2012 – Page 3 – Brian Crick

A Jury of Your Peers

As I write this, I’m sitting in a waiting room in the Cuyahoga County Justice Center, waiting for my name to be called, to serve on a jury. I’ve never done this before. I’m pretty excited, though from the sound of things there’s a good chance my service will just consist of coming to sit in this waiting room for a few days, and then getting sent home.

For some reason, I find myself thinking of this kerfuffle involving a movie star accused of shoplifting, and the prosecutor said of the defendant,

I find [her] to be very nice. This was never about her character, only her conduct.

That quote really stuck with me.

* * *

Last weekend I participated in a 48 hour game jam. I thought it was over, but in many ways it’s just starting.

I didn’t realize this going in, but apparently after you finish your game, there’s a three-week voting period where people play your game and you play other people’s games and rate them. I was assuming there would be some small, pre-selected panel rating things… not the actual programmers doing the ratings.

I have mixed feelings about this. I like the idea of everybody who participated in the contest being a judge and developing this sense community… but I don’t see myself as particularly impartial judge of games, and rating these things feels like this heavy, serious responsibility.

I’d also specifically want the opinions of non-programmers for my own stuff. Not that I’m sure how you’d get such people on board. This contest is structured in such a way that if you want feedback, you have to rate other people’s stuff. There’s a lot of motivation to go out there and rate things and comment on them.

It’s silly, but now I’m imagining this multi-disiplinary jam where game programmers rate 48-hour novellas, the novella writers rate 48-hour symphonies, and the composers rate the games. 😉

* * *

I have occasionally had people comment on how non-judgmental I am. And while I’ll take those sort of statements as the compliments they’re generally intended to be, it also gives me pause.

Like all things, tracing the source of a problem to a specific person is a skill. It is a skill I would not necessarily say I possess.

If there’s some work or social event I’m helping manage and something blows up, I think it’s fair to say I’m not quick to assign blame — both because I choose not to be too judgmental and because I couldn’t accurately pinpoint a culprit if I wanted to.

This lack of perception has been a problem occasionally, and there is, I hate to admit, value in knowing if the blame for a problem really does lie with a specific person. Having this information can only help you and your team or your friends or whatever make things better. You don’t have to be accusatory or mean about it; I think it important to remember that whole conduct vs. character thing — but I’m all for finding new ways to make things better.

Terribly Overdue Scopa Updates

Got a new Scopa card (mostly; just noticed the missing icons, number & title on the bottom). I thought I’d try doing this character from the back just because I thought the bun & chopsticks would look neat that way.

There’s a back-view baseball pitcher coming up too, hopefully.

So actually the top image has been sitting on my computer for like months now. Didn’t add it to my gallery, didn’t send it to the client, didn’t have any motivation whatsoever to move this project along.

I’m not sure what the deal is. I want this project out of the way so I can concentrate on other things. This is, as far as I can tell, a fun, interesting project. I’m happy with my output. It’s for free of course, but the client has reacted positively to the drawings I’ve sent.

I should, all things considered, be highly motivated to get this done.

So in an effort to get back on track, here’s a guess about my lack of motivation: it’s surprisingly tedious.

My first image for this project took like forty five minutes to an hour to complete. Each image thereafter has taken two or three hours.

You’d think it would go faster, the more images I produced, but in many ways, trying to get new images to match the existing ones is harder than coming up with things from scratch. I suppose that’s a skill I need to work on. My workflow could clearly be more efficient, for this and any other project that involves hand-drawn illustrations. Which is most of them.

What I’m doing right now is, I’ve got a basic character template printed out. I’ll trace that with real pencil and paper for new characters, take a picture of my new drawing, then trace that in Illustrator.

There are many parts of this process that are a bit janky, most notably the duplication of effort with the traditional drawing and the Illustrator tracing. But I think the big issue right now is just getting my pencil & paper drawing into the computer. Right now the process looks like this:

Find a nice bright spot to place my drawing.
Take a picture with my phone.
Realize that the light wasn’t bright enough for the picture to come out.
Futz with camera settings, relocate random lamps from around the house and try again.
Email the picture to myself.
Download the email attachment on my laptop.

