I’ve been using The Stick ever since I suffered with a painful muscular injury to my hamstrings.

It has a very simple design – a slightly flexible plastic stick around which a set of plastic spindles can independently rotate. It is these spindles that work on your muscles to ease out knots and release tension.

It’s extremely effective and a superb substitute for daily massages for those not lucky enough to have a full time masseuse on hand.

You can use it almost anywhere on the body but I have found it particularly useful for the larger muscle groups such as the calves, quads, hamstrings and buttocks. It can be incredibly painful when you first start using it but you can control the pressure and it’s amazing how quickly the muscles loosen up and stop screaming.

I came across the Posture Pro and Footeez at the The Running School, I was just preparing for a high intensity blast on the treadmill but I was suffering from a niggling cramp in my calf. I was quite concerned that I was going to do myself a mischief so the running instructor had me sitting on the floor with the blue nobbly gadget under my calf. The trick is to roll back and forth using your body weight to apply quite forceful pressure to a defined spot. I found it to have a miraculous effect, clearing the knot within a minute or so. I bought these two the very same day.

I find that The Stick is ideal for routine treatment as a preventative measure while it is worth rolling out the Posture Pro when rapid remedial action is required. The Posture Pro does take a little bit of getting used to and is tricky to use without giving you carpet burns on your buttocks as you roll to and fro.

The Footeez is similar to the Posture Pro, another knobbly hard plastic cyclinder but is specially shaped for foot rolling. I use the two interchangeably to relieve the pain of plantar fasciitis. The podiatrist recommended the use of a golf ball for focused massage of the PF which is a far more economical method but I find it quite irritating. It’s hard to apply sufficient pressure to the heel region without the golf ball shooting out from under your foot and scuttling across the room. I soon get bored of retrieving it.

Originally published on my warriorwomen blog.

I have so many wrist and arm gadgets that I am holding out for an implantable chip so I can discard some of the clunky adornments. A chip for blood glucose levels, body temp, steps walked, calories input, distance travelled. It will be ANT enabled and my body can spill it’s beans when ever I switch on my computer.

In the meantime I have to get used to being called the household Lab Rat.

A new gizmo arrived yesterday for me to try out – The Trion:z Double Loop Bracelet.

It’s one of those magnetic bracelets typically associated with chronic sufferers of arthritis but re-styled for the athletic world. The Trion:z brand has managed to deeply embed itself within the sporting fraternity and you’ll see the coloured bands on the wrists of triathletes to golfers.

As with most of these “alternative” therapies, you’ve got to tread incredibly carefully when making any health claims. In fact I couldn’t find any on the leaflet that came with the bracelet. There was an emphasized quote, stating that Michellie Jones wouldn’t race without her Trion:z but it didn’t explain why.

Why won’t she race without it? I am puzzled.

What am I supposed to feel now I’ve put this thing on?

Reading the techy section of the website suggests that the bracelet is going to release negative ions which will inhibit the effects of the positive ion producing technology all around us.

I haven’t noticed any problems from the positive ions so far so I decided to check it out on the treadmill. Fan on, treadmill turning, iPod on – I must have been in positive ion hell or at least I might have been if it wasn’t for the bracelet of wonder.

It was an uneventful run but quite pleasant, no headaches but then that’s normal. No epiphany but maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.

It’s quite a nice bracelet though and as it’s designed for sporty types it might not get a stinky as my Link of London friendship bracelet. I think it can stay for a while and take up valuable wrist real estate until the next must have gadget comes along. Who knows, the negative ions might surprise me.

I’ve been watching back to back episodes of the Biggest Loser for quite some time now and in the later series the Bodybugg became an integral feature on the flabby arms of the contestants.

I’m not sure why the new gadget took so long to register with me but within three days of me acknowledging the device and researching it on the web, I was donning the British version on my own flabby arm.

The British version is sold as the Ki Fit and looks the same as the US Bodymedia gizmo but the subscription service has supposedly been optimised for the UK market.

It’s a fairly pricey piece of kit or at least it becomes so once you’ve bought the obligatory subscription to the web service. I went down the expensive route and bought the premium option with the shortest subscription. Everyone in this household was very keen to point out that gadgets have a notoriously short half life for me, so I compromised and committed to 3 months only.

