February Adventure: Hiking

This was an extraordinarily terrific weekend. It was unseasonably warm in this winter of unseasonable cold, and wonder of wonders, the best weather fell on the weekend!  I had not done much planning for my February Adventure until Thursday night, when I realized it would be silly to not take advantage of the weekend. So I thought on it and thought on it. My dog Rocky is only just off exercise restrictions, and he has been really enjoying the short walks around the neighborhood.  On the other hand, I've been running on the treadmill, and perhaps it was time to try running outdoors again, in some new place? Or maybe, I should get the bike out of the shed and take it somewhere new?

The dog won out, so I dug up a couple of old books I have on walks and hiking in the DC area. There are many cool places to go around here, but one of my self-imposed requirements for it to be an Adventure is it has to be novel in some way, something I haven't done before (not just something I haven't done in a long time). Greenbelt National Park won out.

 This is a tiny park by National Park standards - more like a county park. It was farmland until the 1930s or so, and so its second growth forest. I've been hearing about this park since I arrived in the area, most notably from Mark Garland, a naturalist I know who grew up around here.  (I actually heard him extol the virtues of camping in this pocket park on local NPR station where he often does bits on the local environment.)

The park is wedged in between the Capital Beltway and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and as I walked the Perimeter hiking trail, I heard the noise of the highway almost constantly. There were a few quiet places, and I was pleased to notice how quiet it was when I was near the campgrounds.  Maybe Rocky will get to spend the night in a tent here some day.

 We walked around the perimeter trail, about six miles. In places, it was very muddy, and there was one spot where I had no choice but to walk through an inch or two of running water. I was pleased to discover my hiking boots seemed quite waterproof.  There were areas of green - laurel and azalea and holly. I imagine there is a very beautiful time in the spring - April? I think Mark Garland may have written about it in one of his books - I'll check.

 This was the farthest I've ever been with Rocky, and the first time in the woods. He's just finished an exercise restriction for medical reasons, and has been doing well on walks around the neighborhood.  Expeditions like this are a reason I wanted a dog like Rocky, and we had a good time. I kept a close eye on the set of his ears and the angle of his tail. He drooped a bit in the middle, and we took a break for almonds and kibble. He has mostly slept since we got back, unusually for my busy boy.

Let's hear it for more good weather and new Adventures!

Some Virtue, Some Results; Some Transgressions, Some Other Results

I'm filled with self-congratulatory virtue this morning about my activity levels. I don't need to go to work today, and yet I was at the gym for personal training at 6 this morning (surprising cold this morning). I stayed after to run on their treadmill, and then took the dog for a long-ish walk (more than the minimum) right afterwards.

Perhaps all of this activity was at least partly sparked by my incredibly high reading on the scale this morning. I know I've been eating poorly, but didn't think it was that poorly. My food tracking sparked by the last post just a week ago only lasted a couple of days, so I don't have the data to analyze, but I have a distinct memory of a chocolate ice cream sandwich in there somewhere, not to mention the wonderful fajitas last night out with the family.

I've had the vague theory that all I needed to do was keep the activity up, mind most of my eating, and treats would be ok. Maybe they would if treats were small and occasional, but not big, constant, and more than once a day.

So I think I really really need to track. It's a pain, but it really makes a difference. It seems to do a couple of things for my motivation.  Knowing I'm going to write it down causes me to change my behavior in advance. Having the proof in the data afterwards when I'm disappointed in the scale readings also is useful. It is really annoying, but I need to do it - if I care about my weight. And I do care about my weight.  So tracking is an action I need to motivate.  Yes, it's only a means to accomplish a different activity: eating better. But it seems to work, so motivating and rewarding tracking in and of itself - regardless of what I actually eat - is a meta-activity, or the high leverage point to accomplish what I really want: eating better and losing weight.

I sure wish there were even more seamless ways to track my eating. There is at least one app out there where you can take a photo of your food and it tries to estimate calories automatically. I don't know how well it works, but since I'm at least as focused on what I eat as how much, I don't think that would do it for me. I've found the single best food tracker to be My Fitness Pal. It has the normal annoying assumptions about what I'm supposed to eat which I reject.  But it has the most comprehensive database of food, the ability to snap barcodes from the iphone, and versions for iphone, ipad and computer with all the data living in the cloud. It also talks to many other apps, so it exchanges activity data with my magic BMF activity tracker (raising its estimate of how many calories I can eat) and my scale, and the apps for those devices also pull in the food data.  The one thing I don't like about the app (besides having to enter data at all which I can't find a way around) is the inability to export data for my own offline analysis.  In fact, because MFP talks to my BMF activity tracker, I export summary food info from BMF instead.  It's not very satisfactory, since it lacks a lot of detail but it's better than typing in data.