This is, of course, less than ideal. My scanner broke years ago, and my new phone blows up if you try using it as a USB drive, hence the icky multi-step process.

Ideally, I’d hold up my drawing in front of my web camera and just skip the external scanning/photo taking devices entirely. I have no idea if that would work, but it’s a thought. 😉

In the absence of that though, some sort of photo-taking setup with a bright light right in my office might be helpful. A desk lamp pointing at a clipboard on the wall (desk space is really tight), or maybe an improvised light box taking advantage of the fact that my desk is made of glass. Something like that. Anything to make this more frictionless.

I should see if I can cobble something together from random stuff in the house.

Postmortem: Ludum Dare 24

All done with my first Ludum Dare. You can see my game here.

So have some ruminations.

theme

I really could not have been less enthused about the theme. It was ‘evolution’, and while that’s frequently used as a synonym for ‘growth’, when I hear that word, I think of the strictly biological definition of evolution: groups of genetically dissimilar organisms dying off, and leaving the survivors to pass on their genes, slowly changing the genetic makeup of a species over time, not because the individuals themselves are changing but because the selection of individuals is changing. Growing up in an area where there was a lot of uninformed anti-evolution sentiment, I’m very particular about how I use that word; it’s impossible to have a rational discussion about evolution as a theory if you’re not precise about your terms (theory being another word that doesn’t mean to regular people what it means to science grr).

Anyway. From that point of view, evolution is an inherently impersonal concept. You’re stuck with the genes you’re born with, and you either breed or you don’t.

Which is icky since I’d set myself the goal of making something with a relatable story.

However, after much head scratching, I decided that instead of making the individual — the player — change over time, I’d make the level design evolve based on the player’s choices.

Conceptually, that seemed pretty cool, and a great solution to the problem at hand… but it needed a lot more fleshing out, as I’ll get into later.

scope

The first thing they tell you at the game jams I’ve been to is to be careful to limit your scope.

The level breeding mechanic I had was pretty limited in scope: you wandered down a skinny path with various pits and obstacles and were presented with a fork; each path on the fork would be a variation of the path just traveled. So if you hit a fork and the path on the left had lots of pits and the fork on the right had lots of trees, and you picked the left path, the next fork would present you with options with lots of pits.

From a technical point of view, this was simple enough. I had my branching, evolving paths by the middle of the first day.

The problem was, I wanted to use this to tell a love story kindasorta related to The Road not Taken.

You’d be presented with diverging paths, and while you could not ordinarily ‘travel both / and be one traveler’, as the poem goes, you could find a traveling companion. Then, you would travel together, but you could also travel separately, and share your experiences of two paths, because companionship isn’t always about being together; sometimes, it’s about your experiences apart, because, fundamentally, the only way we can experience everything is to share our limited experiences with others…

…in many ways the scope of this story is massive. Not because it’s epic or generation-spanning or has lots of locations, but because of the emotional complexity of what’s supposed to be going on. Communicating my themes verbally is hard enough; communicating them just through visuals and mechanics would be a truly herculean undertaking.

Getting this to work, I realized very late in the jam, would rely on a couple of difficult-to-express intangibles:

The player has to have a longing to go back and take the paths they missed before.
Once the player and their companion are on separate paths, the player has to have a richer experience because of it; the sort of thing that is richer than the sum of its parts.

I barely touched any of this. My one nod to the themes I was going for is the night/day transition on the zig-zag at the beginning and the end; as you’re going down the zig-zag the first time, you’re supposed to learn that, on the upcoming fork, you’re picking day or night. And while you’ll learn that you’re stuck with that choice no matter what direction you take on subsequent forks, at the end, you get a chance to pick again with your new companion and that’s supposed to be kind of rewarding.

In terms of communicating something to the player purely through the physical shape of the level, I’m actually pretty proud of this, if only as a first step. It needs many more more mechanical, visual and aural supports — a sun & moon, changing music, scenery, obstacles, etc. to work properly.

visuals & music

I’m generally happy with the look of this. The pastel wooden blocks are playful and go with the music; the shattering path effect was a big hit with everyone else at the jam.

