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Numbers

Those that know me, know that data, and numbers are part of my make up. One of my favorite sports, though one I can't play much any more, is baseball (and in later years softball) and numbers form a very important way of looking at that sport. As a ballplayer, I was never good enough to generate numbers that might superficially define me as a good player, that just wasn't the reason why I played. There were many other reasons why. However, while numbers are not at all the motivation for my involvement in cycling, they are a way I have of marking my participation in cycling. In other words, I don't ride to achieve a number, say miles ridden in a day/week/year, but I do use the numbers as a way to look back on how things were at a given time with cycling, and often when I'm looking back, it is to find that 'oh, gee' moment that shows up when the numbers become less consistent and show a change of some kind.

When I look at the following chart which represents my weekly cycling mileage for the last 3.5+ years, I find a number of those 'oh, gee' moments, such as easily spotting the week when I rode PBP, or the week I rode the Central Coast 1000km, or a month when I was repeatedly under the weather.

It might be easy to see and say why the lines would not match up better at the beginning of the year, and yet at the same time I also wonder why they didn't come closer than they did. I find it interesting too to note that the lines generally converge at about this time of year (late August, early September).

Comments

skiffrun said…
summat strange here.

Whether I use Firefox, Chrome or IE, where the graph should be, there is a message over a deep-red background that indicates "All series on a given axis must be of the same type."
September 14, 2013 at 4:19 PM
rob hawks said…
Hi Skiffrun,

I got the same error but now I can't reproduce the error and the graph does show on Chrome. Try again and see what you get.

rob
September 14, 2013 at 5:37 PM
rob hawks said…
I removed the old link which was to an active Google Docs spreadsheet that itself pulled data from several tabs within a document. Now, the image is just that, an image and should show without error.
September 22, 2013 at 11:41 AM
Anonymous said…
I was curious if you ever thought of changing the layout of your blog?
Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way
of content so people could connect with it better.
Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or 2 images.
Maybe you could space it out better?

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February 13, 2014 at 10:35 PM
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