Yesterday I found an awesome little addon for my Garmin 205.
I’m a huge geek, and this is the kind of thing that really gets me going, so to speak.
On a more important note, this is the longest run I’ve done in about a year, and whats more, my legs feel great after it. No pain, no aches, and most important of all, my knee feels fine.
..and it feels great. Fingers crossed that after yet another layout my knee is finally ready to run again. No long races planned for the foreseeable future, just lots of sensible low mileage work, coupled with training and plenty of strengthening exercises. I plan to start triathlons in the next few months once my body is once more up to it.
Ironman next year..?
It has to be said that lactic acid does not feel to pleasant. I’ve slept more in the last two nights then I did in the last two weeks prior, and my body seems to begrudgingly be thinking about repairing itself in what can only be described as a cumbersome fashion.
I have overtrained massivley of late, and am continuing a rather extreme course of exercise, involving several rowing outings a week (often 12), and am attempting to clock 250 miles/week on the bicycle, often falling short at around 200 miles due to time reasons.
I’ve trained excessively before, when rowing at university for example, or when training to do 3 marathons in 3 weeks; indeed my normal training for running and rowing would be considered by most to be excessive. Still, I don’t ever recall feeling the lactic acid course through my veins quite as badly as this.
I played badminton last night and I was absolutely shocking. My body simply could just not cope with the demands I place upon myself when playing badminton – even at a semi-casual/serious level. Mentally I was slow and unprepared, and even though I could on most occasions realise where the shuttlecock was going, and get into a position to be able to play a shot; I simply wasn’t able to mentally goad my body into playing what I wanted. I have never played badminton as badly as I did last night.
I’m hoping that getting some proper sleep for a change will actually enable my body to start repairing properly, and that I can get to the level of fitness I want after my knee injury. Otherwise I might have to take some time off, and who knows what will happen then.
After being asked to write a tutorial as to how I did the 3d cog..here it is. For full size images, just click the thumbnail.
Open up a new image of any size you want, but for the purposes of this tutorial I’m making it 500×500. Ensure it has a transparent background. Resolution doesn’t really matter if you’re practising, but for printing you want around 300.
Then we’re going to draw some rectangles. Bear in mind that you can draw whatever you want. Long rectangles at the top will give a complete inner circle, rectangles at the bottom will give outer circles. Vertical rectangles create the “wedges”.
Next we’re going to apply a filter: Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates. Leave it with Rectangular to Polar selected as default, and press ok.
Now, we’re going to change the perspective a bit, so that it looks a bit more 3d: Edit > Transform > Perspective. Click the upper-left box, and drag it to the right so that the image slants backwards, I dragged the box until the horizontal change was 10:
Doesn’t look very 3d does it? We’re going to change that. Right click the base layer, and select blending options. We’re going to add a drop shadow, and then a radial gradient:
Now we need to make it look a bit more 3d. Before you follow this step, if you want to change your original shape go back and repeat what we did earlier, saving the .psd at this stage will also help in future.
Select the base layer. Holding ctrl+alt, tap the up arrow until your image fills out – I did so fifteen times:
Now, select the very top layer and play about with its blending options:
Finally, select the base layer, and add a drop shadow to this:
And thats pretty much it. As you can see from my final image this time it didn’t turn out amazingly well, I think it’s better to use higher contrasting colours to begin with. Play about with the colours, play about with the rectangles and you’ll get varying results.