The KiFit is a 24/7 body monitoring device. It has a number of sensors that pick up movement, skin temperature, conductivity and who knows what else to determine your metabolic rate or calorie burn per minute.

I’ve no idea how accurate it is. Of course the website claims its super accurate and clinically proven but I’m a little cynical. I’ve still be drawn in though and by day 4 I am loving it. As with most things, such as weighing scales, fat percentage monitors and skin fold calipers, it is consistency that holds the key, absolute accuracy is probably a pipe dream.

This gadget enables me to derive some form of analytical study of my lethargic body. Calories out, activity rate, sleep efficiency and providing I log my food intake properly I’ve got the calories in part, sussed as well. It feels as though some element of control has been handed back to me. There is no need to guess whether I’ve balanced the activity and food well enough to put me into a calorie deficit.

The web service is key to bringing the whole thing together and I am incredibly impressed with the system. It works so well – even on a mac!

Here is the activity breakdown from today. I’ve been trying to get on my feet a bit more than usual, so I had a very short stint on the treadmill at lunchtime and a walk around the common before tea. On a working day I’ve been shocked to find that my time at work is no more taxing than a night in bed, my activity level rarely moves above comatose.

I’ve set the target at 10,000 steps per day, and given my days are generally pretty sedentary, its a reasonably stretching challenge. I was still on the treadmill at 11:45 last night trying to reach the desired number.

The sleep monitor perplexes me somewhat, I can’t decide what it detects. This recording comes from Friday night so I managed a long lie in and the best sleep efficiency rating to date. The past two nights I’ve recorded less than 5 hours sleep and regardless of the duration, my night is always broken into multiple chunks. Is it normal to wake so often?

Monitoring the calorie intake is obviously a vital part of the equation and I’ve found the website offers the best interpretation of a food diary that I’ve tried to date. The search facility is fast and accurate and enables you to select items by serving size or weight, which is very handy if you are eating out or with friends and don’t feel able to pull out the scales. Where food items aren’t available you can enter them extremely easily. I actually prefer to do this anyway so that I can be sure the data is accurate and it is particularly useful when when you make up a meal from scratch.

My only problem is that I can’t easily access the website from work so I use the Tap and Track iPhone app to record my intake during the day and then manually transfer the details in the evening. I notice the US site is offering a native iPhone app for recording food intake on the go and hope the UK version isn’t going to be far behind.

I’m going to maintain a photo food journal and kifit stats resource on the semi-anonymous posterous site. If you are interested in seeing my daily intake, feel free to check it out.

I think I’ve arrived late to the party but I’ve just stumbled upon a brilliant piece of software that can actually give Sporttracks a run for it’s money. TrailRunner is a superb piece of kit that acts as a standard GPS enabled training log but with added mapping and routing wizardry. I haven’t had enough time with it yet to provide a comprehensive review of all its features but I do still want to alert you to its routing functionality.

I’ve been looking ahead to the 16 and 20 mile long runs that form part of my marathon schedule and wondering how to find an inspiring route, possibly with some remote off roading and still ensure that I can get safely home at the end of it. The London Loop offers up some fairly secluded long distance trails but although it is signposted in parts, I know I would still get horrendously lost and throw my teddy out of the pram at mile 19.

I’ve therefore been looking for some way to carry the route with me. I’d just started looking round for yet another GPS gadget when I discovered that my trusty Garmin Forerunner 310XT will do the job for me (as would the 305). For some reason I had got it into my head that the 310XT didn’t support routes. In actual fact it doesn’t support routes but does support courses – I don’t know the difference but I do know that courses are just what I need.

This is where TrailRunner comes into the picture. TrailRunner is a 3 in 1 application: an activity journal, a mapping application and a route planning app.

Trailrunner stores all my routes, whether imported from GPS or created using it’s routing functionality, into my own personal network of tracks. I can also access the GPSies community to import nearby tracks and thereby beef up my own personal network.

I get the impression that network building could become quite a techy task. I’ve been reading the instructions and you have to get to grips with a glossary of GPS and mapping terms and occasionally help the program out by splitting and merging tracks.

Having done this though, the program unleashes functionality number 3 – the route planning function. Trailrunner can create a workout of a set distance based on my network, and if I rate the tracks in advance it will do it’s best to choose a loop taking in my favourite segments. Wizardry!

