Saturday, September 03, 2022

двадцять neuf

During my Ukrainian lessons: think in Ukrainian, speak in French.

My running coach is on vacation, so I decided to load up on local 5Ks to make sure I get some outdoor miles.

I’m very disappointed and mostly confused about today’s 5K.

I ran intervals a bit - started out way too fast and burned out, so I walked for about a little more than a mile, and then I went back to intervals. According to my Garmin, my first few runs were at a 9/10 minute pace and my walks at 17. That was pretty decent, but my runs really should have been at a 12/13 mm. I watched my Garmin the entire second half to keep my pace in the slower range. And… surprise! I felt better. It just goes to show that - IN THIS CASE - I should not listen to my body. Apparently, my body thinks a 9mm is my speed. It’d be nice if it were sustainable, but I can’t even do a 30 second run interval at that speed without wheezing and seriously questioning my sanity.

But, then I finished the course and looked at my Garmin.

In “feels like 90” with 86% humidity, I ran 3.35 miles at a 15:15 pace. I WAS THRILLED..

And then I looked at my chip time.

It didn’t matter what I did in the end. My chip time was 16:30.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

I walk a fucking 16:30. Without intervals.

And I RAN this time. That should have helped…

I know my pace is thrown off because my distance was off and it makes me question a lot of things. Like I started my watch late and yet still hit mile markers a full quarter mile after the watch registered a mile.

It might be the foot pod. I forgot to take it off my shoe when I got dressed this morning and it’s calibrated to the treadmill. (I used three different data sources to make sure the foot pod was recording a similar speed. I mean, if it matches Nike Run Club, Strava, and the treadmill, then it’s calibrated correctly as far as I’m concerned.) I’m guessing that if it’s overriding the GPS, it’s clocking a quicker speed because I did an offset. I don’t know. But, at the same time, I’m scared to take it off because I had to basically reprogram my Garmin so it would read correctly. I used to have a really nice Garmin foot pod but it died and Garmin doesn’t sell that model any more. I couldn’t even get a refurbed one from them. I ended up with a Stryd pod, based on a lot of research, but I hate it. (I had to change my watch face to add one of Stryd’s data fields and now I don’t get the information I want / am used to. First world problems, I guess.)

In other news, I’m building absolutely ridiculous excel spreadsheets again.

At my new job, we’ve been hoarding paper. You know it’s bad when the printing companies can’t get their hands on a C1S 80 pound cover, or whatever.

SO. Our Production Manager doesn’t understand how to manage inventory and it’s being complicated by the fact that our inventory is spread over four warehouses and some other issues. She has this excel spreadsheet which is basically an out of control data dump. She can’t even assign dollar values so that I can properly value our inventory at month-end… and we’re sitting on about a million dollars worth of paper.

Because we’re still using Excel 2010, I really had to go back to basics, which was miserable.

I ended up taking her spreadsheet and working through the messy transactions, cleaning it up and making sense of it. I got about 25 lines in before I wanted to throw things. At that point, it was better to move on to the formulas and figure out how to get it to export some real data.

I love pivot tables, so that was kind of the endgame. It took so much trial and error to carry the dollar values, to calculate the inventory without double counting it..  but in the end, I got there.

Three pivot tables:

1) Inventory location showing stock size, type, brand, and quantity

2) Stock value by stock type

3) Number of sheets allocated or used by a job

It’s clumsy as fuck and it’s a little convoluted to get the data actually in, but now that it’s set up, it shouldn’t be that hard to maintain.

It’s honestly the stuff of nightmares.

And with that said, I’m off to find some food, play some Sims and do some Ukrainian homework.

I know. My life is SUPER exciting.