anderstornvig.dk

For now, I’ve moved my primary online activity to Twitter which means that I’m currently not updating this site. So, follow me on twitter.com/tornvig. Longer tweets / rants / anything else really I’ll put on anderstornvig.tumblr.com. But posts on Tumblr are automatically referred to on Twitter anyway. Nifty feature, hah? It’s one of many.
See you!

In this post from late August 2008, I explained how I was going to take up running – four times a week for starters.

As it turns out, someone like me, quite tall, slightly overweight who has never done any kind of actual exercise before, will not be able to “just” do this. Unfortunately, no one told me before it was too late. Here’s what happened.

The experience

First, don’t take any of this as facts, nor professional advice. Consider it an average guy talking from experience and stuff I have read and been told various places.

So, I started running at the beginning of September 2008 and everything went great the first months when I ran 1 and 2 km. I found myself to be quite disciplined and also energized as expected. One month in when I began my 3 km route, my right shin started to hurt. Two weeks later it became really bad. I continued however thinking that it was just bad shape putting an act on. For another week I was able to stand the pain of running 4 km, but after that in the last week I had to give up. For two days I wasn’t able to finish my route anymore, and furthermore, pushing it caused me to nearly not be able to walk for a week or two. I stopped and haven’t run since those weeks back in September-November.

It turns out I had an infection in my shin. A common injury among new runners that should’ve been stopped way earlier. Apparently, it takes up to a year to heal from excessive load caused to your leg.

The comeback

Anyway, I decided to start running again in the new year when I’d be more or less over my injury, and during my break I was told several times both by incompetent but also competent people that I should not run right now or maybe ever. Maybe I was just not capable of getting to the point where I could actually run whereever whenever.

What kind of freaking BS is that? Yes, I had an injury and yes, I’ll probably not run a marathon next year like some people, but sure I can learn how to run. Man was after all built for it. Although, the injury and the realization that I cannot “just” do this has indeed been a set back, I really got to the point where I enjoyed my new circadian rhythm and my running with steady improvement. That’s also why I’ll not just stop and give up, but instead accept that it’ll take me a bit longer.

I am however taking some points with me.

For the record

The development of tendons and joints will not follow the development of muscles and shape. Actually, the process of tendon and joint development will be about four times delayed compared to muscles and shape. And as I’ve learned, it is indeed an easy trap to fall into, that can cause serious injuries to legs and your back.

Furthermore, running, being a somewhat rough and monotonous kind of excercise, causes heavy impacts to be sent up through your body, resulting injuries also if you – like me – are untrained.

To overcome these problems and continue running, I’ve made the following strategy. It is going to be a long but acceptable way to be able to run. I don’t know exactly what my goal is – if I even have one -, but the strategy also just covers the startup and some basic precautions I have to keep in mind.

The new strategy

Basically, I’m starting from scratch following these guidelines. Random order.

1. Run on softer ground. Back in the fall I just ran on what was nearest, which was all just pavement and asphalt. Now, I’m going to seek whatever ground is still left from nature in the city.
2. Start slowly. Very important one. In order for my tendons and joints to keep up with my muscles and shape, I’ll have to keep back and actually perform less than I’m capable of. This means only running every other day at most and keeping the walk/run relationship below one (mathematically speaking) for a long while.
3. Get supporting shoes. I read everywhere that the key equipment for running regularly is shoes. Quality shoes that support exactly your feet. Actually, I bought these a couple of days ago and I must say that besides from being great compared to what I usually walk in, they’re also a motivation in themselves. Maybe I’m delusional, but I feel my activity level increase just by putting them on. Also the fact that you spent a fortune on them give you some sort of commitment to your running project. I had neutral feet by the way but in general my running style was not very gentle to my legs at all – another thing against me.
4. Keep getting up early. My early mornings and bedtimes were another great reward when I ran in the fall. So this I’m going to continue.
5. Excercise legs and back more. As you probably know, I also started going to a fitness center when I started running. This I’m keeping up very ambiciously if I may say so myself. Without injuries. I’m already doing legs and back when I’m there, but I guess I could spend a little extra time on them.
6. Lose weight. I figure it’d be convenient to lose my overweight. Not because I’m uncomfortable with it – it’s only about 5-10 kg or something – but rather because it’ll reduce the before-mentioned impacts between my feet and the ground greatly in the long run. After all my feet are have a small area of contanct for all that weight. With minor adjustments in my eating habits, biking to school and a bit more cardio in the gym I don’t think this will be a big challenge. What’s important though is for me to lose it before I start some more serious running. Simply so my feet won’t suffer in the beginning either.

That’s it. I’m looking forward to continue my adventure, and of course I’ll keep you guys posted – whether you like it or not.

