Fall Sports 2019

Odd to be talking about fall sports when it's like 90°F outside, but it is that time of year.  Sampson is heading into his junior year of Cross Country and Peach is playing 8th grade volleyball.  I watched the volleyball team scrimmage one game and they looked much improved from last year.  They did add a couple girls that are pretty good, and a couple of the girls have gotten much better from last year.  Also Peach got her first spike ever in the scrimmage so that was pretty cool.  On XC side Sampson's team should be really good.  They got every scorer from a regional team back and none of the scorers are seniors.  I think at some point they should be ranked in the state this year, if not, it is because they don't have a dominate number 1.  Sampson is trying to fill this role but will have his hands full not only from his team but from some local competition.  Honestly I can see his team getting 8 or 9 guys in before some teams get 5 guys across, and there is the possibility that they can have 3 sub 18 guys early in the season.  I think Sampson's goal is to get to state, be all-OVAC, and all Buckeye 8.  If he could sneak out a win somewhere that would be icing on the cake, but as long as stays healthy and is able to compete I'll be happy.  There are several guys that will be right on his heels for this season, but last year I thought he made some good changes to concentrate on the season.  From icing his legs before races, no cutting out certain foods.  This year he needs to concentrate on the training to have his best races at the end of the season.  The one thing he may be lacking is mileage, but he has probably run more than he ever has so I can't complain.  The coach said he needed to be in the 500 mile range for the summer and I don't think he got close to that, so we'll see.  For perspective, I have run 126 miles since May, and I couldn't even qualify to be on the team, but I'm also not 17.  Like I said I just hope he stays healthy and is able to improve from last year, if he does that he will be in a good spot and if the rest of the guys improve, they could be really good.

For Peach, her team was kind of up and down a little last year and as the season progressed I think other teams got more better (yikes) then they did.  If that makes sense.  Basically they started out better than other teams but they didn't get all of the passing and 3 hitting plays down by the end of the season where some other teams did and they could handle the ball if you just passed it over rather than having a good striker.  Peach says she wants to be the spiker and she has grown a good bit over the last 2 years (still no where near as tall as Dad, but way taller than Mom) so she could fill that role now.  They are also playing on high school nets, no more shorter nets for the jr. high. It will be interesting to see how this season goes as it looks like the summer work has them playing a little more like a team.  It will also be interesting to see how bad Peach can cut herself since she is growing out her nails and she refuses to cut them even though there is absolutely no advantage you can have in volleyball from having long nails, you can only cut your self.  So far she has cut herself twice.  Well here is wishing the kids good luck and good luck to my wallet to get into all of these games.

The Tractor Incident of Aught 19

So Sunday the 28th of July I had a bit of an accident.  Well let's start at the beginning of the day.  First we had church, (well I mean I got up, ate, got dressed and what not).  At church they were doing something different that day, open mic night or day or morning.  Anyway it was a chance to get up and praise God for anything or anything that has happened, and I didn't have a specific story, I mean I could talk about a lot of things, but it was important for me to just get up and say something.  I think when you have that opportunity to witness for God you have to do it.  At some point I will describe my path from college to where I am and how all of the little things kind of worked themselves out, but not right now.  So I said my piece, went and sat down, and Peach was with me and said that it was nice.  Like I said I don't know everything I said, it was just important to go up there.  Did I mention I followed the guy who was formally imprison and found God there, and also had a trachetmy at some point?  If that guy is praising God then I got to get up there!!  So we went out to Mom's after church and we were visiting with Bo and Susie for the kids birthday.  It was getting late, but I decided that I was going to go ahead and mow the grass, so that maybe I could take the next weekend off from mowing.  Well during the course of opening up the yard, I normally take about 4 laps around the house, then go to the outside for 2 or 3 laps.  When I started around the bank I was thinking that I let Sampson open the yard up last week, and there is no way he would get as close as I get, so I tried to get a little closer to the bank, because I figured last week he didn't get as close as I do.  Well he must have. 

