Category: Training

I occasionally receive the odd running-related press release, and got an interesting one from Mizuno recently, announcing a couple of new running shoes – the Wave Rider 16 and Wave Inspire 9 – the two being quite similar but with the latter being more of a support shoe and a fraction (10g) heavier.

The shoes look the part as you would expect, and are appropriately vividly coloured and styled – very much the trend these days, and why not – at this time of year, much of the time it’s dark when I’m running, and it makes sense to be as visible as possible.

Anyway I mention the shoes for three reasons.

Firstly I’m impressed that this is the 16th iteration of the Wave Rider shoe. Mizuno clearly know they are on to a good thing – not launching a new brand every year or so, but instead evolving a well known one. The average running shoe only lasts for 3-400 miles so a typical club runner might need to buy a new one twice a year. If the shoe is good, then the club runner will not want to change it for another brand if the old one is no longer available – they might just as easily change the manufacturer altogether, but they would much prefer to stick the name of the shoe that they know – shoes are the critical tool for a runner. So, give them what they want, and take the opportunity to refine it.

But you also need to keep new people discovering the manufacturer and brand, and also update the look to keep it looking new and relevant. So – relaunch it!

The second reason I mention is that I got a rather nice Mizuno freebie – which just happened to be a Wave Rider 15 – during the launch of an unrelated training shoe by them, earlier this year. Like the new shoes here, it wasn’t a subtle shoe – purple and lime green. When added to my red, white and blue running tops, the look is somewhat psychedelic. But it’s a very comfortable shoe and has become my current running shoe of choice. This is partly due to superstition – I started wearing my previous new shoe when I hadn’t fully recovered from an injury, and I put the resulting niggles down to the shoe and not my injury – d’oh. But it’s surprising just how superstitious you can be when it comes to injuries.

Anyway, long story short, I’ve been very pleased with my “v15” Wave Rider the last few months – I even took it to the Venice Street Race in November, although Venice was underwater at the time* so there was not much running involved, and it could well be the v16 that I end up getting next, when the current one wears out – or maybe there will even be a v17 by then? It looks like the Wave Riders will be evolving for a while yet.

The third reason is the that PR came with some photos, of runners running in the shoes, like you would expect. But the locations strongly reminded me of urban orienteering races. None of the running in the photos is taking place on roads, but instead they are along the seafront, through building courtyards, along garden paths – all the places where the best urban orienteering takes places. The campaign’s ad (short video – 30s) even includes the runner ascending some external stairs – very Barbican. You could easily imagine a control in each of these photos. In fact I very nearly doctored the photos to add one in the background. I don’t think Mizuno would have been too impressed at that though.

I’m planning a big urban orienteering race – in fact the second biggest standalone one in the world – next September. It might even be the biggest in the world next year, because the traditional incumbent, Venice, has got cancelled in 2013, after some concerns were raised during this year’s flooded race. Details of the race I’m planning will be up at the end of this month – all I can say for now is that it will have a distinctly watery feel to it. As the planner, I get to pick where the control sites go. And I’ll certainly be aiming to pick ones like the sorts shown in the photos here.

* Resulting in a rather saline shoe now. I’m not sure if it would survive a wash cycle.

Here is my GPS tracklog for the middle Sunday afternoon session of the Nike Grid game, running between two phoneboxes in E2. In order to stave off boredom, I tried to vary the route every time. Each leg was 800m-1km long. The bottom left is the Mecca Bingo on Hackney Road and the top right is by the bridge across the Regent’s Canal, just south of Broadway Market.

You can spot where a mini-football game was playing by my different routes through an otherwise unobstructed field. I also witnessed the aftermath of both a cycle accident (top right) and a car accident (top left)… The screenshot is from the Ascent application and includes imagery from Microsoft Virtual Earth.

I did so much running on the Sunday that I gave myself shin splints and so am not going to be doing any running at all for the next few weeks.

🙁

Despite my lack of personal success, my team did rather well and we have ended up with a lot of prizes.

