Wittering on Wednesday

Daylight

With the conversion of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland across to BST (British Summer Time) this weekend just gone the whole day suddenly alters. The apparent arrival of longer lighter evenings open up the day to many options, in my life that is getting out and about (cycling, running, rowing more in the weekday evenings). I can almost feel any hint of what might be called collective seasonal affective disorder burning off everyone in the last few days.

Blogger's own snapshot - City centre park coming into full blossom

The fact it has coincided with very lovely sunny weather might well have accentuated the benefit of the clock shift this year. That it also coincides with my training for a marathon this year might be heightening the feeling for me as it now means that evening runs will often be in daylight (and on routes that have felt unsafe all Winter as they are unlit paths / trials).

Training / fitness

I have been renewing my 'friendship' with the calorie tracking myfitnesspal app (see www.myfitnesspal.com), thanks to having read a post by 'Morning Runner', specifically "WIAW (after a 20 miler)". I was using this app last year (I have the tag on my blog showing my progress still), but had gotten out of the habit. Reading a post by one of the many extremely clued in running bloggers that I have been browsing in spare moments which mentioned the app got me thinking, and moreover remembering how well it worked for me before the Cardiff Half last autumn. So I am back 'on the wagon' so to speak, and hopefully over the next few weeks I'll begin to see real benefits. One benefit, as pointed out in the post I read, is that it helps you keep track of 'refueling' after heavy exercise days, as it is all to easy to wake up the day after a busy day feeling awful just because the exercise left you with net negative calorie count for the previous day.

Motivation right here, I've got to get into green ;-) - an image pulled from my myfitnesspal tools page

Having had a look around my myfitnesspal online pages, with charts of last years effort and so forth, I came across the BMI calculator (result shown above). I was mildly miffed (!) that my BMI came in just over the green / yellow boundary, it would be so fantastic to get myself firmly planted somewhere in the upper quartile of the healthy range... oh, and so much easier to run a marathon if I can shift a few pounds, and not have to haul the extra around 26.2 miles!

Blogging and stuff

While I am wittering on about blogs I've read lately I often have a look at blogger 'Blogs of note' page on the way into or out of my blog. One that has caught my eye and my attention of late is '366 Random Acts Of Kindness', it is thoroughly simply and yet complete genius. A guy has decided to take the leap year and spend a large part of it paying forward kind acts (see his post 'Tomorrow it begins...' for his full motivation). Some of the acts at first look seem so, so simple and then you realise "hey, I could do that" - and there in lies the essence of the genius. I will be checking back regularly to see how he gets on.

PS. I am enjoying the new Blogger user interface it is certainly cleaner and crisper looking than I was used to. It seems that I can navigate my way around it to - which is always a good thing ;-)