Running Chick

I’ve been thinking about getting myself a RoadID for quite a while now, but never got around to doing it.  Finally, after seeing mentions of it on two of the blogs I read and an ad in Runner’s World, I finally quit procrastinating and ordered one.

I do all my runs and rides by myself.  My previous method of identification when out running or biking was an old driver’s license with my contact info written in permanent marker on the back.  It would have worked fine, except that I never remembered to take it with me.  And then the info I wrote on the back wore off.  So much for permanent markers.  I carry my cell phone, which has my contact info in it, with me all the time most of the time, but what if my phone got smashed and my contact info couldn’t be accessed?  Or the battery went dead because I forgot to charge it before I left the house (the most likely case)?  RoadID seemed like the perfect solution.

I debated about getting the ankle ID, but I’m not really into ankle bracelets, so I passed.  Then I debated on the elite or the sport.  I thought that maybe the nylon band on the sport would get stinky over time, so I went for the Wrist ID Elite.  Then I debated about the color – there’s about a billion selections!  Okay, there’s only nine, but anybody who knows me knows that I am horrible at making decisions when there are multiple choices.  Especially when it comes to colors.  Ooh, purple!  No, that would look weird.  Pink!  No, I’m not really a pastel pink kinda gal.  Red!  Too racy?  Orange!  Nah.  Yellow!  Meh.  Green!  Ehn.  Finally, I decided that I should select a color that fits my personality.  So, I chose boring black.  Because I’m boring.  As soon as I ordered it, I wished I’d have ordered red.  *slaps forehead*

ANYWAY.

The laser engraving of my emergency info on the tag is done really well.  You can sort of get an idea of it in the picture above.  I blurred out my info because even though I want first responders and ambulance people to read it, I don’t necessarily want all of the internet to know my emergency contacts or that I’m allergic to peanuts.  Not that I’d wind up having to have a shot of peanut juice in an emergency situation, but I had one line left and didn’t know my blood type or have any witty or inspirational quotations to add.  So, I thought – hey! I’m allergic to peanuts.  That’s probably important to someone besides me! I’ll throw that on there.  I bet the person who set up the engraving got a good giggle out of that.

ANYWAY. AGAIN.

I figure the best way to get into the habit of wearing my ID is to wear it all the time.  So, I’ve been doing that for two days now, and it’s quite comfortable.  And, since I got black, it goes with all my work outfits.  Score.

As an additional bonus, the nice folks at Road ID have extended a little discount to my friends who order one for themselves.  To get $1 off your entire order in the next 30 days, using the coupon number:  ThanksNancy559738

One final note.  Accessories are pretty cheap.  If I do decide to get that red wrist band, it’s only $12.99 and the id tag is, obviously, easily interchanged.  Speaking of the tag, if my contact info changes (say, for example, if I were to give the BF the boot and wanted to remove his number..HI JOSH JUST KIDDING LOVE YA! xoxo, or I were to find out my blood type – which probably wouldn’t be a bad idea in the first place..) replacement tags are only $16.99

If you’re out working on your fitness by yo’self like me (ahem, Bad Decision Bicyclist), please consider a RoadID.  You can thank me later. 

After running my blag on Serendipity for the past few months, I've come to the conclusion that Serendipity's built-in editor is less than adequate. When my blag was on blogger.com, I used a Firefox plugin called Scribefire for my posts. While Scribefire did have it's annoyances, I've found myself thinking more and more about seeing if I could figure out how to get it to work with Serendipity. One quick Google search later and I happily found that all I needed to do was add the "Post via XML-RPC" event plugin and set up the Serendiptiy account in Scribefire and I was up and running.  Geez, why didn't I think of this sooner? This post was written using the Scribefire. So far, so good. Let's see how it does images: That's promising.  Actually, that's Spencer's paw.  I was messing around with my new camera. How about formatting?  bold, italic, underline, bold and italic! Big! Small! How about some color?  Ooh, pretty!

• Hey, bullet points!
• I don't really have anything else to add to this list
• Oh well

I'd say that this gets a solid thumbs up for now. ** Update 12/31/2010 *** Since this post seems to get the most visits, I thought I'd do a follow-up. I no longer use Scribefire for my posts. I found it to be buggy and, most annoying, it would frequently crash and end up losing everything I was working on. Also, it seemed to have trouble posting to my blog - sometimes it would post just fine, other times it would say it would post, but nothing would show up in my draft folder. Then, when I would try to post again, it would tell me that the post already existed. While it's quite possible that I was doing something wrong, I got to the point where it was just too frustrating to use. So, after much searching around, I switched to Windows Live Writer. Live Writer obviously comes with it's own set of quirks, but it's never deleted one of my posts and it's never failed to post to my blog when I told it to. Plus, there's a ton of plugins available for managing images, videos, code and whatnot. I've been using it for over a year now, and I'm really happy with it and can have no complaints.

I have one of those fancy "smart" phones that has a built-in gps.  Today as I was trying to plan out a route for my six-mile run, I thought that it would be cool if I could find a fancy program for said phone which could record the data from my route and display it in a map real-time.  This would make it easier for Josh to keep tabs on my progress for the times when he needs to come and pick me up.

The first application I tried was GPSed.  It seemed to work okay while I was doing some preliminary testing at my house. Well, it was able to correctly pinpoint my location of my phone as it sat on the desk next to the computer.  But, it completely failed beyond that.  Here's what Josh saw as I was on my run:

This is what it should have looked like

Only a slight difference. Josh reported that the route, which was set to upload every 3 minutes, was sometimes uploaded and sometimes not.  In all, I wasn't very impressed with GPSed.  Realizing that it was just released on Friday, perhaps they'll fix the obvious bugs in the next release.  If not, I'm totally asking for my 99 cents back.

The next application I tried was called InstaMapper.  It's not like I was going to head out on another run to test it, so I decided to give a spin on my way to the grocery store.

Here's the to-route.  

Both the to- and from-routes.

The data version of the route.

So much better.  Josh said that the points were uploaded quickly and most importantly, they were very accurate.

We'll test in further when I'm on my run tomorrow to see how accurate it is while my phone is riding around in my pocket.

Oh, almost forgot.  Today's six-miler was at a 10:47 pace, which was pretty speedy considering the majority of my run was on pure ice.  The only time I was worried was when I was heading down Manninen Road and noticed that I was cruising at a very fast 9:10 pace and I had this vision of myself falling and sliding ala one-person luge all the way down the hill into cross traffic.  I probably could have (maybe should have) slowed down, but the thought of running for any length of time at that pace was way too empowering.  Thanks to my trusty YakTraks, I avoided any winter olympic action.

This week's totals:  11.02 miles @ 10:51 average pace/minute.