I also finally managed to implement a simple version of the crossfading & random music structure I wanted for my Jennifer Ann contest submission years ago. Normally the music has this wood-block sound, but when you get close to a potential companion, some chimes fade in. The music is structured in such a way that when the wood blocks are playing whole notes, the chimes are playing faster notes, and vice versa. So the companion, musically, completes you. 🙂

mechanics

I’ve only done two game jams and the one Jennifer Ann contest, but I noticed something after this jam was over: when thinking of ideas after learning of the themes, I tend not to start with existing game genres at all. Like, I don’t think about how the theme could be applied to a platformer or an RTS or an arena shooter. I think about the theme, and think about what you can do with a game engine and a keyboard and a mouse that fits the theme.

I try to reinvent mechanics from whole cloth.

While this may lead to more original ideas, this sort of thing takes a lot of time and is not necessarily appropriate for a jam. There are things in platformers and shooters that are just known to work, and perhaps more importantly, known to be fun. So even if your story doesn’t work and your approach to theme doesn’t work, well, you could still have a workable game if you start with an existing genre.

Further more, people can just look at something and know how to play it if it fits into established genres. This whole building-a-path-to-your-companion thing I was trying for just wasn’t terribly obvious or communicated very well.

I may have to try starting with a standard genre next time.

Or not. Maybe I just like high-risk experimental stuff.

technical stuff

From a technical point of view, this went extraordinarily well. I barely had to look at the Unity documentation, and only referred to code I’d written for other projects once, for a shader that didn’t even make it into the final product.

There were only two technical hurdles really.

First, I didn’t know how to get your companion to wander down a different path from you once they followed you to a fork.

The second issue was state management. There’s this whole sequence of things you have to do, to win:

Create a solid path to your companion.
Get close enough to a companion to get them to start following you.
Keep the companion from falling while they follow you.
Cross a fork while you have a companion.

And basically, the game had no centralized idea where you were in the process. If a companion started following you, new companions would still appear on new paths. If your companion fell, the game wouldn’t know something bad had happened. There was all this stuff going on, but none of it meant anything to the game. Which made it really hard to debug.

summing up

Generally, I consider the game, as a game, a failure; it’s just not clear enough what’s going on and the story just isn’t communicated to the player, at all.

However, as with most of these things, I learned a lot, had fun, and and glad I did it.

Looking forward to the next jam.

Getting Ready for Another Game Jam…

Been really out of it lately, hence the lack of posts. Not much in the way of pet projects of deep thoughts to post about.

However, I’m attending another one of those Game Jam things this weekend, and I’m hoping that will sort of jolt me back into normalcy. (That, or I’ll just get even more loopy because Marie is on vacation, I’ll be around a lot of people I don’t know too well, and I’ll descend into one of those forgetting-who-I-am episodes. We’ll see… )

For those of you who don’t know, a Game Jam is where you’re given a specific theme to work on, and have a couple days to crank out a game that fits the theme.

The jam doesn’t start for a few hours, so here are some disconnected tips for myself going into this. It isn’t so much unlike the mental prep work I used to do before TypeCons, I suppose.

Keep my other pet projects at a trickle during the jam.

I fully intend to use some of the weekend doing non-game jam coding and illustration and design and whatnot. Besides my already burning desire to get this stuff moving again, it wil probably help whatever I’m doing for the jam, to take frequent breaks.

Speaking of which:

Pick an approach to the theme that will help me sort out issues with my existing stuff.

If I find myself writing something at the jam that’s about cool mechanics for their own sake or has too-realistic physics simulations, I’m doing something wrong. Ideally, I’ll be able to pick an approach that has a little bit of story, a little bit of that commenting-on-the-the-real-world-through-the-lens-of-abstract-mechanics I want in my other stuff.

Check in with other jammers.

