exercise – Page 7 – dangermouse.net

Drawing vision diagrams

Today I relaxed a bit after yesterday’s manic work at the market. By “relaxed”, I mean I went for a 5k run first thing in the morning. I tried running the loop at the halfway mark in the opposite direction today, which meant uphill sections on either side of a downhill, rather than vice versa. I don’t know if it made much difference overall, but my time today was 20 seconds slower than last week.

After the run, I got stuck into drawing some diagrams for my planned class on human vision and colour perception for Outschool. I need to draw my own diagrams to avoid using copyrighted images. Here’s my take on the layers of the human retina:

I got most of the diagrams I need done, but still have a couple of tackle tomorrow. But now I can at least make a title image for my class to upload to Outschool, and start signing up students!

New content today:

Getting things done

This morning I thought I wanted to get another 5k run done, because I’ll have limited opportunity for the rest of the week, due to having an ISO Photography Standards meeting. It’s an online meeting, from 8:00 to 11:30 every morning in my time zone. I don’t really have time to do it before, if you include having breakfast and cooling down and probably having a shower to be comfortable for the meeting, and the afternoon is not a great option in our summer, and evenings are usually busy with other stuff. (I don’t think I’ve ever done a run in the evening.)

But this morning I also had to get some blood drawn for a cholesterol test, after fasting, so I couldn’t have breakfast before. So I wanted to get that done as soon as the pathology lab opened, and then go home and have breakfast… and by the time I was ready to go run it was approaching 10 o’clock. But fortunately it’s very cool today, with overcast skies keeping the sun out. So I got ready and went for the run.

I wanted to see if I could break 30 minutes for the 5k on the street route I’ve worked out, which is about as flat as I can find in this area. But it’s still a bit hilly, with an elevation gain of 87 metres over the 5k. I started hard, but when I hit the uphill sections about halfway through I thought maybe I’d gone too hard and would run out of steam before finishing. But I pushed through and managed to complete the 5k in 28:39! Much better than I’d hoped for.

Energised, I got stuck into writing a lesson outline for my planned initial class on Outschool: Human Vision and Colour Perception. I wrote out a list of bullet points of topics to cover. Then I made a list of diagrams and illustrations that I want to have. Many of these I could find on the Internet – however Outschool insists (justifiably) that you have legal rights to use any images you present in your classes. Which rules out most of what you can find – doubly so for scientific diagrams. There are a many good diagrams, but all covered by copyright, or which need to be purchased, or which are at least Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, which is no good because I can’t easily include correct attribution in class materials and don’t necessarily want to release my material under the same licence.

So I’ve decided I need to draw the diagrams myself. So I have a list of diagrams, and now I need to sit down and draw them all. I did manage to get one done today, after fiddling with a couple of different drawing apps on my iPad. I’ll get stuck into the rest tomorrow.

I also had a combination of thoughts prompted by two things:

1. Earlier today I saw a question on AskReddit:

To those who think to themselves, “I should do this today,” and then end up doing it: is it possible to learn this power?

With several answers along the lines of: “When you think you should do something, just get up and do it, don’t put it off.”

2. I was thinking I really need to watch more of Neon Genesis Evangelion to get through all of the series, but how the heck am I going to find the time to do that…?

This made me realise that watching TV is one of the things that I procrastinate and never manage to get done. I always have too many other things that I want to do, so much so that I often end up thinking “I should watch some TV” and then never get around to it.

So maybe in order for me to achieve this goal, I need to stop putting off watching TV and just sit on my arse and DO IT.

New content today:

Two 5k runs in a week

My last 5k run was last Thursday. I felt like I wanted to do one early this week, but I was stymied by having to take a COVID test on Monday and then isolate at home for 24 hours. But this morning I was free, so I launched into it, running the same street route as last time. I wanted to try to break 30 minutes.

Unfortunately I didn’t quite manage that, but I trimmed 4 seconds off last Thursday’s time, clocking 30:18. And I managed to complete this second 5k run less than 7 days after the previous one! That feels pretty good.

The rest of the morning I spent taking photos of Lego sets for the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! I did it in record time, being pumped up from the run beforehand. And this afternoon I worked on writing and making new Darths & Droids comics.