Post from April on new Fitness Ap

So I have started using a new health app, the Samsung health.  It actually isn’t new and apparently I have had it for a while and just never really used it.  You see I had the fitbit alta and I really like it but after about a year and 3 months it kind of took a crap and isn’t holding a charge, so I decide to go all in on Samsung and get one of the fit pro’s.  Well Best Buy had one for $150 as an open box and it seemed like a super good deal.   I think I may have to add the 2 year protection though because I can see battery issues coming with this one too.  Anyway the app allows me to input the calories from every food I eat and it keeps track of them.  The best thing is it has some preloaded foods or pulls from a connected data base and it will save any food and nutrient information you put in.  So every time you eat a similar meal you can find it really easy.  So far I have realized that I was eating a lot more calories than I thought…oops. Well this is correctable, but Sophie is gonna be mad because I really want to limit my calorie intake so I can lose some weight.  Yes it is going to take effort, but I am ok with that.  I am *cough* in my forties *cough* so I want to take a little better care of my self.  I started running / walking about 2 years ago when I can and I am picking up my training this year to try and get to 25 minutes in a 5k.  That essentially means I will run the whole race, no walking.  I have been working my way along the local 5k course, gradually building up the distance so hopefully by the end of June I am doing the full course a couple times a week.  Anyway I think if I can lose about 10-15 pounds that will make the racing easier and hopefully help with the weight loss.  Sophie pretty much hates to hear about anything healthy though and has already threatened divorce just 2 days in.  I don’t think she is serious, but just to be safe I’ll try and keep this on the down low.  Hopefully it works and she will want to do it too.  I think that will make things easier if we do it together.  I’ll wait until the anger dies down a little though to introduce these ideas.  Also the Samsung watch comes with the “MapMyRun App” which I hope to try out today.  I like the fitbit app tracking of runs so we will see how this one works.  I also told Peach that if she got straight A’s we could pick out a fitbit at the end of the year. 

Cemetery First Run

So pretty pscyched for training after the race last week, and am picking it up to make up for that 2 seconds.  Anyway I am using the Map My Run app from Under Armor and am experimenting with the courses and training features.  Basically you can set up your own training program, set the days of the week and kind of what your goal is, plus it uses your past performance to gauge where you need to train.  I used it for my last race, but because my watch wasn't syncing the workout, I needed to run the phone and watch at the same time.  Anyway this lead to having duplicate workouts get logged, and I had to delete the one which was synced to the program.  I could always go back and resync the watch work out, but didn't always do it.  This time I am going to try and do better and logging the workouts so it can put me on the correct path. One other feature of the map my run is that you can create a route and load it to the phone.  Now I tried this with the cemetery loop and it wouldn't map the whole thing because there was no road to the school, so I had to do it in two parts.  Well the loop was about 5 miles and I wanted to step up the old training so I figured it would be a good loop to run up the cemetery hill and then back down all the way to the house.  My muscles said it may not have been a good idea.  See I had run the cemetery before, but I drove to the school, would run down the cemetery and then back up.  The difference on this run is I ran to the bottom of the cemetery, then ran up, then around the school and then down the big hill, back to the house.  I was reasonably pleased with the effort as the old legs were burning during the run, but this is probably the first time that was actually easier to run than walk that I have experienced.  I ran a mid 12 minute pace for the whole run (granted the uphill part was closer to 15/16 minutes) and it took about an hour, so I was really happy about that.  There are some other paths I can take as well to stretch the mileage out a little, plus if I needed to put a lap around the school in that would get me up to whatever mileage I would need.  I figure I can stretch the loop to around 6 and half miles if needed.  There is another loop around the same area that can do 8 pretty easier, but that is aways off.  Overall I don't feel bad after the run, like I thought I would, the weigh in this morning was also a low of 196.6 lbs. so that is good news.  The program I'm on I should take tonight off, and then test tomorrow for 12 minutes at race pace. We'll see how this progresses, but so far so good on the first big jump for me.

skyview app - A review

Downloaded the Skyview app for my Samsung S10 and it is the best star layout app that I have used.  I had trouble with apps in the past, but this one actually shows the stars, planets and constellations.  Pretty neat.  You can use it any time of day as well and snap awesome screen shots of constellations doing crazy things...

You can see Orion just hanging out at the fire...

Or attaching Peach during the day.  I don't think he likes the sun...

WATCH OUT SAMPSON!!!! IT'S CANCER!!!!

Hey Aquarius, stop pouring stuff on me...

Sophie attacking a bear.  This is good stuff.  Anyway there is also some neat astronomy stuff too, and it links to the wiki for information on the constellation, you know if you want to use it outside.

2 seconds

This is what 2 seconds looks like in a 40-49 age group in a 5k coming to the finish line.  I mean if I knew that was my competition I would have stepped it up earlier, but looking at my UA map my run stats I was at about 212 beats per minute on the old ticker coming to the line so that was all I was giving at the end. Plus I ran like 90% of the race at my max heart rate.