I could easily just hole up and work on my own stuff, and I want to make sure I don’t do that. Unlike my last game jam, I won’t be part of a team, but this is still, in many ways, a social event after all.

Sleep.

Not something I normally have trouble with. 😉 But if I do hit a point where I’m so super excited about what I’m working on that I feel the need to stay up late working, I have to remember that I wrote this: staying up late never, ever helps in the long run.

Alternate skill sets.

I’d like to try forcing myself to stick to a rigid rotation of coding, playtesting, illustration, and music composition — say, a half hour each session — throughout the weekend and see how that goes. My gut feeling is that if I can do that, it will help greatly with my productivity.

This is how you click a button.

I spent much of Saturday night teaching an unmedicated schizophrenic how to use a new computer she’d just bought.

This was, in many ways, the high point of my day. I like teaching. Teaching is especially nice if you have every reason not to like the person you’re dealing with, or just can’t connect with them on any kind of personal level. All of that fades away into a comfortingly neutral set of canned interactions.

I also like teaching because the less your student knows, the more open you are to looking at a skill or an experience from a fresh point of view.

And this was a person who didn’t know how to click, or what a blinking text caret was, so my mind was pretty empty just a few minutes into this. It was a unique opportunity to look at the typical conventions of computer UIs — scrolling, push buttons, tabs, file trees — and ask yourself how much sense these things really make.

We had no common experience of computers at all. In fact, it’s probably safe to say our experiences of reality don’t overlap that much either. And while it can be immensely frustrating talking to a person with problems like that, it kinda gets you thinking, about the way you think about things.

* * *

Earlier in that day, we went shopping for said computer, and the first question we had was, tablet or laptop?

The computer was going to be used mostly for email, web browsing, music and movie watching. The obvious choice was a tablet.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit biased. I do not like tablets. Or more precisely, I do not like the idea of tablets. From what I’ve seen, they’re mostly geared at consuming things… and, if that’s true, I’d rather see people get a machine that at least has the potential to allow them to create interesting things.

I don’t want everyone on earth to be a computer nerd. We all have different skills, different interests. However, the cheapest laptops at the store we went to cost the same as the tablets. So I figured, why not go with the laptop? I’d like to believe that anybody could get a lot out of this, if they so desired. Even an unmedicated shizophrenic.

I don’t want to underestimate anyone. It doesn’t matter whether I like or dislike them; it doesn’t matter how functional I think they’ll ever be; I don’t want to start off by thinking of someone as beneath me.

I’m not convinced the tablet would have been easier to user for someone totally new to computers anyway, and it all comes down to one thing: affordances. Affordances are visual cues that tell you how you can interact with an object or user interface. Most tablet user interfaces I’ve seen are utterly lacking in these. If you want to scroll, you can flick along the screen, but there are no scrollbars telling you you can do this. There are no hover states on buttons because the tablet can’t detect a hover.

Don’t get me wrong, some tablet interfaces are beautiful and elegant and there’s certainly potential here. But I would hesitate to throw a technology so young at a new user.

* * *

Several days later, I’m still repeating many basic computer concepts. That’s ok. It will take a while for everything to sink in. Overall, I’m surprised by how much actually is sticking.

Being around the mentally ill is s funny thing. You could just think to yourself, gosh, I’m glad I’m sane.

But I prefer to look at it this way: if I weren’t sane, I wouldn’t know. We could all have an over-developed sense of how rational we are, and we wouldn’t know.

I’m just lucky that I can make the choice to try to improve how rational a being I am.

Symbols

Last night I uninstalled a bunch of games from my computer. I hadn’t been playing any of them in a while and had pretty much decided I wasn’t having much fun with them; it wasn’t really a spur of the moment move to make me more productive or anything.

And yet, I felt an immense sense of relief. It’s symbolic, and symbols can have real weight.

I’m usually good about changing my habits when necessary, but there are a few specific things I’m not really making progress on. So I’m wondering to myself what sorts of symbolic gestures could help me there.