Not much else to report today really… Took Scully to the park, cooked quiche for dinner… I might watch some more Neon Genesis Evangelion tonight.

Here’s a photo I took yesterday. It’s a metal utility cover panel – I guess underneath it are phone wires or gas mains or something.

New content today:

More running – 5k on the streets

After yesterday’s 2.5k run, I felt inspired to go out again today. I was all ready to go after breakfast, but when I got out the front door it was starting to rain. A quick look at the radar told me it was going to get heavier, so I called it off.

But after lunch the rain had stopped and the clouds looked lighter, so I ventured out. This time I tried to find another flattish route different to what I did yesterday. I walked up the nearest steep hill to the top of the ridge, and from there ran along the road that follows the ridge down to the harbour. This way I avoided most of the constant up and down climbing into and out of valleys. Of course heading downhill meant most of the back half was uphill, but thankfully the slopes weren’t too huge today.

By the time I got to the end of the ridge, down near the water, I’d covered 2.25 km. Coming back I went down some side streets instead of the main road, so it was a little longer and I hit 5k just before I got home, so the distance was good. I was pretty worn out by the end of it though. The weather was 22.1°C, 73% humidity. Nice and cool, but that humidity was nasty.

But I was happy to have covered the distance without slowing to a walk.

The other thing I did for most of the day was work on my Outschool class materials. I need to find diagrams to illustrate human vision and colour perception. There are plenty of good ones on the net, but I need them to be public domain, or royalty free, and that restricts things a lot. By the end of the day I’d only really found two half-decent images I could use, both old diagrams out of copyright.

But I’ve now decided that it’ll be easier for me to just draw all my own diagrams. I’ll put together the class notes, and decide what diagrams I want, and then sit down and draw them all in a batch. So that’s the task for the next few days.

New content today:

Cool running

The heatwave broke overnight and today dawned cool, although it was still very humid.

I decided to finally go on that run I’d wanted to do a few days ago. Normally I walk up to the nearest sports oval and run laps around the inside of the fence, because it’s flat. Running along streets around where I live is a recipe for going up and down a lot of hills, some of them pretty steep, and I usually want to avoid that.

But today I felt like taking a more scenic route, and hills be damned. I did a 2.5 km loop which is I think about the flattest possible route I could find in the area, but it still involves going up and down a lot, from a maximum altitude of 67 metres, down to essentially just a metre or two above sea level. I paused a a few places along the way to take photos, and I uploaded them into an album with comments.

The weather when I ran was 22.5°C, but 86% humidity. It didn’t feel too hot while running, but once I stopped and went inside, the sweating started up and just didn’t stop for ages. All I was doing was sitting down, drinking cold water, and occasionally wiping myself with a cold, damp cloth, but it took over an hour to start to feel comfortable again.

I spent today editing together the video I made for Outschool, as a teacher introduction. My teacher profile isn’t publicly viewable yet, because I haven’t made a class, but once it is, I’ll be able to point to it. I also started writing a class description for my first planned class. I’m going to do a class on “Human vision and colour perception” for kids of age 11-13.

Speaking of teaching, school started today after the summer holidays – the start of a brand news school year. My Ethics classes won’t be starting for a few weeks, as the school gets the kids settled in – I’m guessing my first class with the new kids will be late February.

New content today:

Outschool approved

Good news today! I got notification that I’ve been approved to teach classes online on Outschool. This was a long process, because they run background checks to ensure you’re eligible to teach children (i.e. have no relevant criminal convictions), and since Outschool is based in the US, they use a third party company to run checks with the Australian Federal Police. Which means that all the paperwork shuffling takes a long time. Anyway, my checks have all come through clean, and I can now start the process of listing classes that I want to teach on Outschool. I have to complete a couple of training modules first, and then come up with lesson plans.

This is all great because it’s going to be a way that I can bring in some more income to supplement the relatively small amounts I’ve managed to make so far selling my photography. Hopefully that will go up as well when markets start up in earnest after COVID, but I think Outschool will be more reliable.

