Went back to the gym today, and walked three miles on a treadmill. It wasn't bittersweet at all, rather it was like coming back to an old friend. I'm sure I'll be running plenty in the days to come. The whole process was filled with revisiting old familiar things:

I put on my favorite sweatpants, which I have been running in for years.
I had good gear to use - good, quality running socks, good shoes
I was listening to a familiar, and favorite audiobook, David Eddings' Enchanters' End Game

It felt good to do. I walked three miles, bringing my #365Miles total up to 5 miles. Not bad for the 3rd day of the year.

My gym is designed to encourage you. Snappy, high bpm music plays in the locker rooms and on the gym floor. The walls are decorated with quotes and encouraging statements, like "Leap and the net will appear."

I remember years ago, before I had first found running and really dug into it, I was both excited and terrified to do it. I had no idea if I would be able to do it. There's no question - I've lost a fair amount of fitness this past year. But it's exciting to leap towards getting it back.

One big decision I did come to, as a result of all this is that my experimentation using a fitbit has come to an end.

I think that wearing it has had the opposite effect from what I wanted. The fitbit monitors your steps all day long. For work reasons, I have to take it off when I'm at my desk, which is kind of a drag. But I also have come to realize that wearing it actually encourages a sort of mindlessness, an "auto-pilot" mindset in me, that isn't in my favor.

Don't get me wrong, I'm ALL ABOUT metrics. I love them. I have a lovely, very fancy Garmin running watch that I will wear when I do run and walk. And I'm more committed than ever to using Lose-It to track my nutrition and exercise. The thing I see about the fitbit is, it makes me sort of mentally lazy about it. That's not a device problem, nor is it a Mako problem. It's just how I'm wired. I need the focused attention of tracking my workout explicitly, without relying on the "background chatter" of my calories/steps burned by daily life.

I'm grateful that I can return to what works for me.

PostedJanuary 3, 2015

AuthorMako Allen

Categories365 Gratitude

Tags365 Gratitude

CommentPost a comment

So yesterday, as I said I would, I got started in earnest on my behavior management application, WeMinder. I scoped out what I thought was a reasonable initial data model, drew up a raw pen-and-paper ER diagram between the tables, and got started creating what are called the Domains, the central objects that make up the heart of the system.

It's not as impressive as it sounds. All told, it's like four files, and maybe 60 lines of code. But it's a start. The development framework I'm using is called Grails. It's awesome. I love it.

I also hate it a little bit. It can be very persnickety about certain things. I found out that you really can't name domains "Action" for some reason. I also was having a little trouble with the project scaffolding.

Scaffolding is this awesome rapid-prototyping feature of Grails - you toss this one line into the controller for your domain, and WHAM BANG YOW OTHER SOUND EFFECT - a fully functioning basic user interface comes out the other side.

It looks kind of like this:

Awesome, right? It's nowhere near perfect, and I'm going to customize the living heck out of it, until it looks very pretty and does a lot more stuff. But you gotta start somewhere.

Scaffolding like this is designed for CRUD. (No, not that it looks like crud, although granted, it kinda does.) CRUD is an acronym for the 4 basic database operations you can do. Create, Read, Update, Delete. It's good for administrative stuff, and for when you're just getting started building an application.

But, this crud has to actually WORK first. And yesterday, it didn't. I could add potential actions, like snuggling, or getting a spanking, but they just wouldn't list properly. What's more, I couldn't make any entries, because they're relationally tied to the actions. Unacceptable!