A good symbol should be highly visible, have a design or form that immediately reminds you of its meaning, and maintaining the symbol must not become and end unto itself. With that in mind:

having real fun

Since I don’t tend to have much fun playing video games, I’ve already started looking for ways to truly unwind — and the roller coaster thing mentioned yesterday is part of that.

I’ve made a map tracking our progress, and that’s sort of a symbol. It will be important to keep that up, though the goal is, of course, to have fun — not to fill in the map or obsess over numbers like percentage of U.S. roller coasters ridden.

diary

Posting journal entries helps me think, and I’ve been neglecting that lately.

In the interests of getting me posting more, maybe I could designate different days for different types of content. Music Mondays. Coding Tuesday. Stuff like that.

Not that I’d post every day, but limiting my options on any given day could actually get me to organize my thoughts better because there would be less flailing about finding post subjects.

diet

I’d like to reduce my soda intake, and increase my homemade food and veggie consumption… though I’m not doing a very good job lately. I’m not sure what a good symbolic gesture is there.

Though going with the journal subject days, it would make sense to make Thursdays about cooking, since I’m trying to do more Wednesday game night cooking, and those sorts of things are high-stress, experimental endeavors that are frequently worth doing postmortems on.

However, regularly doing large scale cooking isn’t necessarily going to encourage me to do more ordinary cooking. It’s getting into symbol-for-its-own-sake territory.

Going with the ‘highly visible’ definition of a good symbol, it might help to have my crock pot stored in a more visible place (right now it’s at the bottom of a pantry that’s not even visible from the kitchen proper.

I keep forgetting simple meals are an option. Yeah. I like that.

A friend of mine posted this thing about using a simple calendar to develop good habits, and I may try that too.

Roller Coaster Rankings

This has been a bit of an unusual summer. For no particular reason, my wife Marie and I have decided to ride every roller coaster we can.

While the goal is, of course, to have fun, I’m finding the experience strangely educational.

By my estimation, we’ve already been on 4 percent of the operational, non-kiddie coasters in the United States. Still a long way to go. When my 20 year high school reunion comes up three years from now, we’re seriously considering doing a big road trip from my current home of Cleveland to my childhood home of Tulsa, hitting all the parks we can along the way.

Of course, said road trip is dependent, among other things, on how sick we are of roller coasters by 2015.

I don’t see that as too much of an issue; in fact, if anything, this summer has made me like roller coasters of all kinds more.

Part of it is the mindset I’m in when I enter a park. If I get to pick what coasters I’m going to ride, I start trying to evaluate them in terms of this one-dimensional scale of I’ll hate it / I’ll love it before even getting in line.

Case in point: up until this year, I hated wooden roller coasters. I didn’t like how bumpy they were. I liked the smoothness of steel coasters, the openness, the sensation of flying.

If I go in trying to evaluate a wooden coaster on a scale from bumpy to frictionless, it will get a low score every time. And because I’ve been concentrating on just that one scale, I’ve missed things that are uniquely appealing about wooden coasters: the way landscape and trees can be part of the ride design; the way all those wooden supports create this interesting volume through which you travel; trying to wrap my head around the idea that almost a hundred years ago, people were riding these.

On a scale of short to tall, steel coasters will usually beat wooden ones. On a scale of slow to fast, steel probably wins again. Every modern wooden roller coaster has exactly zero inversions.

On any of these scales that I am used to thinking about, either because of personal experience or because theme park marketing fluff likes to harp on the biggest, fastest, steepest coasters, wooden coasters don’t measure up.

But if I’ve already decided to I’m going to ride everything at least once, my mindset is a little different. I forget about the scales. It’s easier to just go in with an empty mind, free of preconceptions or that laundry list of specific things I and copy writers like and do not like about rides.

It’s easier to just absorb the experience for what it is. And that’s a skill that’s worth practicing.

Understanding Not Required

I was playing this card game last night called Cards Against Humanity. It’s like Apples to Apples a bit. There’s a deck of question cards and a deck of answer cards. Players have a hand of answer cards, and each turn, one player draws a question card, reads it aloud, and every other player submits an answer card that they think fits the question. The player who played the funniest answer gets a point.

