Broke 500

Woohoo I'm at 513 songs. It's going quite well. When I started I could do level 7 songs and usually get A's, now I can do level 9 and get A's, while they still wipe me out I have become quite good at them, I'm finding the level 7 songs aren't enough of a workout so my average song rating is 8. I almost never get lower than a A on anything and I often AA things. I am yet to AAA anything but I've been close.

Blisters and Monitors

So I haven't been dancing the past couple of days due to a massive deep blister. I can barely see it but I can feel that it is there. It hurt quite a lot. I feel better now though my foot still hurts a little.

On a more interesting note I got a heart rate monitor for my birthday. What it does is basically tells how much energy you are using by monitoring your heart rate. DDR for the playstation has a work out mode and I was always curious how accurate it was. I had my suspicions that it may be giving more calories than what actually happened. My average calories burned on the playstation was 35 a song. Last night I did 8 songs and my average was 30 calories. This proves that it is roughly correct. DDR is as good of a workout as I thought. So when I play a 21 song set I burn 630 calories. Thats not to bad.

Custom Songs

I found a way to increase the amount of songs I have woohoo. Stepmania allows you to create your own songs. Now when I first found this out I was psyched! After I tried to make one however I became much less psyched... See you have to figure out the bpm's yourself. If they are off then your song won't sync up with the arrows. So I tried with Andrew W.K's ready to die and I clocked it's bpm at roughly 180.00. So then I tried to assign the steps and you can record the song as it plays. To my dismay no matter how I altered the bpm it never synced up.

Fast forward to last week when I did a little research into how other people make step files. I got a link to a program that analyzes songs and gives you the bpm. Andrew WK's Ready to Die is in fact 187.20 bpm.

So with the proper BPM in place it's now easy to just grab the bpm and hit record on the song to lay out some simple steps. The steps aren't fantastic as they are basically a rough draft but from my experience they are still a lot of fun and they don't have any of the configuration I hate.

As a side note yesterday I twister both my ankles by slipping off the dance pad twice. My right ankle got better in a few minutes but my left still feels a little off. Not enough to keep me from dancing though

Socks

Been a fun couple of weeks so for. It's been going very well. I'm up to 222 dances which is 4.5% of my goal. in 4.3% of the time. So I'm a little bit ahead of my goal.

One of my biggest concerns when playing DDR are my socks. I think about it when I put them on in the morning and right before I play DDR. If my socks are to thin the dance pad hurts my feet to much. If my socks are not on properly then the bloody seams give my blisters. Ya thats right socks give me blisters. If they are too thick my feet sweat to much and it isn't comfortable. I don't wear shoes because I find it's like playing the piano with mittens on. You can't feel anything!. I don't play barefoot because I am quite certain I would shred my feet into tiny bits. If I am wearing a bad sock in the morning or if I can't get a seam to move properly I will remove the offending sock. This raises another problem as fresh socks provide less traction. So I find my newly fitted foot slips a lot more than my other one. This is less disconcerting if I change both socks as it is an equal problem. I have been contemplating buying a large amount of new socks chosen just for there DRR abilities.

Ya I bet you don't put so much thought into your sock choices do you?