It’s not like I haven’t had anything to write about. Not at all. There has been loads of uninteresting things happening to me. Actually, I’ve been ridiculousness busy. Or not. Busy compared to what? To whom? Nobody knows. Except me. I’ve been ridiculously busy compared to how busy I usually consider busy to be – THAT BUSY! Then you ask: “How busy do you usually think busy is?” Interesting question, because I usually think busy is busier than I normally think busy is – and that’s certainly busier than you and even the former me will ever be. The current me will always be the busiest. Trivial. And since I’ll always be the busiest man on earth, it’s my privilege to define the term too. You should all have a clear understanding of what it feels like to be busy like me – again, it’s not like you’ll ever get to recognize the feeling, but you should know it – so you can feel sorry for me and more importantly admire my strength for being able to keep up with the responsibility it is to be busy for other people. So what is busyness? I’ll tell you….. No, I won’t. I think I’ve made my point. “Think” because I’m too busy to actually bother.

Way off topic. Enough with the crazy talk. Changing the title of this post now. Tomorrow, I’ll try again to write the post I was supposed to write today. Procrastination is the ugly cousin of busyness.

As any admitted geek, my fingers regularly start itching for new hardware or gadgets. Even though I just bought some gear a few months ago I just have to get a new toy. I’m sure you’re familiar with the excited feeling of going online, order something, restlessly check the mailbox and finally receive that small slip of paper on which it says that your package has arrived and now is waiting for you at the local post office (that’s how it works in DK). Of course you immediately grap your bike, ride it like you’d never do in any other situation and race walk into the post office. That’s when you get stopped by the annoying queue slip that ensures fairness in the queue. The lady behind the desk repeatedly pushes the button to serve new costumers and move the queue along, and every time you optimistically check your little slip to see if it in some obscure way has changed to the next number. Anyway, you get the package home and you can’t wait to unwrap it. That’s when the hopeless tape assembly gets in your way, and of course you don’t have a scissor or a knife nearby. So you use whatever sharp features nature equipped you with, nails, teeth, evil laser eyes.. When you eventually make your way into the new toy, your struggles are rewarded with the lovely smell of new hardware.

I’ll bet the majority of geeks – or whatever you may call us – are addicted to this self-satisfying behavior. I know I am and when you combine that with my well-developed impulsiveness it easily becomes an expensive pleasure. But what can you do..

The reason for this babble is, well non-existent, but a few weeks ago I had my eyes set for an Eee pc 900. At the time I just had to have it. Fortunately what has the ability to stall my impulsiveness is bad online reviews. Since I was going to throw away about 2500 dkr I figured it would be 15 minutes well spent. I’m glad I did because the computer – which is the model with one 16 GB SSD – didn’t get a single good review concerning speed. Apparently the 16 GB SSD is painfully slow. I decided to wait till the 901 would be available in DK. It’s supposed to be radically improved. In fact, this very week we’ve just entered is the week the 901 should become availabe in DK. Yihaa, I thought Saturday. Saturday.

Yesterday (Sunday), I peacefully sat on my laptop browsing the source code of an RSS reader called Snownews. There was a few things that didn’t suit my needs – that’s another story. All of a sudden, poof!, a nasty, vertical, yellow line appears right in the golden section of my screen. Imagine one big pixel error that goes from the top of your screen to the bottom. I figured it was X putting an act on, so I restarted it. Nothing changed.. The line is apparently permanent, the screen “broken” (I can obviously still use it though) and my loyal companion through years now is showing its first sign of age. It’s really sad and here I was only thinking about that stupid 901.

All though I’m reluctant to do so, I may have to replace the old warrior. I probably can’t live with the screen and it’ll be too expensive to replace. I won’t throw it out. It can still be used dedicated, with an external monitor or something like that.

So what are my options? Well, fortunately my parents weren’t hesitant to offer me an almost new left over Dell, and I think I’m going to accept that. The Eee is once again out of the picture and I don’t really have the cash to buy a new full featured laptop. My demands of such are quite high so it wouldn’t be cheap, and since the Dell is right here in front of me, actually stronger and smaller, running Ubuntu right now, it’s just easier. It is uglier than my HP though : ).

That was my Sunday and since my last post I’m also back in Aalborg ready for tomorrow when school starts again.

This is going to be my last post for now about ways in which I want to change my life style – yes, I just realized that’s what I’m doing with all my plans. I simply can’t squeeze more into my weekly schedule and I guess it’s not that interesting to you anyway.

