Monthly Archive: September 2012

I have a Fitbit

So on Friday I got a Fitbit, as did Leigh, so that I/we could start to track our daily walking, general fitness, calorie intake and sleep patterns.

It has been a couple of years since either of us did any real fitness things, five pregnancies and two children has that effect on your lifestyle. One would think that now we have a two year old and a 7-month old it is not the best time in the world to take on the extra tasks of walking and fitness improvement. Well, actually, logically it is the best time. We have young kids, they keep getting faster and bouncier, we will have to keep up with them. Time to start improving health and mobility I think.

Also, one can get locked into a pattern, a sedentary existence, and that’s a bad thing. So best to shake things up and do something positive.

I chose the Fitbit because it has a community element, it tracks food, water intake (something I don’t do enough) and sleep patterns. Mostly, though, it is for the stats, I love graphs and infographics and fitbit is providing me with those. Once I have a few of these I may share them on the blog, or I may let you know how it goes, I have an example of them below from the second day i used the fitbit. We had a good weekend to start with both of us getting over 30K steps and passing 15 miles walked. We will see how well this continues and if we get a drop off point.

I am hoping the investment costs will outweigh that for a while…

 

Nice Morning For it

When I woke up this morning it was raining quite hard, but as I stepped out of the door the clouds were clearing, the wind was dying to a cool, and refreshing, breeze and there was a smell of Autumn wafting in the air. So I decided to take a longer walk to work along the canal. I also turned on the pace keeping app. so I could measure the time it took me to get to work and the distance as it was something that intrigued me.

Below are the images from the walk and the pace stats.

So I did 5K steps in 48 minutes, which was almost 3 miles (I average 1800 steps to a mile) with an average mph of 3.6 miles – a good speed for walking at I feel.

 

Just words…

<rant>

Random Tweet “…the police broke the arm of a man in a wheelchair who was protesting disability cuts…”*

So this annoyed me, for no real reason it seemed except the language colours it.

What does it matter that he was in a wheelchair?
What does it matter if he was male?

The words colour the sentence, it is wrong that the police injured any person, irrespective of age, gender, or perceived ability.

But if we said “…the police broke the arm of a girl with Down’s Syndrome…” it would massively colour how we react.

Is that in itself an issue?

Surely the main point of this is that it is wrong for the police to use heavy tactics on anyone?

Why should we feel less concerned by “…the police broke the arm of a male wrester who was protesting tha lack of Giant Haystacks memorials…” than we do to the original sentence?

So I guess I would be happier if the language was neutral, “the police broke the arm of a person protesting…” If then I was able to read further and discover gender, age and ability it may make the knee-jerk reactions less prominent and allow me to be more rational about the larger issue.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t protect the vulnerable, just that emotive arguments often lessen the point. The police should not be empowered to use great force on anyone exercising their right to protest anything they see as an injustice, whether it is disability cuts or Giant Haystack memorials.

</rant>

* Note that this isn’t a rant against the commentator, or even a judgement on their writing skills, it is all about me and how I oft times react.