The changes keep happening to my life as shown in this third and final of three posts documenting it all, to keep the posts reasonably short. At least that’s all I have, or have planned, for now. This set mostly go back to my running, with a two week lockdown from a COVID outbreak as a forced change in my life, to go with my deliberate changes.

 

New running watch

After a few weeks of this new running style that I can believe will work well for me, I realized that my analog watch without ability to measure distance well, and thus pace, wouldn’t be able to tell me much for progress on my runs aside from how many minutes faster I did the same runs in before. But that would be crude, like recently 7.5 or 8 minutes on a roughly 16 mile run. I also hadn’t been keeping a run log for a decade, and don’t really need to any more with these watches having their own tracking software. However, they won’t be able to do some of the things I will be able to do with data visualization software if I can get the data downloaded!

For my running performance, I have just committed to getting my first ever GPS watch, which I will go with the Garmin 245 Music, though I will wait a few more weeks to practice my self-discipline, patience, and self-motivation to do a bunch of writing contest entries first in my “incentives package”. Targeting May 5th, which aligns very well with many things in my life, and has double lucky 5s. I’ll probably go pick it up at around 5:55 for the heck of it. 🙂

 

Getting on wireless headphones

When I run on my own 2-3 times a week, I still listen to music. I’m old skool enough that means a bicep strap to hold an iPod mini (mine still works), and corded earphones, even though the iPod has bluetooth tech. With my Garmin, I’m preparing for the day when I won’t have that iPod any more, though, so I got the version where I can use some of those MP3s previously mentioned that i had, for it. However, i can’t hook up my Garmin with corded headphones, so here comes the wireless headphones evolution for me!  I didn’t need those Apple Airpods, though, so I saved some money to get an MPow set that’s just as highly rated by tens of thousands of people, looks like it would fit my ears better, and is 25% of the price with more durability features!

 

Getting on Strava

Strava is like Facebook for fitness, except they’re not owned by those giants. They’ve accidentally given out GPS data because stupid people left it on going to secret locations, but I’m OK with some of my data not being protected for this stuff. I’m not running anywhere secret, nor am I leading any secret sort of life despite me recently switching to Signal, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and so on.

I’ll be getting on Strava to compare, see, and be inspired by some workouts done by friends. It’ll be a lot more interesting than on Facebook, where I’ve essentially unfollowed 90% of friends there whose posts I couldn’t usually care less for, opting to have my newsfeed full of interesting content from research organizations like TED, Freakonomics, and so on. When I scroll through Facebook, which isn’t often these days, it’s anything by doomscrolling!

 

Writing class begins May 4th

It’s not the first writing class I’ve ever taken, but it’ll be the first one in over two decades. On May 4th, I begin a memoir writing class for newcomers to Canada with my province’s writers’ federation. This should be interesting as I think most there are really newcomers in recent years, not like me of 40 years ago! However, I checked and they said I’d be fine, so there’ll I’ll be! Two hours each Tuesday evening for six weeks. So excited!

 

So what’s next?

I don’t know, to be honest. We’ll see. However, something big just got handed to me in the form of a lockdown for 2 weeks, and a lockdown-ish for another week after… at least. I won’t have a problem adapting to that, including going to work in an office meant for 20 with only myself there, but for good reasons! A colleague of a few years at the office had also left within the past week, so that’s also more change.

 

Phew! That’s tiring just thinking of all these changes!

 

 

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