I've found one way to fuel my motivation for diet and exercise is to spend money. I make myself comply with something, and then if I do, I buy stuff. After running for three weeks, I bought three pieces of workout clothing.  I was absurdly pleased last night to lay out my clothes for 5:30 this morning including my new bright blue miracle fabric workout tee, and even more pleased at the gym this morning to realize the shade exactly matches my blue-and-green running shoes. (I always say, attention to detail is the keynote to fashion success.) Now, I have to find stuff I really want for it to be motivating. Sometimes I shop first (online) and save my shopping cart for later.  It also requires me to have discipline about not buying stuff just because I want it when I want it.

I have to do some work to find my quest object. I've also found that I need to not make the finish line too far away - a couple or three weeks.  So we'll see how it goes.

Back to Basics

The results of heading to the store without a clear plan.

Why is it every vow to "get back on track" in my eating leads to a $100 tab at the food store? I'm focused on eating the right things and not eating the wrong things. This means having the right things lying around easily accessible.

I'm not sure what will be happening with family dinners this week, so my shopping focused on breakfast and afternoon snacks.  I eat protein in the morning but am always looking for how to add vegetables or something interesting to the mix. I got lots of cheese, olives, and celery, which will work for breakfast or afternoons.  I got sausages for more breakfasts. I have a couple of lunches already in the fridge from leftovers from this weekend.

I got a box of shrimp, boiled and peeled. Cheaper than their shrimp rings. I'm thinking they didn't sell as much for the Superbowl as they thought they would.  Shrimp pretty much works for any meal.

I have eaten really badly for a while now, and yesterday felt physically bad from all the bad stuff I was eating. Today, I focused on virtuous chores and at noon realized I had neither eaten nor worked out. So a quick protein-and-vegetable lunch from the freezer and out the door to do other family things.  In the late afternoon, I realized I really really wanted to do my treadmill run to keep on track with the C-2-5K plan I'm following. It was all uphill, it seemed, I wasn't able to do the full routine called for, and I didn't feel very good while I was doing it, but I'm so glad I did anyway.

I'm going to lower the speed even more if necessary. At my gym I was reminded of the best test on intensity:  Can you sing a whole verse of "Old MacDonald had a farm" without gasping repeatedly for breath? Ideal is grabbing a deep breath between phrases; too hard is not getting through a phrase without gasping. I think I was too hard today, even though it seemed really slow.

Hopefully, if I keep plugging away, I'll get to a better level.
Excelsior!  Olives and fresh mozarella awaits me for breakfast!

- iPhone uPdate

Intensity

This morning's run on the treadmill felt like I was running though jello on spaghetti legs.  This was the first session where I ran for (all of) three minutes without stopping, but even the shorter sprints were a real effort.

I learned when I first started Nordic Traking with a heart rate monitor years and years ago that my feelings of subjective effort and my actual work only have a loose correlation.  So this morning, I was not running particularly fast - starting at 6 mph - but it felt very very hard to do that. But the heart rate monitor was not climbing especially fast - it was near the end of the second run it got above 145 and maybe got to 150. I started slowing down considerably, all the way to 5 mph, in order to complete the time intervals.  But now, I've looked at the data from my arm band (BodyMedia Fit) and by its calculations, I was in fact working harder than on any of my previous runs.  This device counts effort as "mets" which I've never really figured out. I just consider it some number that shows relative effort.

According to my armband, I have to work above 5.5 mets for it to be vigorous exercise. Above 3 mets is moderate exercise.  Many days, including days I go to the gym, there is no vigorous exercise at all.  But running definitely gets me there.

The armband has sensors it uses to calculate mets. It has 3-axis accelerometers to know how I'm moving, and then it is in contact with my skin and it measures temperature and connectivity - which is a measure of how much I am sweating. It does some complex math to figure this stuff out and convert it to activity. The smarts of how it does the calculations all lives on the internet, not in the device itself. The raw data has to be uploaded to the companies servers to get the results. I do the upload generally only once a day, using my phone to send the data.

All of my runs this year have hovered around 8 mets of effort. When I'm doing intervals, it shoots up during the runs but doesn't drop all the way down during the rest walks.  Today, the effort shot up over 10 mets for most of the time after I started running. So my subjective feeling of working harder was truly based on how my body was acting, at least in terms of heating up and sweating. The heart rate lagged that feeling of hard work, but there is at least some validation to how I'm feeling.

So what do I do with this information?  I think it means I slow down. I keep going, running versus walking for the full time, but slower if necessary.  Oddly enough, as little as I'm doing, it seems to be resulting in "over training".  I'll keep plugging along, and even pushing myself, but not harder than seems productive.