If I had 3, they would be cookies

Not as much novel stuff as I had hoped for happened this week, but it's been BBQ rack of lamb. I mean, very relaxing. I mean, how can one NOT be relaxed with you have this?

 The Saturday morning run was lovely. This is one of the first times that a long slow run has actually been relaxing. I felt better at the end than I did at the beginning. My legs were feeling a little tight, then later that afternoon they wanted to go for another run.l

So, speaking of legs, me and my running buddy. It should be easy to tell which of us is which. Yes I ran in shorts. No she didn't run in painted jeans.

Part of our view.

 It's been interesting getting my heart rate monitor settled in at the start of a run. For a while it was reading 170 bpm which is flat out not right, considering my max is supposed to be 163. It got settled in and stayed nice and steady.

We started at the dog park at the end of Southland Drive, ran south to the pedestrian bridge at the north end of Fish Creek, back to Carburn park and around the little pond. That ticked over 11 K, 1:21 or so. A nice walk back to the car finished things off.
 

Then some treats! These are energy or recovery balls. They are not cookies! This has been decided. Though three of them would be cookies. I had two. They are very yummy!

Sunday was a very nice spin session pushing the heart rate up a bit. One the bike an hour.

 Oh! If you are a Joan Hickson Miss Marple fan, you can now get a Blueray of her BBC series. I got one from the library just to see, and the image difference is AMAZING! If I get organized I'll try to take some photos.

The AMA will be published tomorrow. Some of the answers are still being tuned.

Last call for AMA!

I've had several questions now for the intermittently erratic AMA feature. My brain is turning on them, and already going interesting places. Thanks to the questioners so far.

If you want in on the deal this time, now is your last chance. I'm going for a run in a little while, and in between the fascinating conversations with my running buddy, my brain will be twisting and turning and going sideways on the questions.

After the feeble, weak, creaky, cranky swim the other day I had a perfectly nice 45 minute easy spin. I credit a nap with snoring cats.

Then the next day I was in the pool again for a buddy swim, and this was back to almost normal. The first 500 m was perfectly normal, 9:15, and the next 500 m kind of fell apart on me, 9:30 or so. Lots of water running with Katie, then some more 100 m intervals that were kind of slow. I didn't want to stress my shoulders so I left it there.

The 3 of us walked over to the Purple Perk and had a lovely coffee chat. Even though the butter tarts were tempting me in 3 part harmony, I stayed strong. Part of the discussion was if the energy balls Michelle made were cookies. We decided not.

Appros of nothing in particular.

So, don't forget, if you want in on the the AMA, now is the time. Comments below.

Transitions

No, not just triathlon transition.

This is more general, about the change from any state to another state. Awake/asleep. Working/not working. One yoga pose to another. Swim to bike to run. Non-geezer to geezer. Fat to fit. Skiing to shooting. Incomplete to complete. Green veggies on the plate to a clean plate. Whatever. Some of these the change alternates whether we like it or not, and some of them could go either way and some are one way.

There is the transition itself, and then the conditions it happens in. Forced or not, as in suddenly being told you don't work there any more. Time pressure in the sense of the clock ticking like in a triathlon transition, or a deadline. Is there an audience? Are you solo, or part of a team?

Change can be hard, but sometimes people seem to make it harder on themselves. Take something simple, or what should be. Get out of bed and out the door to whatever activity is first on your list. Maybe that's a workout and you don't need a big breakfast or a shower. Maybe it's getting ready for a big meeting first thing at work, and you take extra care how you dress.

I listen to people, and you'd think getting out of bed was the 7 labours of Hercules all together. I don't get it. As an adult you should know how long it takes to get done whatever needs to happen for you in the morning. Allow that much time plus a little extra for recreational cat vomiting cleanup, and subtract that from the time you have to leave the house. Set the clock for that time. When it goes off, and this seems to be the hard part, turn it off, get up, and get on with it. This hitting the snooze button is madness. That 9 minutes "sleep" isn't going to do you any good, and could well mess up your day.

Much the same rule applies to almost all transitions. Just get on with it. The more you think about it, usually, the worse it gets. If the consequence of getting the transition wrong are catastrophic, then you might need to take some time to think it through first.

If you don't know how to do it, the best way is to learn by doing. The first time is always the hardest, and you'll know better for the second time. If you get a chance, practice first.

Lots of people here in Alberta are going through a working to not working transition, of the forced variety, and for all too many of them it's a surprise. This baffles me. So many people seemed to think the good times were going to go on forever, in spite of recent evidence of busts. Alberta's economy is a roller coaster, and anyone that doesn't understand that and plan accordingly deserves what they have coming. That's not to say I like the roller coaster. Not at all. It's a stupid way to run a province.

