Mick West

Today was a good day in my inexorable progress towards running a six minute mile. I ran the 1.1 miles to Original Muscle Beach at 6:45 pace. This is quite a leap from my previous record pace of 6:53 a week ago, which in itself was a huge leap from the record before that, 7:02, set just five days before that.

My “training program” is approximately:
Monday - 2 x 1.1 miles, divided by 30 minute low intensity circuit training
Tuesday - Day off
Wednesday - 2 x 1.1 miles, divided by 30 minute low intensity circuit training
Thursday - 3.2 miles
Friday - 2 x 1.2 miles, divided by 30 minute low intensity circuit training
Saturday - 3.2 miles
Sunday - Day off

So really I don’t have a training program. I just do the runs a few times a week, and each time I try to do the best time possible. This is not what the books recommend, but it seems to be working so far. I think this is what is referred to as “low hanging fruit” - I’ve led a sedentary life for so long that my mile time started out so slow that it was inevitable I would make great strides initially. I still don’t feel like I’ve reached any kind of plateau, but I will, and that will be the time for a more structured training program.

For reference, I’m 40 years old, 6′2″ and 160lb. I’ve been running about nine months. I was sat a desk with very little exercise for 15 years before that.

The Playstation 3 is a very powerful machine. So powerful that it needs a lot of electricity to run, and that means it produces lots of heat. It has a very efficient built-in fan to keep it from melting down, but when it gets too hot, the fan starts to run very fast, making a noise something like a small jet taking off.

My PS3 is in a cabinet with a glass door, and I use mostly for watching DVDs. If the door is closed, then the PS3 will overheat in about 30 minutes which makes it hard to hear, but if I leave the door open, then all is cool, except you can now hear the normal fan noise from the PS3. I did not like this state of affairs - for one thing I would forget, and half-way through watching a DVD I would hear this horrible high-pitched roar coming from the cabinet, and I’d have to either ignore it and hope it did not explode, or open the door and listen to it at full volume until it cooled down.

I could move the PS3, but there is really nowhere for it to go in a way that my wife would find aesthetically pleasing, so it’s kind of stuck there. Adding an aftermarket PS3 fan such as the “intercooler” is pointless, since the problem is the air inside the cabinet getting too hot, and having nowhere to go. The PS3 is quite capable of cooling itself, so long as it is “well ventilated”. So I decided what I needed to do was mod the cabinet by adding a cooling fan that would blow in cold air.
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