http://www.avonwalk.org/goto/Paul_Willett
Originally posted September 1, 2010
We're getting to the big finale in this adventure and there is an appropriately significant milestone in the training. Going by the 24-week training schedule for the 39.3-mile course, as of tomorrow I should have walked 500 miles in training. As of tonight, I'm a bit ahead of that schedule, at 566.36 miles in 158 hours and 14 minutes.
That's a lot of miles and hours! How does one avoid being bored to tears after the first hundred miles? Having a good iPod with some sweet tunes helps, but I figured out early on that I could paint while I walked using some of my techie toys...
Before starting this program in March I got a Garmin GPS watch for my birthday. It has some pretty neat features & software, keeping track of elevations climbed, pace, speed, and so on. But my favorite feature was how it can display your route overlaid on Google Earth, like this one from today...
Of course, Google Earth is a pretty "feature-rich" program, so it didn't take long to figure out that I could save all of these GPS data sets to build a library of routes and training walks. Then as time passed I always looked to plan walks in places where I hadn't been before. In essense I've been painting in the street outlines of the San Fernando Valley using Google Maps as my canvas and GPS as my brush:
Cool, huh? And oh, the places I've seen. And I'm neither bored while walking, nor a nut-job. (OK, so the jury's still out on that last one, but you know what I mean!)