Some people don't seem to grasp that a job exists only as long as the company wants it to. They only care about their bottom line, and will spit you onto the sidewalk like used chewing gum when it suits them. The only course of action is to be prepared. More on that here. Once it happens, and it will, you  need to get on with whatever is next. For many people that's finding another job. Sooner started, sooner found. For some it's retirement, desired or not. Suck it up and get on with it.

Transitions can be exciting. All that change! Try to enjoy them for what they are, a break between two other activities. You might not like it, but focussing on what you don't like just makes it worse.

Some transitions are less clear cut, and all but irreversible. From young to old, for example. That one has been preying on my mind lately. I don't think of myself as old, not at all. But it's creeping up on me. Every now and then I see it in the corner of my eye, skulking in the undergrowth. When I look, it disappears, or seems to. But it doesn't go away.

Working on being fit helps stave it off. I look at other people my age, and some of them look old. Some of them act old regardless of their age. It's like geezers. Not all of them are old, and not all the elderly are geezers or old. Yes, I'm dealing with sore and tired muscles, and creaky joints some days, but I keep telling myself it would only be worse if I stopped moving as much.

I'm not one of those people that think things have gone all to pot, and youth have no manners, though looking at American politicians one can be forgiven for thinking so. Yes there are problems, climate change being one of the biggest. I'm mostly excited by all the changes. 20 years ago cell phones were rare, expensive, and stupid. Now almost everyone has one, and they are amazing! I'm still learning things that it will do. 30 or 40 years ago cars were death traps. Now they've learned to drive themselves better than humans, and the sooner we can remove the nut behind the wheel the better off we'll be.

That word, learning, is a big one. I think when you stop learning you start dying. I've already begun to think about what my next project is when I have more time, and I'm thinking photography. I've really enjoyed taking pictures with the iPhone, and sometimes tinkering with them in Snapseed. I think it would be fun to get a good camera and learn to actually use it properly. Right now I look at camera specs and I'm baffled. But that will change. I have a buddy who says if I take him to lunch and ask nice, he'll walk me through the camera purchase process.

That more time thing. I'm beginning to suspect the Penn West contract will not be renewed at the end of June. That will give me more lots more time. I've got one buddy that wants me to take surfing lessons on a beach near Tofino. Another buddy keeps telling her team, "I know a really good data guy." Guess which is tempting me more?

Today is one of the rare days when I'm not working, but Linda is. I dropped her off, had a weak, cranky, creaky swim followed up by a long soak in the hot tub. It would have been a nice day for a long swim since I was the only person in the pool, but I wasn't feeling the swim love today.

One of my buddies is running some stairs to the pre-puke stage later today. I scoped them out, since I hadn't known there were stairs there. OMG. I was invited, but won't be joining. This is the half-way point.

A little shopping on the way home, and now I'm beset by cats while trying to write this blog. Maybe I'll have a nap. There are novel ideas gelling.

I tried resting the laptop on Curtis as he snoozed, and got this look. Anyone have any doubts what he thinks? He is not a fan of the laptop. Or the phone. Or the iPad.

And the AMA, Ask Me Anything. Feel free to put your ask in the comments. I promise to use my imagination.

All right already, enough Garmin stuff!

So not so much interest in the Garmin stuff. That's ok. I know there are a few readers who absorbed every word, and probably came back again and again to read it over and over. Well, maybe not so much.

Today's run, 6K 39 minutes. For all that I was feeling kind of tired before, I settled into the groove quickly, and had a really good run. More new pathway covered. That project is going along well.

I got asked about the 30 day cookie challenge. There was a photo of me in the race a couple weekends ago, shot from low down on the track just as Terry was passing me. She's not a big girl, and you can barely see any of me, except for this ginormous gut leading the way. Ouch.

So I decided, with a bit of encouragement, to cut back a bit. Here's the rulz. Only one 5 oz glass of wine per day, no carry over if I miss a day. (No wine today, btw.) No cookies, treat bars, or cake. Cliffs bars while on the trainer were the subject of some discussion, with the idea presented that i could make my own snack and save the bars for later. As it turned out I didn't need them. I'm not really changing any of my other eating habits. As they say, one case of giving a try to see what happens is better than a million cases of imagining the outcome. Here's part of one recent meal.

The writing word count has gone negative in the last little while. This is not a surprise to writers. I've been tightening up some flabby prose, and removing some notes to self that were buried in the text. I've also come up with some names. If I can't think of a name right off, I'll just use letters. So I had (title) Xxx, and (title) Yyy. That makes it easy to replace when I come up with the names. There was also several ministers that attend a meeting, and they are A, B, C, D, and E. I've been thinking about tweaking that scene, and I don't even know if they need to be introduced.

