Getting Things Done in the Five Minute In-betweens
The injury I was so worried about in my last entry got better after a day off and slight tweak in foot landing. Trying to speed up is hard. It’s so easy to try to run faster and to end up doing something wrong with your legs. I’m hoping to fall into a better groove any day now. This might be the third time this year that I’ve gotten overenthusiastic about speeding up, accidentally locked in some bad form, got injured, spent a few days in pain only to make some minor changes to get back on the road. That’s fine, but I wish the frustration would have been accompanied by some consistent speed increases.
I opted for skipping my now usual Wednesday mid-long run and opted to make up for Monday’s lack of hills instead. They felt better but I’m still struggling to make it a hard enough workout without some faster runners to chase. COVID-19 is still a thing and I haven’t found a team of runners to join out here yet. It’s probably good for me to work on internal motivation but I do miss running in a group.
After the last entry, I published my first entry on unit testing over at https://quarantine.network . It’s the first of a four to five part series on testing that I’ve been putting together. I posted the introduction, I’ve got an outline of the series, and I’m well into the second entry.
I’m not expecting much to come of it. If I’m happy with how it turns out, I’ll republish on https://dev.to and see if any other devs find it useful. I started writing my introduction way back in January before COVID-19. At that time, I’d try to find a few minutes here and there on the train to write a note, refine a topic, sometimes write a paragraph. I’ve been meaning to write this for over a year but have made little process.
For motivation, I made a deal with myself that I could buy a new running watch if I was able to crank out at least four technical style blog posts on unit tests. My running is getting to a point where I could really use a new watch so I’m under a little self-created pressure to wrap up that project. Extra time that isn’t earmarked for work, running, family time, or physical therapy is hard to come by but I think I’m making it work. One of the things that I’m learning from parenting is to be satisfied with the five minute spaces in between other tasks. There’s never enough time, but if you put those five minute chunks together, eventually you can get something done. Hopefully, I find enough time to finish my series and buy my watch.