Day: August 6, 2009

Running hurts. 😛 After the shoulder-swimming thing, I started running a little.  It’s not fun at all.  Sometimes I feel like I can run forever without any problems. Other times it takes me four steps before I start cramping up.  My legs always hurt afterwards.  I’m terrible at pacing myself.  It hurts more to jog than to run.  I can’t go more than a mile and a half without having to walk.  My throat starts burning because of how I breathe.  Short of slowing down to a walk, NOTHING will make the cramps go away. It gets super boring after the first three laps.  The music selection at the Y does not help with the boredom.  I sweat like a pig. RUNNING STINKS!!!!

Swimming is the ultimate sport.  A good swim feels like slicing through warm, soft butter.  All my sweat is washed away.  It’s relaxing and repetitive and refreshing. It doesn’t jar my bones every time I move.  I usually get a killer workout. It’s not as boring and I don’t know why. I don’t cramp up. Breathing is easy and controlled. I know how to pace myself in the water.  It never hurts as much as running. Also, being underwater is so much cooler than running around a short track eight million times. Swimming is just plain awesome. I would do it every single day if I could. However, our Y doesn’t have an indoor pool yet and I’m still staying off of my shoulder and I’m going to need to do something all winter long and I hit a plateau on the elliptical and the elliptical is boring anyway and running is something that you can do competitively which I like and sometimes when I’m running it feels like I’m running super fast on a cloud and I could run forever and that feeling is really, really good, almost as good as swimming like butter. So running it is.

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The Big Betty Blonde t-shirt giveaway is this weekend!! So sign up with your extra e-mails, cross your fingers and anxiously await the results! 🙂

This is what Troy, Christian, and I have been working on at the Ag Engineering department at NCSU.  It is really coming along nicely now.  It looks like our buddy, Jeff, is going to join us on the project.  He has a mechanical engineering degree from Virginia Tech and will work on the robotic elements of the project.  We are hoping to get together this weekend to plan this out and go through some of the programming issues.  We identified the Arduino board as the embedded robotic controller we want to use.  It costs less than $40 new, but Jeff one-upped me and bought one from a buddy for $20.  He has already started programming it.  I really need to get a little bit more organized with Christian’s programming project, too.  Jeff is going to write the program to control the pump, some lights, and a motor to move one set of lights on a track.  I think I will have Christian start looking at the possibility of using an Arduino board to read the results from one of the competing sensors.  That way, if two people are learning the same technology, they can help each other and there is some redundancy of knowledge.