My writing progress seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of time I spend a work. There is a 4 day weekend coming up for me. Just saying.

Lots of people comment about what a cutie Curtis is. Celina too, of course. But not all the photos are winners.

I've thinking about doing an Ask Me Anything. Any takers? You know where the comments are.

Forerunner 25 zones revisited

First thing is to understand where the story left off. If you don't know what happened during my first run with the Forerunner 25, you'll be kind of lost here.

I tweaked the zones, and think I over did it. Last time they were reading too high, or so I thought. Today I got on the bike with a pencil and paper handy. After getting warmed up, I set up to produce a specific amount of watts, and recorded some info. The goal watt numbers are derived from a Functional Threshold Test done over the winter.

The idea here is to put out the maximum power you can maintain for 20 minutes. At first it's easy, then gets harder. My number was 225 watts, and using Training and Racing with a Power Meter 2nd edition by Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan I had previously determined my watt ranges. That's the top list in the photo. They've lined up pretty well with what I feel during spin sessions.

The bottom list was based on max heart rate percentages by Karvonen method. If I'd thought about it at the time, I'd have know right off that something was wonky. 50% of 163 is not 105. It's 81.5. Except there's something else in the calculation too, the heart rate reserve. Here's the screen shot.

So today this is what I got pedaling for 10 minutes in each zone, with a break in between:
158 watts (nearly top of Endurance pace) 108/109 BPM, zone 1.2 per watch, or 66% of max heart rate by calculation. Breathing was deep and easy.
190 watts (top of Tempo pace) 118/119 BPM or zone 1.9/2.0 by watch, or 71% of max heart rate by calculation. Breathing was harder, but still regular and deep. Beginning to get a bit of a sweat on.
225 watts (Lactate Threshold) 129/130 BPM or zone 3.0 by watch, or 80% of max heart rate by calculation. Breathing really hard and deep, but not panting. The fan is on high. I think I could have gone another 10 minutes to repeat the threshold test, but I wasn't in the mood for that.

Running at the average of 125 BPM yesterday was chat pace. I'm not sure why the same heart rate has me breathing so much harder on the bike. Something isn't adding up. Then I found this chart here to compare % of Max heart rate, to the Karvonen which is Max heart rate minus resting.

If I look at the left most column, it lines up really well with my spin numbers today. But at least so far, the Karvonen numbers seem to work for running. I'll have to track this a bit more. Fortunately, the Garmin app offers 3 screens, a default, cycling, and running. Looks like I'll have to go through and set each. I know it knows when I'm running, I hope it's smart enough to figure out when I'm biking. I don't remember a way to select the activity on the watch. Maybe I missed it.

Overall it worked out to 1.25 hr on the bike. One last little factoid. My heart rate dropped by 15 beats per minute in one minute from a 130 beats per minute effort level.

The big amusement here this morning was giving the cats a hit of catnip. Linda loves doing this. It's quite the show, but this is the first time I've caught it on video.

Forerunner 25 first run

Here we go! The story to date. Back in December I attended a Garmin try out part at Tri it. Shortly after, I learned I'd won something, but I didn't know what. Three months to the day after, the famous Richelle got in touch and said it had come in. I was all excited and picked it up the same day.

The other day I tried it on a spin session just to get a feel for it, and try out the heart rate monitor. Today I tried it on a 10 K run with my buddy Michelle. My overall impression so far is that for what is billed as a "basic or entry level" runner's watch, it's pretty darn comprehensive! For all that people talk about waiting forever for their watch to find the GPS signal, this seems fairly quick. Still slower than my phone, or so it seems, but then the phone keeps track and already knows where it is, so it's got a head start.

Mainly I'm looking for heart rate monitor information. A bit of a digression here for the several readers that asked for it. Feel free to skip ahead a couple paragraphs, look for the line to know where the digression ends. The theory behind heart rate training is simple. The heart is a muscle, and we want to teach it to be stronger. One does not build other bodily muscles by trying to bench press 500 pounds right from the start. You have to start gradually.

Lots of things are tied together here because our body is a complex system that must be considered together. Generally speaking, the more fit you are, the lower your resting heart rate. Why? Because a strong heart can beat slower and still push blood around the body. The best way to get your resting heart rate is first thing in the morning, just before your alarm goes off. You don't even need to put your fingers on your throat if you're aware of your body. You should be able to feel it, just lying there. Look at the clock, count for a minute.

The resting heart rate, like so many things, is just a number that isn't good or bad in and of itself. Some people naturally have a faster heart rate. You want to find out where your normal is. If you haven't completely recovered from previous training it might be a bit higher than normal. Same if you are stressed about something, or you had a crappy night's sleep. This can be an indication that it's time for a rest day.