I’m importing my old workouts as we speak and mapping out the London Loop into 10 mile segments.

I can export any route held with TrailRunner to a number of different formats. If I choose TCX I can import the file to Garmin Training Centre and then send the course to my device. From here I can access it through the training menu. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.

This isn’t a feature restricted to TrailRunner by any means. MapMyRun enables you to create routes and then export as a TCX file as does Google (I think), but TrailRunner is such an accomplished piece of kit that I can’t resist investing some time and effort into it.

DCRainmaker has prepared a useful illustrated walkthrough of how to create courses for the Forerunner 310XT (or 305/500/705) using MapMyRun as the route maker and Garmin Training Centre to upload to the device.

You don’t even need to have a Garmin sports watch to take advantage of these features either. RaceBunny is an iPhone app also by Berbie software that works seamlessly with TrailRunner. You can record GPS trails from the phone and import to the desktop software as well as downloading pre-recorded routes into the iPhone.

I’ve got quite a lot of dabbling and learning to do before I become adept at using TrailRunner, as you can see from my mapping example above I’ve got it riddled with waypoints. This isn’t necessary at all as you can link your trails to the map background. So in this case I am using the OpenStreetMap background which has all the legal trails already mapped, all I need to do is click to start my trail and the software miraculously follows the twists and turns to spit out a track.

When I’ve got a little more familiar with TrailRunner I’ll be back to give it a full review but if you love maps and gadgets and have a mac I’d really recommend you give this a go – it’s free and fantastic!

Originally published on my warriorwomen blog.

I’ve been running with my iPhone for a couple of years and I think I have now got a fairly stable armory of running or health related apps that I would be prepared to recommend. I’ll split them into 4 sections and go from there.

The Running Logs

The iPhone is my ever present mobile computer. It bothers me that my training logs are locked away on the laptop at home, or worse, spread across a few online logs like Garmin Connect, Adidas miCoach and Fetcheveryone. Surely when someone asks me how my training has been going for GNR or VLM, I ought to be able to pull out my phone and demonstrate with a pretty chart or a weekly distance log. It’s taken a bit of effort but I can now do that. Of course no one has asked how my training has been going for a while.

Athlete Diary (web link)
Running logs abound but a lot are fairly naff and are never going to pull me away from a desktop version, however I have been extremely impressed by Athlete Diary.

It is shockingly expensive, at £11.99 it’s the most expensive app I’ve ever bought, in fact I still can’t believe I did it. It is very good though.

It looks very much like a standard paper journal but it has whistles and a few bells. On the face of it the program is simple enough, the first screen opens with the log in list form showing the standard: date, time, distance, pace, sport along with notes on the route. The second screen shows each day in journal format and you have the option to add images and web links. The third screen shows the totals in both tabular and graph format. The fourth screen is the search facility and is the key to uncovering the amazing functionality of the application. From here I can search on any number of variables and keywords that you can set up and customise.

So for example I have set up a few keywords such as wt, Avg HR, Shoe 1 etc. Each keyword can be defined as total, avg or non-numeric which determines how it is shown on the charts and summaries. As far as I know there aren’t any limits to the number of keywords you can have but it does pay to think about it at the start so you can build up a consistent data set as you go along.

Having set up the keywords I can head back to the search facility and select the date period covering the last year, select running as my sport and perhaps select the training type as race. If I now look at the log it will show me all the running races in the last year. Moving to the summary sheets the same applies – running races in the last year. If I now choose the chart option I can select the keyword of interest so for example max HR to show the variation across the selected events. If I selected a specific keyword in the search facility such as Shoe 1 my log and summaries would show all the runs where I wore shoe 1.

It is such a customisable application that is very nearly worth £11.99

The feature that makes me so particularly happy about my purchase is the import/export functionality. The designers have gone to huge effort to enable you to get all your data into the log. It’s a bit of a faff and I had to wipe the database clean and start afresh a few times before I got the hang of it but I do now have every single run from the last 4 years loaded up. I pulled data out of Sporttracks, Garmin connect, Fetch and others, faffed around with it in excel to get the right format, converted to a text file, emailed it to my phone and the copy and pasted it directly into the import screen of Athlete Diary – Genius!

It’s hard to believe how happy that makes me. All my data inside my little phone.

