Tuesday 15 February 2011

Back to the Grindstone

Oh dear!! I've lost a lot of fitness, both aerobic and climbing wise. Saturday I went for a road bike ride, just a short ride of an hour or so to get back in to things, over the hills to Colne and back. Just as well I didn't go for a longer ride as I was knackered! In mitigation my tyres were slightly soft and the first half up the biggest climbs was in to the wind but it did feel very hard work. There's the rescheduled Christmas Cracker sportive in a couple of weeks so I need to have some semblance of fitness for that but the weather forecast for the coming weekend doesn't look promising to get a long ride or two done so it might be a baptism of fire given it's 56 miles and in the Lakes.

Sunday we went to Harrogate Wall. I've not done any rock climbing or even training for it since straining a tendon at the Bridestones in early November and it showed. I struggled on just about everything and by the seventh or eighth route I couldn't hang on decent holds. Oh well, will just have to do more training.

An update on the calculator code from the last posting. After a bit more refactoring (the software engineer's fancy word for moving things about) I got to 85% common code with just 15% being specific to the BGR calculator. I then went for the PBR calculator. The code for this was quite old, probably a copy of the first generation BGR code, I certainly haven't done any work on it for a long time. The PBR calculator needs to be a bit more complicated as there are five potential starting points unlike virtually every other long distance challenge so the code had to be able to deal with that.

Everything was quite straightforward, I added a few elements to the calculator form plus copying and some slight modification of the BGR specific code and it worked! So the PBR calculator can now create multiple schedules for comparison, swap them round, etc. just as in the BGR calculator. Of course I couldn't stop there and I updated the route notes page to have the same feature set as on the BGR side of things - light status information, editable content and dynamic popups with timing details of each top. The page also presents the notes with the same starting point as chosen in the calculator so that everything lines up.

There's still one or two small issues, mainly to do with Internet Explorer, but all in all the new code and methodology has proven that it's sufficiently adaptable for my needs and I should be able to maintain and extend it easily and use it for other challenges.

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