It has been over three months since I got back into outdoors activities. It started with the
Cucamonga Duathalon Training Route I plotted out on Google Maps in order to get myself in shape. The original intent behind the outdoor activities was to restore the high levels of energy I experienced from jogging trails such as
Black's Beach/Torrey Pines while studying in La Jolla. The secondary intent was to be able to view the natural wonders of my home state with the same sort of reverence and enjoyment I experienced while traveling in 2008. Other than a brief recess in December to play heavily discounted computer games on Steam, I've been pretty good about exercise and hiking in particular.
After having done so many hikes and having next to no pictures to keep track of them by, I was inspired by
Dan's hike log to begin my own form of recordkeeping. However, instead of a table, I decided to keep track using my existing blog. I renamed the "Outdoors" category to
hiking and plan to keep record of hikes and jogs. After all, one person's jog is another person's hike. While the standard definition of hiking pertains to wilderness and countryside, I am going to include urban settings in this category as well. In order to contain the same kind of information as Dan's hike log, I have to standardize my entry body to include some pre-defined fields. Doing this in a consistent manner would allow me to export a similar table with some Python & MySQL work on the blog's database. The name of the hike (title) and the date already exist as fields for each blog entry. For the others:
<usual serendipity media image object.... alt="trail map"/>
Participants: solo -OR- with x,y,z
Location: Locality, State -OR- Region, Country
Distance: x (bike) + y (jog) + z (hike) (include units!)
Elevation: low elevation - high elevation (include units!)
Terrain: arbitrary string (rocky desert, mountainous forest, grassy hills, urban etc.)
...
main body of text
...
additional entries from media library, if any
With this in mind, it is time to write today's entry and edit the previous entry. I may eventually ret-con previous hikes, especially the more memorable ones from the 2008 travels such as Reykjavik and Kilarney.
