You are all just data to me

I ran 3 miles last night at the YMCA. It was 33+ minutes of suck on the treadmill because I left my iPod or any sort of headphones back at the house in my rush to herd Little Girl out the door. We couldn't be late for choir practice! Fortunately, I was able to watch Animal Planet's Planet's Most Extreme with closed captioning. It was the top 10 strangest defense mechanisms. There are some fscked up animals out there.

Why is it that I work like a dog to get a 33 minute run out of a treadmill and work like a dog to get a 30 minute run on the road? I thought running on a treadmill was supposed to be easier than the road. It is easier in the sense that it sucks less, but my times are better when I run out in the Big Blue Room.

Anyway, that's not my point. The point of this post was to announce to the teeming throngs of people reading this that I am strongly considering something. I am thinking about ditching RunningAhead.com as my running log of choice. Frankly, it is redundant because I log my runs in a paper journal (the Runner's World Training Diary) and on Fitlinxx, which is a system tied to the machines at the YMCA and awards points for weightlifting and cardio workouts that you can redeem for YMCA swag. So every time I finish a run, it is like this -- I write down my time in the Runner's World journal, log it at RunningAhead, and log it on Fitlinxx [unless I was on a networked treadmill at the Y, saving myself one logging step.] It's redundant, and as a programmer, lifehacker, and overall lazy person, I have deep philosophical problems with keeping data in more than one place. Plus, I am on a personal mission to go analog as much as possible in my life. For instance, I ditched my PDA in favor of a Hipster PDA made of index cards and a moleskine weekly planner. I stopped journaling my boring life on LiveJournal in favor of a moleskine journal. Paper, to me, is more enduring and a more accessible interface than a website. Websites come and go, but the ability to grab an actual artifact off of my physical bookshelf is important to me.

So anyway, I am thinking of ditching RunningAhead as a logging tool in favor of paper. I do this with some trepidation because RunningAhead is a terrific site. It's not you, it's me, RunningAhead. In fact, I will probably keep using it to sketch out routes on its k-rad Google Maps mash-up. And I will probably still participate in the Virtual Races at the beginning of each month. Races, as I think I have said before, provide milestones that keep me running.

I am about 90% convinced that this will be the way I go. If you feel strongly about it, and you want to talk me out of it, please leave comments.

Tags: journaling, software, workouts, running, jogging