Under Armour Cold Gear - First impression

Trying to advance my runners outfit a bit I got somewhat professional and ordered my first GoldGear Item from Under Armour. In April 2011 my third participation at the StrongmanRun will take place at the Nurburgring and since this is unknown terrain for me (finished my two participations in Weeze) I really need to train a bit more this time.

Keeping in mind all the training will occur during winter I thought I needed more sophisticated clothing and the long sleeve turtle mock is the first one to get.

The label says "compression fit" and by putting it on for the first time it feels weird, like a second skin, what's exactly what it's supposed to be.
Tie the shoes, fire up the iPod and away you go.

Running through puddles of mud that soak my socks I didnt feel cold at all. Though I had a rainy 10°C afternoon with little wind my upper body felt completely comfortable, even the half-cut running trousers didnt matter at all.

Concluding this is some awesome cloth you can get I will put to more tests at less degress. 0°C is the goal.

Strong buy

Saw the timelapse a few weeks ago now finally learned that this is to be put together in a spectacular movie.
If you are a fan of great HD imagery in motion and want to step ahead of Disney's Earth and Oceans, then I recommend you keep this one in mind.


TimeScapes: Rapture from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Sources

• timescapes.org
• http://gizmodo.com/5683126/this-is-the-most-delicious-eye-candy-ive-seen-all-week

Back on track

When it comes to sports I'm much of the accountant type of guy. Whether it's running, swimming or working out in a gym, everything gets noted down somewhere. For the latter I prefer the somewhat obsolete method which is a small black book containing handwritten notes. Nothing you'd expect from an otherwise rather tech savvy guy but it turned out to be most simple and transferrable way. If you're one of those lucky fellas who got themselves a membership in a top notch gym using memory cards in their machines then you would probably shake your head about this. But try keeping that data at home or transferring it to another gym, like when you're on vacation or after moving house - almost impossible.

Since my first participation at the StrongmanRun in Weeze 2008, I began to keep track of my running exercises a little more carefully. This is when I got myself a Nike+ system for my old iPod Nano and it's been a huge motivation and training assistant since then.

The big downside of all that self-monitoring is the part where you stop your activities for a while and return to them after a serious period of time. After recovering from an injury that dragged me down the last couple of months I blew the dust off my running shoes, sync'd my iPod with some running tunes and came across the last entry in my Nike+ database... September 8th, 2009.

Long story short, not wanting to give up on running I put my old condition to the test and actually didn't fail completely. Where I was facing joint pain after just a kilometre a few months ago and stopped before it got worse I now got over 8km which is nice.

So here's my early pre-new-year resolution for 2011: Back on track and completing the half marathon in 3 months.