HRM Log FM (web link)
Before I came across the Athlete Diary I was convinced that the answer to my problems was an app that synced with Garmin Connect. Admittedly I don’t have all my runs on there, I had a life pre-GPS and sometimes I run on the treadmill but in recent times it is fair to say that most have been uploaded to Garmin Connect. Garmin Connect is a terrible website though and it doesn’t help me get the stats and data on my phone.

After a lot of searching I came across HRM Log FM. As an app it doesn’t do a lot, you can’t add runs or modify data in any way but it is a perfect way to view data stored on Garmin Connect. The sync is fairly painless and new runs are added to a calendar view, clicking through enables you to view the details – summary, lap details and a pace and heart rate chart. The route map isn’t shown unfortunately but it’s still very useful.

The GPS Apps

I am not a big fan of the GPS apps but then I have a Garmin Forerunner so why would I bother?

The GPS reception is not as good as the purpose built watches and the effort drains the battery far too quickly for my liking. The last time I used it I nearly found myself stranded at the end of the Wandle Trail with no juice left to call for my pick up vehicle.

Having said that I have tried a good few and have been impressed with two: Adidas miCoach and Nike+ GPS. I’ve previously reviewed the Adidas mobile miCoach app and you can read that here.

Technical Running Stuff

PaceCalc (web link)

A very simple little app. There are many websites around that will perform the same function but it’s handy to have it wrapped up in a stand alone program.

You enter your time for a race or a custom distance and it returns a screen with pace and speed conversions in metric and imperial and then on another screen it displays projected race times on the basis of your entry. It also provides a series of recommended training paces.

Cadence (web link)

This is perhaps a bit gimmicky but I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about efficient running styles at the moment. I don’t have one but would like one and apparently one of the ways to get there is to shorten your stride length and increase your step rate or cadence. 180 steps per minute is the holy grail apparently. Seems unattainable to me but I’m happy to give it go.

This app is just a running styled metronome, I set the rate to 180 (or some other number) and the little feet beat out the pace for me to follow.

That’s all there is to it.

Diet and Weight

Some runners and particularly this one, need to keep on top of their weight, or more accurately chase after it like a hurtling runaway train.

I’ve got two favourites weight logs, True Weight and FatWatch.

True Weight (web link)
I’ve used True weight for a long time, it’s very simple and uses the Hackers Diet principles to show the “true weight” after all the fluctuations have been smoothed. The display is clear and you can view the actual weight recorded as well as the trend line.

I have to admit that unfortunately, these figures are not mine.

FatWatch (web link)
I recently moved over to FatWatch as I wanted to record both my weight and my fat %.

It uses a very similar method for plotting the trend and allows you to set a goal and show your progression (or lack of) against it.

Both applications enable you to export your data via email so you need never lose data to a locked in app again.

As you can see I have an unfavourable divergence between the green (target) and red (trend) line so it’s time to take remedial action and start the calorie controlled approach for a while. This is where the last app comes into it’s own.

Tap&Track (web link)

This app gets reviewed all over and has proved to be incredibly popular because its so intuitive and smooth to use.

You start by entering your height and weight details and after setting your weight loss goals it determines your daily calorie allowance. By the grace of god or perhaps metabolism, you can increase your daily allowance by logging some exercise. I’ve just this minute bagged 30 mins on the treadmill so that I can polish off half a bottle of bubbly without having scale anxiety tomorrow morning.

It’s a typical food, exercise and weight log and works on the principal that if you diligently record everything that you eat, you might just think twice about putting it in your mouth. I find it quite effective but you have to be strict and record everything.

Like most of these logs it has the American bias but it does still seem to have a lot of foods available locally (including Sainsburys and Pret a Manger) and besides its an absolute doddle to enter your own items which you can then save to your favourites list. I don’t mind doing this, when I go on a diet I tend to eat a rotation of very similar foods so after a fortnight I’ll have just about all the options covered.

I read reviews where people doubt the accuracy of some of the nutritional entries, I’ve found a few problems as well so its advisable to sense check new items or enter them yourself from the label.

It doesn’t seem to handle alcohol particularly well. I’ve entered the details for Stella manually but it doesn’t have a section for alcohol content and so the nutrition chart doesn’t include a piece of pie for the proportion of calories that comes from alcohol. That’s a bit of a shame for me but maybe something they could easily add as an update.

