Running in Moab

For those of you who have never heard of Moab, Utah, it is the mountain biking capital of the world...at least according to many biking enthusiasts. Well, it's also a great place for running. Red rock cliffs surround the town and a beautiful trail (Mill Creek Parkway) runs right through it. (It's not really a parkway but it is partially paved.)

Even in this beautiful setting, the traffic on weekday mornings can produce irritating fumes...a big turn off for me. I need to run about 1/10 of a mile to get to the trail, but once there, the fumes are gone...or at least unnoticable.

Today I ran my typical circuit while listening to my new jogSet (Bob's jogSet Jazz 2). (For details about the jogSet, run on over to www.jogtunes.com.) Rylee, one of our 2 dogs, needed the usual coaxing to get him to run near a house along my jogging route where an unleashed dog occasionally runs out to the trail.

The obvious drawback to running with a dog is the need to stop for sniffing and other essentials. Jogging "in place" will keep your pulse up fairly well but not perfectly, and cleaning up after him slows you down considerably. These annoyances are usually completed by the halfway point and the run back home is usually free of hesitations. Of course, the return must be along the same trail so that the dog recalls all of the sniff points and doesn't continue this stop-and-go deal.

After arriving at home, I set my iPod to a podcast (I usually listen to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code), and I set out for short run with our other dog, a six-month-old Cairn terrier. She's learning to heel...kind of...but most of the time she's tugging.

jogTunes.com now "on the map"

My warmfelt thanks goes to Sean Lloyd, whose eloquent runnersblog posted a great introduction to jogTunes.com. Please see his entry for 3/7.

I finally recorded audio files for runners and joggers to use in determining their pace range. I find that I jog at a rate of 150 to 190 beats per minute. I therefore used GarageBand and Apple's loops to put together "songs" that demonstrate tempos from 150 to 190 BPM at 5 BPM increments. I stupidly tried putting all the tempo changes into one GarageBand song but then realized that each song can only be in one tempo. That's why I needed to create so many files. I converted them into AIFF format for playing in iTunes and they sound pretty good. It's amazing how minimal the difference is between 150 and 155 BPM but 20 BPM increments are very discernable. I hope to make these files available at jogTunes.com within the next week.

I'm still working on getting the website to run better in IE and Firefox. It looks great in Safari.

I look forward to any suggestions, jogTunes, and jogSets that readers wish to contribute. Please send them to me on this blog or by email.

jogTunes.com - a new website

I'm pleased to announce my new website jogTunes.com, a new music playlist exchange and resource for joggers and other people who exercise.

Have you ever noticed that, when you're listening to music on your iPod while jogging, it's more fun (and envigorating) to jog to a song that matches your jogging tempo? The problem is: how do you find all the tunes that match your jogging pace and arrange them in a sequence to match your workout duration and pattern?

That's where jogTunes.com comes in. We help you find the joggable tunes and arrange them into jogSets. You can then send them to your player and start your workout. Runners, walkers, cyclists, and other people who work out will also appreciate the features of jogTunes.

The website is still under construction. It's presently oriented to iTunes users and runs best in Safari on a Mac. But it can be viewed in any browser. Please check it out and send in comments and suggestions to this blog or to my email at jogtunes@mac.com. I look forward to hearing from you.