So for example, one of the question cards is

After the earthquake, Sean Penn brought __________ to the people of Haiti.

I tend to find absurd answers the funniest. There’s a Sean Penn answer card — you could say Sean Penn brought Sean Penn to the people of Haiti.

But in many ways, the point of the game is to be as gross or offensive as possible. This is, after all, “a party game for horrible people” according to the game’s box. So you could say Sean Penn brought pretending to care, or friendly fire, or even man meat; those are all answer cards you could play, things Sean Penn could bring to Haiti.

And those are pretty tame answers.

There are answer cards I won’t mention here, and there are many, many answer cards referencing things or acts I’m unfamiliar with, except to say I suspect they’re probably fairly naughty.

So last night was the second time I’d played this game, and I did somewhat better than the first, despite not knowing what many of the cards meant and not exactly being adept at making dirty jokes.

And I realized — it doesn’t matter whether or not I get the dirty jokes being made during the game, or whether or not I get what makes a dirty joke funny, because getting it isn’t strictly necessary for doing well. What’s necessary is a good sense of pattern matching.

* * *

Recently, some people at Google wrote some software to look at random images and try to identify and categorize important features within each images, without being told what was important or what was worth looking for. Evidently, the software decided that cats were important. I find this quote particularly interesting:

We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat’… It basically invented the concept of a cat.

It’s easy to read an article like this and think about how we would think about this, about recognizing pointy ears and slit-shaped eyes and fur and all those things about a cat that make a cat not look like a person, but this is a pretty low-level thing going on here. The Google software does not know what a cat is. It presumably knows that, in many images, this recurring pattern appears, a pattern we would recognize as a cat, but which the software has no name for.

* * *

I rather like learning new skills starting with nothing but pattern matching, but unlike the Google thing, I want to be given some instruction as to what I’m looking for. Take music, for example. I didn’t start by learning music theory. I’m not sure you can say I listened to a wide variety of works and decided on my own what sounded best. I started by listening, over and over, to works that other people have defined as good. Famous symphonies, Oscar-nominated movie scores.

The trick here is to take it on faith that what people say is good, is in fact good. And of course tastes vary, but I’d argue that you at least have to start by taking these things on faith, if you’re going to learn anything.

Sure, I’ve studied a bit of music theory in the last couple of years, but I still have trouble defining what makes these works good; they are, by definition, good. You could say I don’t know what good composition is any more than that Google software knows what cats are. I just know some patterns, and I’m not even doing that much concept invention the way Google’s thing realized that cats were a thing. What sorts of musical things are out there, that I haven’t even categorized, much less studied?

* * *

This approach only gets you so far. If you want to teach, it will be difficult. If you want to do something that’s novel but still appealing, you’ll have a hard time. And it gets frustrating sometimes, being able to do things like draw or compose or code without really understanding what you’re doing.

But it’s a good place to start, and the nice thing about this approach is, I’ve gotten ‘so far’ on a wide variety of things this way.

Speaking of which, I should probably check out YouTube videos of commonly accepted ‘good’ running form. I’m sure they’re out there.

Postmortem: 5k

Saturday morning, I found myself at a 5k run in Parma — oddly enough, at the same field where Marie plays football.

I’d been planning on doing a 5k for a while but just didn’t really plan on going to this particular one until Friday.

Like I said in my last post, I’ve already been in postmortem mode for some time, but having actually been to a formal 5k, I had a few more thoughts on the subject.

* * *

ok so it wasn’t that formal

I was sort of expecting a lot of orientation and herding, but mostly you just filled out a little form, pinned a number to your belly, and waited around for someone to say it was time to go. No ID required, no lining up by estimated minutes-per-mile.

I don’t particularly mind, though I probably showed up way earlier than was strictly necessary.

* * *

running with water

During my practice runs, I’ve never carried water with me. I’ve never hydrated during a run; I’ve only done it afterwards, and, on rare occasion, just before.

But they had a water stop halfway through the race, so I figured it would be good to grab some. I felt a little weird drinking it while walking, and even weirder just throwing my empty cup on the street when I was done, but apparently that’s what you’re supposed to do.