Despite a few niggles, this app is a joy to use, very well designed and so far it seems to be helping me towards my goal.

So there you have it, 9 top iPhone apps for runners, have I missed any must have apps? Let me know.

Originally published on my warriorwomen blog.

Having abandoned treadmill running in favour of the great outdoors it wasn’t long before I began to bemoan the loss of my preferred running watch the Garmin Forerunner 305. I long for pretty maps to illustrate my outdoor running routes and spur me on to explore my surroundings and for that you need GPS.

Fortunately for me I am spoilt, and my good lady wife didn’t listen to my moans for long before coming home with a beautiful orange gift – the Garmin Forerunner 310XT.

The Forerunner 310XT has been the long awaited upgrade to the Forerunner 305. The Forerunner 405 (reviewed here) let us down with it’s silly bevel features that went haywire at the first hint of moisture, so the Forerunner 310XT marks a back to basics approach, stick with the tried, tested and much loved functionality of the 305 but add the long called for water resistance that should mark this as the triathletes choice.

Not of course that I can call myself a triathlete having done only one sprint event about 3 whole years ago. I am occasionally known to dabble in open water swimming though, or at least I have done twice, but I don’t think one should limit oneself, who knows when I may decide to pull on the wetsuit and explore the local waterways.

So the biggest change between the Forerunner 305 and the Forerunner 310XT is that Garmin have made the 310XT waterproof and therefore suitable for the swim. Having looked into the watches swim capabilities though I think I understand why Garmin took their time to introduce the feature and make a truly triathlon oriented GPS watch.

This review of the Garmin Forerunner 310XT is continued on warriorwomen running blog.

I did the cycle commute twice last week, first on the painfully slow Brompton and then on the super speedy Specialised Sirrus Pro. I was expecting to shave at least 10 minutes off my time on the road bike.

Here’s what actually happened:

I presume my current fitness level is the rate limiter and not my bike choice, so I may as well stick to the Brompton, with its handy frame mounted bag and potential for shoving on the train when I can’t be bothered to go any further.

The activity comparison movie was taken from Ascent the activity tracker or sports log for mac. Since I’ve started using GPS again I’ve been really impressed with this software, I’m even beginning to get over the loss of Sporttracks when I moved away from the PC.

The activity comparison window is one of the best I’ve ever seen on a sports log.

Originally published on my warriorwomen blog.

Since I’ve shifted to the iPhone I’ve always struggled for places to secrete it while out on my run. It has a tendency to yank my shorts down if I put it in my pocket and so I’ve resorted to wearing a huge Salomon bum bag – tres trendy!

I was sent an iPhone sports band around the same time as I found myself kitted out with the Adidas miCoach which proved to be perfect timing. The miCoach pacer needs to be held within about 2 inches of your mp3 player and it clips perfectly to the sports band.

iPhone accessories vary widely in their quality but I was really pleased this item. The strap was big enough to fit even my substantial arm (not pictured), the iPod touch screen worked beneath the plastic screen protector and the strap includes a perfect cable tidy to stop the headphone wrapping itself around my elbow. It’s very good quality and I’ve been out in the April showers and so far no harm has befallen my beloved phone.

I do have some concerns about the new iPhone carrier though, the other evening while running past the local “Enterprise” college, the strap came loose and I was left gasping and clutching at my heart. I was readying myself to scream pathetically until I realised there had been a temporary velcro failure and I wasn’t being mugged by a gang of iPhone coveters. It’s a serious concern though, I read in the paper last week that a local guy was killed for his Blackberry, which makes me think it’s probably not the best neighbourhood for running around with £400 of swanky gadgetry strapped provocatively to your arm.

I suppose I could wear baggier t-shirts to cover it up or go back to the bumbag style.

I’ve tried out a few of the gadgets head to head but have now come to the conclusion that my Adidas foot pod does not respond well when it is in the heel recess of the specially adapted Adidas shoes.

Yesterday I headed to the incredibly soggy climes of Mitcham Common for my run and had to move the foot pod to my sturdy Salomon GTX trainers, using the lace clip. This time the pacer recorded a much lower distance than the Nike+ but at least the pace chart proved to be realistic.