I’m going to take up running. At least four days a week, probably from monday till thursday. It’s no secret that I could stand to lose a little weight but that’s actually not my primary motivation. Inspired by this post on this blog which I recently stumbled upon, I want to energize my mornings by getting up early around 6 am and run. At least I want to try it because I’ve been so freaking tired in the mornings last year. It made it hard to stay awake during lectures, and hard in general to get anything done the first one or two hours at school. By running I want to change this, and according to the before mentioned post it should also boost my energy level and thereby my productivity the rest of the day. A downside is that I have to be in bed early too which doesn’t suit my nature well. But I reckon around 11 pm will be fine, giving me seven hours of sleep.

The first day of this experiment will be monday September 1st and the route will be 1 km (planned on http://www.iform.dk/polopoly.jsp?d=1756&a=10447, please enlighten me if you know better sites for that). Laugh all you want but be aware that I’ve never willingly excercised before and I have to start somewhere. After two weeks – that is 8 days of running – I’m going to add another km and so forth. If I’m not able to run all of the distance in two weeks I’ll instead add another week to the same distance.

This is my plan to energize my mornings and, as stated in my previous post, hopefully I’ll make it, keep it up and eventually grow to like running.

Due to increasing back pain over the summer I was finally forced to do the inevitable, join a gym (advise from an osteopath and a masseur). There’s many different options in Aalborg and since I have no experience whatsoever with equipment, facilities etc. I decided to go for the cheapest. UniFitness is a relatively new gym owned by the university and it is therefore reserved for student as well as employees and employers of the university. It’s only 90 dkr a month – half of any other place in town.

Because of the price, this place is obviously attractive for students who aren’t the wealthiest. And it is indeed very popular. But apparently the university doesn’t at all meet the demand. The spaces are limited and to get in, interested had to meet up at the office personally this morning 8:30 am. A hopelessly old fashion way of signing up to something these days, I think. Hopeless or not, I had to obey the system, drive to Aalborg and get up early, earlier than I thought. Yesterday I spoke to a mate who signed up last year, and he said that I’d have to be there long before 8.30 to get in. I figured 6:45 would be all right.

So.. Got up 5:45 am. Put some early Smashing Pumpkins in my ears and drove through heavy rain on my bike. I made 6:45 and there were about 15 in front of me – complete silence when I got there obviously because nobody knew each other.Nothing wrong about that, it was just a bit weird : ). So I threw my jacket on floor and sat on it up against a wall for nearly two hours, listening to some This will destroy you and eventually Karl Pilkington. It wasn’t the worst queue I’ve been in, but it was boring and painful to sit there on the floor struggling to get comfortable. After an hour no position was comfortable.

Anyway, I got a spot and right now I’m glad I did it. Good choice to meet early – I’m not sure everyone of the 150, still queued up when I left, got a spot. Last year only 50 of about 200 got in. Crazy popularity which the university clearly should take advantage of. But maybe there’s some problems with a state-subsidized gym competing with privately owned gyms. I assume it’s state-subsidized.. And technically the privately owned support the state-subsidized financially through taxes – unfair. Talking over my head now so I’ll just stop.

I hope it’s going to be good and I actually look forward to trying it. My plan is to go at least twice a week. Hopefully I can keep that up.

Some days ago I got an idea. Maybe it’s because I need to get back to school, but I really want to expand my knowledge. Make it wider. As it is right now it’s quite narrow, limited to specific things that I know a fair amount about. I have only digged into things I needed or were forced to know something about. It could be due to interest or schoolwork. My narrow-mindedness has become particularly bad since I started on the university last year. Before that I was regularly learning new stuff in school.

The way I am going to do this is make a list of topics of my interests, pick a topic, process it to an unknown extend, finish it and pick a new one. There has to be no pressure. The picking of topics I haven’t really sorted out yet but it can be anything – science, space, history, biology, psychology, people. I probably won’t pick something that involves computers. There’s enough of that in school. I don’t want “news”-knowledge either. I have no particular wish to know about stuff going on in the world right now. Sure, I’ll inevitably pick up on some stories here and there, but it won’t be knowledge I’ll focus on. It is too flightily, isn’t it?

I reckon some topics will be quite big, and of course my intention is not to become an expert in them. I just want to know the basics, excite myself, be able to explain a bit about it, gain some perspective, use it in crosswords, Trivial Pursuit, quizzes, etc. My sources of wisdom can also be anything – e.g. the library, books, the Internet, magasins, documentaries, TV in general. I’m probably also going to take a few notes to the topics to connect things in my head.

I imagine that each topic will take about two weeks to a month to research to a satisfying extend, an hour or two every other day. It all depends how interesting I find it.

Actually, the idea originates in the Ricky Gervais radio show where they talk mostly drivel and amusing stories but also about many interesting topics. One topic which I found particularly fascinating was evolution. How we, the world, scientifically got to the point where we are now. I have picked this to be my first topic to explore.

For now however I’m going to postpone the take-off of this plan. Just till I get settled in Aalborg and school again.