Earlier this morning I restarted my exercise routine, by going for a jog around the neighbourhood. Rather than get straight into a 5k run on a flat track, I decided to do a run around a couple of large street blocks for more interesting scenery. The disadvantage is that it’s up and down hills, although the route I chose is mostly fairly gentle, especially compared to some other routes I could take around here. I used to run this route a few years ago, and at that time found it a bit of a struggle to keep going all the way home on the final long uphill stretch. But today I found it fairly easy going, so I think the running I did a few months ago has improved things and not worn off completely yet. Phew! The route today was 2.2 km, so I’ll work back up to 5k runs again over the next week or two.

After the run, I walked up to the supermarket to buy some flour, for baking sourdough. I started with feeding my starter yesterday (with wholemeal flour), then realised I didn’t have any plain flour left to make up a loaf. So I had to get it today before making the dough. I decided to get a large 5 kg bag, and a plastic storage tub to put it in. This is baker’s flour, which should have more gluten in it for making bread, compared to plain flour. So we’ll see how much difference that makes in the final loaf, which I’ll bake tomorrow morning.

New content today:

Running the middle distance

I tried to do a 5k run this morning, but I was so uninspired halfway through that I stopped after 3k instead. It didn’t help that the weather is so humid now, although it was a lot cooler than yesterday.

Apart from that, mostly I worked on Darths & Droids writing today. In between cooking a few things – for lunch, dinner, and in mid-afternoon putting together something for dessert to chill in the fridge. Just a simple concoction of wheatmeal biscuits and mascarpone, to use up some leftover mascarpone from the other day. I had it with a scoop of ice cream on top.

Oh, I’ve been watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix with my wife. We’re really enjoying it. A friend of mine recommended it to me, and he was spot on.

New content today:

Let’s get physical

Today was a day of physical activity. I wanted to get back into my running, having had a couple of weeks off due to bad weather. I decided to start easy and only do a 1k “sprint” rather than a full 5k run.

That also meant I could finish that, plus a stretching routine, early enough to head out to the pitch and putt golf course for a game. I contacted my friend and he met me there, so we played together. In our initial game he granted me a handicap of 18 for matchplay, and suggested we decrease it by 1 every time I beat him. I’d gotten it down to 14, bouncing around that area. But today I blitzed him and won 14-3 (with the last hole halved). I scored a total of 75 strokes, which is my best ever on that course, beating my previous best of 79 by 4 strokes. And I recalculated what our matchplay scores would have been with different handicaps… all the way down to a handicap of 2, at which point we would have scored 9 holes each today.

So I’m pretty chuffed. But this does suggest my true handicap relative to my friend is probably something closer to 8, rather than 14. I don’t think it’s as good as 2 – today I felt freakishly good compared to normal.

After playing 18 holes, my friend left and I went next door to the driving range to hit a bucket of balls. I’m reasonably happy with short strokes, chipping, putting, and hitting irons up to about the 5 or 6. But I wanted to get some solid practice hitting a 3 iron and a driver. These clubs are my bane – and it’s hard to get practice during an actual round of golf because you hit them so infrequently. I flubbed several hits, but did manage to get some sort of groove with hitting them eventually, so that felt pretty good.

After that I went to my favourite pie shop by the beach for lunch. I planned to get a butter chicken pie, but they had sold out, so I settled for chicken in white wine sauce. It’s actually a sort of cheesy béchamel, and really delicious. Then I drove home just in time to meet my wife who is currently working mornings in the office and coming home at lunch time to work from home each afternoon.

I went for a walk with Scully up to the post office to mail an Etsy order (from my shop), and do some other shopping. Scully is now pooped and sleeping all evening, and I am tired and have that sort of muscle stiffness that comes after a day of physical exertion. No pains, but just good honest exhaustion.

New content today:

Thoughts on running

Lap 1.

I never used to be a runner. I wasn’t athletic at school or university. I played a bit of casual tennis and sometimes squash, and later took up swimming a bit, but I’ve never really been dedicated or high performing.

A few years ago I thought I should stop being lazy and do some physical activity for fitness and health’s sake. I took up jogging around the neighbourhood. But the area is hilly and going up and down hills the whole time is just a drag. It petered out within a year or so.

Lap 2.

In October last year decided to really give it a go again. Rather than do random distances around the neighbourhood, up and down hills, I now had Strava, so I could track distance and time. I decided to go up to Gore Hill Oval, a football/cricket field not far away, and run laps on the flat ground.

