buy an iPod nano :-).

Here is the strange thing:

• It’s not reasonably priced ($249 for 4G)
• Most of things I needed (like armband) are not standard
• No FM tuner, voice recording feature etc.
• It needs to be connected to a PC for charging (unless you buy a separate charger)
• It doesn’t have the tilt screen (as described above)

And still I love it more that the iriver. Why? Because it makes an ordinary song sound extraordinary, it is extremely easy to operate and it does have the ‘cool’ factor. Not to mention the podcasts, photos and iTunes.

When buying a product you can weigh the pros and the cons all you like but Once in a while you should just get what you really want.

Runner's don'ts

Do not check your weight in the morning if you watched superbowl the previous night :-)

Progress Update - Jan 06

Running Time : 05:48 Goal: 100:00
10 attempts

Books Read : 3 Goal: 25
The tale of two cities By Charles Dickens
On Bullshit By Harry G. Frankfurt
At First Sight By Nicholas Sparks