As both Adidas and the Garmin FR60 use ANT technology I was able to pair the miCoach pacer with the Garmin foot pod, which is great news as at least I know this one works and it means I can get the best of both worlds – instant visual feedback of pace, distance and time from my wrist watch and the vocal instruction and motivation from the miCoach pacer. The heart rate monitors are interchangeable as well as they also use ANT.

Today I took the Adidas miCoach and Garmin FR60 combination out on a familiar old haunt around the Chiswick and Barnes Bridge loop of the Thames. I wish I’d stuck with the off-roading trainers – my shiny white Adidas shoes haven’t been enhanced by their trip through the Thames.

I’m fairly sure this is a 3.5 km loop give or take a few metres, according to many GPS recordings taken over the years and both gadgets came close enough to keep me happy without the need to calibrate.

Now I’m happy with the accuracy and the set-up, I can just concentrate on picking up for my fitness for the Great North Run.

Originally published on my warriorwomen blog.

It was closer to dusk but the effect was similar – one large, brightly coloured woman trogging down the street with three foot pods attached to her shoes, two watch-like gadgets on her wrists and an iPhone and miCoach pacer bound to her upper arm. I probably looked like a heavily wired suicide bomber, good job I kept clear of the tube stations.

The miCoach pacer has given my running a whole new lease of life, I’ve been out 5 times this week and I’ve even canceled my gym membership as I seem happy enough to run outside now that I have some audible support. If I keep up this level of enthusiasm for two months it would have paid for itself already.

So my feelings are strong for this new gadget but I can’t help feeling a little disgruntled with its accuracy. Hence the head to head foot pod test, pitting the Nike+ Footpod against the Garmin Forerunner FR60 and the Adidas miCoach Pacer.

Here’s the Adidas miCoach output, which is very pleasing to the eye. This particular chart is showing my heart rate against time with the scheduled HR zones overlaid. I was supposed to stay in blue zone for the first and last 5 minutes with a 30 minute stint in green zone. Blue is such a hard zone to stick to, it’s a tiny bit too high for walking but too low for running so I end up running for a minute then walking – hence the zig zags. Green is a lot more comfortable.

The middle dip in the chart occurs because the pacer declared it had temporarily lost contact with the footpod. Although she encouraged me to carry on while she re-scanned I decided to dither on the spot, I was in the middle of a controlled experiment afterall.

The final results from Adidas suggest I completed 5.38 km in 42 mins which is extraordinarily unlikely given that it included 10 mins walking time. The pace image at the top of the chart says 05:36 min/km which must also be tosh. I never run at that pace and it also doesn’t equate to 5.38 km over 42 mins. So something wrong here. Still, I don’t know why I’m complaining, the doobury wotsit tells me to slow down with every step and then declares that I’ve set a blistering pb pace – result!

The Nike+ Sportand is a no-nonsense beast. It consistently performs, it’s cheap and I can’t help thinking its pretty accurate as well. Shame the stats are so painfully naff. How awful is that chart? The axes aren’t labeled, its been smoothed beyond recognition and its ugly.

The Nike+ recorded a distance of 4.76 km over the 42 min run.

Here’s the pace output from the Garminn Forerunner FR60. You would normally also have heart rate info overlaid but I thought it would be a bit overkill to have two heart rate straps on.

The Garmin footpod recorded the shortest distance of the bunch at 4.41 km.

So there was a huge variation in distance recorded:

Garmin FR60 – 4.41 km
Nike+ Sportband – 4.76 km
Adidas miCoach – 5.38 km

Without testing this on a defined route I can’t be sure which is the most accurate but my suspicions based on the fact that I am at my heaviest in ages and also my unfittest is that it won’t be the miCoach. I did map my route on google maps and it came out at 5.22 km which I also don’t believe.

If I needed any more evidence that the miCoach pacer was a little unreliable, here’s the pacer chart from the same run. It looks like a bar code and bears no resemblance to how the run felt to me. It should be directly comparable to the Garmin offering above but obviously isn’t. Perhaps its just teething problems or perhaps I have a dodgy footpod. The miCoach offering is still in its early days and I would expect their to be software enhancements that may improve this sort of output, perhaps it requires a tiny bit more smoothing?

There’s nothing else left to do so I’ve gone and signed myself up for a 5 km race in Regents Park. I’ll take all 3 gadgets out on another outing and calibrate them properly.

Originally published on my warriorwomen blog.