Smashing

This has not been a good weekend for sleep. I got up early for a run yesterday and deprived myself of a lie-in, and felt devoid of energy. Today I did the same, but instead of going back to sleep after I'd got home, as any sensible person would, I lost two hours of my life keying my old runs into Smashrun.

It's nice to share: did nobody tell that to any of the corporations that house our data? You can't feed your Facebook friends into Gmail, so you can't put your Gmail contacts into Facebook, and if you have a year's worth of running data in Garmin's tracking database, you can't press a button to pump it into Smashrun's backend. All you can do is labouriously type things from one window into another one. Wasn't the information revolution meant to free us from drudgery?

Still, it's not all bad: now I have several virtual badges to show how much I've been running, as well as some fake electronic medals to tell me that I'm more consistent a runner than 80% of the people using Smashrun. I have a feeling that's not anywhere close to the universe of serious runners jogging round the globe, but it's a short term fillip to my self-esteem.

Also, there turns out to be some benefit to typing in all those runs: I get to appreciate that where I thought I was (a run everyday) isn't quite what I'd been managing since we moved to Singapore. Still, incentives are what they are, and although Smashrun is a bit like high-tech stampcollecting, perhaps it will drive me on to maintain more consistency for the rest of the year.