Gore Hill Oval is a kilometre from my place… uphill. To start with, I started timing myself from home, so including the uphill walk to the oval, which I sort of jog-walked as my legs could bear, before reaching the oval and completing enough laps to take my total distance to 5km. I did it once every week or two, and got times around 30-31 minutes.

Lap 3.

Then the summer hit, and the bushfires that blanketed the city with smoke for weeks on end. It was unhealthy just to be outdoors, let alone huffing and puffing for half an hour of exercise. So I stopped running. Once you start being lazy again, it’s easy to keep it up.

I didn’t start running again until July this year. This time I figured I’d walk up the hill to the oval, and only start timing my 5k run when I started doing laps on the flat ground. That immediately reduced my time to around 29 minutes.

Lap 4.

I’ve kept it up since then, one run a week, only occasionally skipping a week (twice so far up to now). My times are now around 27:30 consistently, but it varies a bit. The weather has an effect. Cool and dry is good. One morning was very hot, and my time was bad.

Lap 5.

Today it’s cool, but very humid. The air feels thicker and doesn’t inhale as easily. Sweat is dripping down my face, and into my eyes, stinging with the salt. I feel like I’m labouring and doing a slow time.

Lap 6.

The Oval is an interesting place. There are always people here, either running laps like myself, or simply walking laps, or using the field for soccer practice like the guy who is kicking goals, bouncing the ball off the picket fence so it returns to him. There are people walking dogs. There are mothers and babies in prams and strollers. There are personal trainers and clients, the former pushing the latter to exert themselves and not give in.

After six laps I feel like giving in.

Lap 7.

They say there’s a “runner’s high” that you feel when running – a feeling of euphoria that drives people to keep going because it feels so good. All I feel is exhaustion and an overwhelming desire to stop.

I stumbled onto a thread on reddit yesterday where someone was saying that running feels surprisingly good. A bunch of people commented that yes, it does, they love that feeling they get while doing a run. One person commented (paraphrased):

“I wish you could show me how to get that feeling. I run, but only because I force myself to because I know it’s good for me. I hate every single step and when I’m doing it all I want to do is stop and never run again.”

That’s me. I’m running and I hate it. I just want it to stop.

Lap 8.

The first few laps are okay, because my body is fresh. But it gets harder and harder as the laps pile up. This is where sheer bloody-minded stubbornness takes over. I’ve done more than half the distance. If I give up now, I lose. I don’t want to lose. I don’t want to be a loser.

I keep going.

Lap 9.

Younger guys, bare chested, impressive six-packs, are doing laps of the oval too, overtaking me every few laps. Yeah, if you were my age you wouldn’t be running so fast!

Maybe you would, but I can dream. There are other people, old and young, just walking around the oval for exercise. I’m lapping a few of them. Eat my dust!

Lap 10.

The end is close now. Light at the end of the tunnel. If I can just complete this lap, there’s only one more to go, and then – blessed relief – I can stop.

I start counting steps, in a 4-beat rhythm. Like counting bars when drumming. ONE-two-three-four ONE-two-three-four ONE-two-three-four ONE-two-three-four. It takes a lot of bars to progress a quarter of the way around the oval. One lap is like a whole song.

I sing lyrics in my head to stop myself thinking about how much I want to stop running.

Lap 11.

This is it! The last lap! I know 11 laps is a bit over 5 kilometres.

Halfway around I pull out my phone and open Strava to check the distance. 4.84 km. I pick up the pace and start a sprint to the finish. My breathing, heavy but regular, shifts to double time as my legs pump the ground for the last hundred and a bit metres.

Done.

At 5k I turn off the tracker and slow to a walk as I catch my breath. My time is 27:42. Not as bad as I thought with this humid air, but I’ve done better.

I wander over to the open-air gym equipment next to the oval, and go through a stretching routine and some sit-ups and push-ups.

Other people are still using the oval. A mums & bubs fitness class begins.

I stretch my legs out. I head off for the downhill walk home.

It’s done. Until next week.

New content today:

Little tasks and writing

I did a lot of little housekeeping tasks today – some literally housework, some just some things I needed to get done for other reasons.

And I did a 1k run, setting a time of 4:25, exactly the same as last week.

And then I spent most of the day working on Darths & Droids comic scripts.

New content today: