Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Two Posts in a Week? What?

Photo: mjp*, Flickr Creative Commons

Yes, I realize I've gotten really bad about posting. I can't offer any real excuses for my lack of consistency before June, but during the summer I really lose my ability to maintain a schedule. I don't work from the last week of May through the next-to-last week of July and most days I don't really manage to get anything done besides that day's run or bike ride. Then there's the fact that I usually take any excuse to travel that I can. Really screws up any routines I set up during the rest of the year and I'm already really bad at creating and maintaining habits.

Before I get any further with this post, go to take this little test and let me know in the comments what your results were. This is the website of a research project measuring the average person's English vocabulary. The short test asks you to check the boxes next to the words that you understand at least one meaning for. Clicking the box just because you recognize the word but couldn't define it is cheating. Using your results, the test estimates your vocabulary in number of words. I got 31,900, which is above average for my age, but below average for my age when the respondents scored the same as I did on their verbal portion of the SAT.

Now that's out of the way, I just signed up for the Savannah Century. In other words, I'll be riding my bike 103 miles around Savannah in just more than a month from now. This is a beginner's century because there are no hills in Savannah, much less categorized climbs. Still, my longest ride so far is basically 21 miles and I'll be a month into my half marathon training by then, so being ready for a 100-mile ride is going to be a stretch. The official bike jersey for the ride is pretty sweet, though.

The best thing about the ride is that it starts and ends at The Distillery, which is an incredible beer geek bar in Savannah. Seriously. Move this place into a trendy neighborhood in Metro Atlanta and it becomes the 2nd or 3rd best bar for beer geeks in that city. Brick Store is one of the top 5 in the nation, much less Atlanta, but I haven't been to The Porter Beer Bar, so I can't say how The Distiller compares to that one. Regardless, I may have to make my wife drive me to the ride that day and have her occupy herself for the six hours I'll be on the bike so I can have my way with The Distillery's tap list before making the long(ish) drive home. She enjoyed our last visit to The Distillery, so that part wouldn't be as bad as entertaining herself for six hours.

Speaking of bike rides, if you look on my side bar, I've added a widget that uses my RunKeeper data to report my workouts. The current three are all bike rides, although I didn't ride today. I woke up too late and my butt hurts from all the riding the last few days, but by the time you read this I may have completed tonight's run. That's assuming the downpour we've been experiencing for the last two hours doesn't continue all evening. The widget wasn't created by RunKeeper, but is something their Twitter feed linked to after one of their users created it.

4 comments:

Julie said...

What do you mean you are bad at forming habits? You took to your triathlon-type training pretty darn well.

Evidently, I know 26,100 words. Guess I should read some more.

Theresa B (of Nebulopathy) said...

I form bad habits very, very quickly. Good habits, not so easily. Survey says: 35,100.

Jacob said...

I can't even get bad habits to stick without consciously working at it for years and even then they die off way too easily when I stop trying to keep them up.

Courtney said...

27,800. That sucks. There were a few words I recognized but didn't know the exact meaning of, so I was honest and didn't check them. Probably could figure them out if used in a sentence, though.