I made it along to the second Finsbury parkrun this morning, having missed the first due to a trip to France. It takes just over an hour to my “traditional” parkrun location at Bushy Park, so, after an evening out in Camden, the 25 minute cycle to Finsbury Park was definitely a preferred option. It was a cool, crisp morning, quite sunny. The park was surprisingly busy for 9am on a Saturday, with other joggers, BMT clients, cyclists, and children in the playground. There were 38 people for race – as the series has just started, the numbers will probably grow, but it meant I got a top-10 finish today.

The course is two laps of the park, with a meander inwards to the top of the hill, from the northernmost point of the perimeter road, near the end of each loop. The meander starts with a short, sharp (1 in 8) climb up to the top, my km splits (3:51, 4:10, 3:51, 4:11, 4:07) suggest the hill, in the 2nd and 5th kilometres, seemed to take around 15 seconds out of my time each time it was visited. There was another, more gradual hill in the first and fourth km. I finished 7th, in 20:11, but didn’t push hard, so should be able to beat that comfortably in the future. I’m going to try and make it to as many of these ones as possible, in the next few months, unless an even more local one starts!

This is a poster that I will be presenting at next week’s GISRUK conference in Durham. It is a summary of my Masters dissertation that I wrote last summer. The dissertation itself focused on areas and data in London, however thanks to LivingWithDragons‘ (and others’) excellent data-gathering for OpenStreetMap, Durham is similarly well mapped, so I customised the example map to be Durham itself.

The background, by the way, is a faded greyscale version of the map for much of London, which came from a “Slippy” street orienteering map of the metropolis that I’ve created but never got around to releasing, however it does show the extent of OSM’s London coverage now – pretty impressive.

Click the graphic to see a larger version, but you’ll have to come to Durham yourself to see the original in its A1 glory.

…and not just London. It covers 25 cities in the UK.

There are some omissions in the coverage of course – e.g. Chancery Lane is a notable missing street. But my home street in Hackney is there, and the imagery extends right out to the edge of the metropolis.

Here’s some fare-dodgers getting booked by the police, outside the main entrance to UCL.

Photo Copyright Google.

I noticed for the first time yesterday, that individual trees are being stored in OSM, and being rendered on the default OSM/Mapnik map:

The green dots are points tagged with natural=tree, here at City University London.
OSM documentation for the natural=tree tag

This got me thinking – might I be able to build a “proper” orienteering map using entirely OpenStreetMap? Street-O* maps can already be produced with OSM data – this was some work I did last summer, and also am working on – but being able to produce an ISOM** map directly from OSM data is quite appealing. (ISSOM*** might be harder, as this standard requires roads to be shown at their actual width, rather than being linear features with fixed-width cartography.)

Most of the orienteering-specific features, such as pits and earth walls, wouldn’t show on the “public” renders of OSM data – the ‘general maps’, but a customised rendering could show these and have specialised cartography for them. As well as adding these new features, some existing features (e.g. natural=woodland) which are rendered on the general maps could have tags added to indicate the runnability level – orienteering maps have four levels of “greenness” for woods, and sometimes tree canopies are shown in white – this could be inferred from a size tag associated with a natural=tree point, medium being shown as a circle with a 5m circumference, for instance.

Many other features are already on OSM – paths, tracks, minor and major roads, as used in the Street-O maps, and also vegetation types, gates, walls and fences, that would appear in an ISOM/ISSOM based map.

My local park, Victoria Park, could be having a lot more detail added to it soon.

* Street-O: An informal orienteering discipline, run in urban areas with simple maps showing the street and path networks, and little else. Typically A4 at 1:10000
** ISOM: International Specification for Orienteering Maps. “Normal” orienteering races use these maps, which are full colour and very detailed, typically A3-A5 at 1:10000.
*** ISSOM: International Specification for Sprint Orienteering Maps. A much newer specification designed for the increasingly popular urban and sprint races, the map is almost a plan view of the ground, with roads shown at their correct width, sometimes with pavements shown seperately. Typically A3-A4 at 1:4000 or 1:5000.