* * *

frame of reference

I was going somewhat faster than usual my first mile and a half. During practice runs lately, my first mile has usually been 10 or 11 minutes/mile, but I completed my first mile’s worth of race in 9:44 — even though I thought I was going slow.

I guess, running in a crowd, since everyone’s moving with you it doesn’t feel so much like you’re going fast, and it’s harder to judge your own speed.

* * *

slope

I had a lot of trouble with some of the gently sloping roads here. It wasn’t what I’d call hilly, but I’ve been practicing on a nearly flat loop at home. I should alter my routine to include some hills; there are some good ones not far from my house.

* * *

stretching

I always stretch after running, but I have noticed a tendency for my Achilles tendon area to be particularly sore after running lately. Marie showed me a good stretch for that, and we think it may have something to do with my propensity to walk without having my heels touch the ground much of the time.

* * *

results

As I suspected, I came in last in my group, which is ok. It was my first run, and I’m just glad I showed up and did it. It seems there’s a race nearly every summer weekend, and I’m looking forward to continuing my training, and doing more races before the season is out.

And next year, there’s always the Cedar Point 5k. 😉

Random Thoughts on Running

About a year ago, I started trying to run regularly. I’m kinda sorta trying to lose weight, though that’s just a nice-to-have; mostly I’m in it for the general health benefits, having noticed several mornings in a row that my resting heart rate was well over 100 bpm.

I was going to run my first race, a 5k, this Sunday, but a spur-of-the-moment trip to Cedar Point is going to be taking its place instead. Still, I’ve been in postmortem mode just thinking about this race, so here goes with the babbling.

* * *

tipping point

I tried to do some regular exercise with Wii Fit and EA Sports Active, and while those workouts can be fun and intense — and, most importantly to me, measurable, the running-in-place aspect always felt a bit wonky.

(I suppose I could, on my non-running days, do upper body workouts with EA Sports Active, though we do have a real weight bench now for that sort of thing.)

What really got me doing this regularly was getting my first smartphone and a RunKeeper account — so I could go out running, have the phone’s GPS track me, and view my progress on the RunKeeper site.

I can track my elliptical training there too. I highly recommend RunKeeper.

RunKeeper can tell you your pace, speed, total distance, etc, at regular intervals if you want while you’re running. I tried that a couple times, listening to little progress reports every minute over earbuds. It was kind of cool, but ultimately, I think it’s more useful to just develop a feel for that sort of thing while running.

Which brings me to my next blurb.

* * *

listening

When I started, a friend pointed me at this couch-to-5k training schedule. I appreciate the help, but in the end I sort of ignored it.

Learning how to make good decisions about how far I can push myself is just as important to me as actually making forward progress. It’s about listening to my body; knowing when to take a break from jogging and just walk a bit; being honest about when it’s really time to for the break to end.

* * *

last place

Looking at last year’s race results, if I went to this race with my current best case, 10-11 minute mile, I’d most likely come in pretty close to last in my age & gender group.

Part of the point of doing this was that I don’t generally enter contests unless I think I can at least make runner up or honorable mention of some sort.

While I do lots of things just to do them, and babble about my progress here, I’m skittish about being overly vocal about it until I’m particularly good. (In my head, this here blog is in this weird space where I’m fooling myself it’s private but it’s actually public.)

I’m trying to get over that skittishness, and just enter more contests, not to see how I rate, but as more motivation to do good work.

* * *

pacing

I still don’t have a great sense of pacing. If I run fast and take long breaks, it still feels faster than jogging slow with short breaks… but that’s totally not the case. I need to work on that.

* * *

food

Nothing is more important, it seems, than eating properly before I go running. Pasta is good. Burgers are bad. I’m getting better about picking the right meals before I go.

Beverages, though, are a bit confusing. I’m trying to drink less soda pop, but I get the vague feeling the lack of sugar is hurting me both in terms of performance and the willpower necessary to push myself harder.

There are, of course, better ways to get sugar I suppose.