Fixpert

Maybe you think it’s weird, but I drink pickle juice for leg cramps. Sometimes. Just a little bit. If I increase the amount of exercise I’m getting, I sometimes start to get leg cramps — usually in my calves, and usually when I’m sleeping. Waking up to a crippling charlie horse sucks. If you have never had that happen, just be glad. If you have had it happen, I recommend drinking a little pickle juice.

My friend Dee Dee told me about this trick a couple years back, she’s a hard core cyclist and I would call her an elite-level endurance athlete (aka, masochist, hehe). Her advice seems to really work. For reals. I will usually have a couple nights in a row where I wake up, about to have a charlie horse yelling “NO! NO! NO!” and then it’ll quiet back down again and I’ll go back to sleep. After several nights of this, I will usually get the crippling charlie horse. You know, the one where my muscle is completely seized up and I’m thrashing about in pain yelling obsenities, maybe even punching myself in desperation. So, there is usually a 3-4 day warning flare. Enough time to get me some of that fine, fine pickle juice. I usually just take a couple swigs of it straight out of the jar (I recommend Dill) for a few nights. And that’s it! Cramps…deterred.

At first I thought the whole concept was what I like to refer to as “Dumbo’s Feather” but now there’s a product on the market called Pickle Juice Sport. It’s endorsed by legitimate athletes. Sounds like a novelty/joke item, but I believe in it, and I believe it is for reals (damn, two “for reals” in one post, can I do that? Of course I can, it’s my site). I have not yet tried the official NFL-player sanctioned Pickle Juice Sport, but I will as soon as I get the chance. Mostly, I’m curious to see if they tried to make it sweet. I hope not, the whole point is the saltiness in my opinion.

From the site:

Pickle Juice Sport has approximately 30 times more electrolytes than Powerade and 15 times more than Gatorade.

Pretty cool, I had no idea about the electrolytes. Well, I will still probably just stick with regular pickle juice because it doesn’t take much and it’s probably cheaper but I will keep you posted if I have the chance to try this stuff.

HEY! Stop making fun of me! I’m just trying to help my beloved readers, even if it means revealing the embarrassing details of my private life.

What is De-Lurking Day? Today is the day that I encourage all of my site visitors to go ahead and leave a comment. Say whatever you want. If your mind is blank, say hello, who you are, where you’re from, and what type of content you enjoy on the site (bike stuff, the random stupid stuff, web design stuff?).

Lately I’ve been looking at my stats, and without digging to deeply into it, I see that I’m getting somewhere between 50-100 hits a day. That’s not a ton, but it’s certainly out of proportion with the number of comments I’m getting. There are about a dozen people that regularly leave comments on this site (and I love you all). I think the posts and the site itself is more fun because of the conversations that take place after I publish a new post. The more comments, the better the conversations and the better the site!

I’ve also been using Crazy Egg for some real estate analysis on my site — to see where people tend to click. I’m going to do a full write-up on Crazy Egg soon, but in the meantime, take a look at the aggregate activity on my homepage, the brighter the spot, the more that area is getting clicked:

I’ve noticed that the Artwork tab is getting a lot of action, but I haven’t posted anything new there in a long time. This has inspired me to really beef up this section, since I wasn’t sure if folks were even interested in that. Web Design and Bike Lane are also getting lots of clicks, which is great because these three categories are the ones that I am most interested in.

Gadgets & Technology posts will still exist here and there, but that tab will likely go away, and I think Random just needs to get renamed to set better expectations of what’s there. Those posts tend to be on the personal side, and I have a feeling if I rename the tab Personal, it will sound juicier and I’ll get more hits.

I am also thinking about totally re-working the right rail, the Recent Articles section is some prime real estate that I think could be better used. Oh, and just so you know, De-Lurking Day could easily turn into De-Lurking Week because I’m about to head out of town to my friends’ wedding in Hawaii! Not sure if I’ll have internet access on my trip, so just keep the comments rolling in, I can’t wait to see how many new peeps surface because of De-Lurking — you can do it!

This concept was inspired by Veerle’s Are you a lurker? posts.