Lots of my long runs have been at what I call chatchatchat pace. This is a good indication you are in zone 2, where you are teaching your body to burn fat, and building a network of blood vessels to get oxygenated blood to the muscles. As you go faster you need to put more and more effort into the activity, and talking goes by the wayside. At the top end one of a few things can happen and you will stop. Your lungs can't supply enough air, or your heart can't move it around, or so much lactic acid has built up in your muscles they aren't going to move anymore. Or maybe you'll puke from exertion. Or, worst of all, you'll injure yourself. Don't want to do that.

So why zone 2? Why not the sexy high intensity training? I found this article that summarizes it fairly well. The vast majority of us are not going to race even an Oly distance. Maybe a 10 K run, but not a half marathon. The trick is to find the top of your aerobic output, and stay there. Learning to run in zone two, with a spicing of intensity helps train you to do that. At first it seems slow, but gradually you'll run faster and faster.

As a digression within a digression, one of the disadvantages of only using your heart rate is that there is a bit of a lag. It's an indicator of how hard you are working, but it isn't consistent over time. As you become more fit, you'll be able to run or bike faster on a given heart rate. You may have other issues affecting your heart rate. This is why many athletes have gone to measuring their bike performance with a watt meter. It measures how much effort you produce. If you set your bike trainer up consistently, you'll know week to week what you're putting out and if you're improving.

_______ Digressions end.

So, heart rate information. Normally when we run, Michelle is a champ at finding a 7:30/Km pace for us. Today was a little slower, 7:45 or so, but both of us were feeling a little tired. The watch connected with GPS quickly, and we set off from Glenmore Landing.

First thing I realized is that somehow in my fiddling around I got the pace info in miles, but that's ok. My phone was reading it out in kilometers so we knew when to turn around, and what we were running. The average heart rate over the whole run was 125 and it was often in the low 120's. Going up some hills boosted that.

The problem was that the zone number was making no sense. Much of the time the watch was telling me I was in mid zone 3, and I didn't believe it. The heart rate number was good, but I was suspecting that the max heart rate was set incorrectly, driving the zones to be calculated incorrectly. Once home I delved into the screens and figured out how to tweak it.

The numbers are still big and easy to read, and paging through the displays is quick and easy. I'm not sure how much the display information can be customized, in the sense of putting specific things in specific places. Just now I think I'd like to see heart rate on the top, and current pace on the bottom, since those are the two numbers I'm most interested in on a run. Maybe I'll have to dive into the manual and see if that is possible. As it is, I found the page with heart rate and zone, and left it there.

We chugged along doing a very nice out and back along the reservoir, on a cooler morning than we've had for a while. Lots of other runners out. Once home again I got the watch synched with the app on my phone and it displayed all sorts of data. A beginning runner should have nothing to complain about! There is all sorts of information to help a runner plan and improve their workouts. Being honest I probably won't use all the functions available, like the activity tracker stuff. It's there, but at the moment I don't want to use it.

Here's a bunch of images from todays run. There was a bit of Grrr along the way here, since I could see the photos on the laptop, but blogger wasn't letting me select them. In the end I had to go with screen shots, so the image quality isn't quite the same. The only thing I can see that's missing is the ability to float your mouse over one of the graphs, and get a readout from that instant, with a corresponding dot on the other graphs. But who knows? Maybe that's there and I haven't been smart enough to figure it out. These are all different screens within the iphone app.

There is cadence and elevation. The pace and heart rate screen scrolls. You can turn the phone sideways and the images embiggen.

This is iSmoothrun, screen shots from the phone itself. The three log photos are in fact one scrolling screen, which I like.

Turn that screen sideways and you get this graph, purple is cadence, yellow is pace, and the gray is elevation. This elevation looks comparable to the Garmin, but sometimes I don't believe it, being too flat, or too much of a change.

And lastly on another screen, the map.

The iSmoothrun map embeds some pace info via the colour, but I never know what it means. Both are fine for figuring out where you've gone. The Garmin red really stands out. I drilled into both, and I think the GPS was a bit off. Garmin had me running through the hospital, and some homes in Lakeview. iSmooth run had me on Glenmore trail itself.

The only substantive difference is that iSmoothrun puts the 3 graphs together so it's easy to see how they interrelate. There's times having the 3 together is a pain though, like when it shows cadence all over the place and it hides the other data. Certainly between the two of them I've no fears about running out of data to consider.

The 30 day cookie challenge is still going well.

Lastly, since I know some of you only come here to see the cats. This morning Curtis nearly timed the recreational vomiting perfectly, from a cat point of view. I just barely didn't step in it, as I was scurrying around getting ready to run. Sigh.

hashtag smbyyc74

Once again I was bereft of the hot tub at Talisman. The other pools were busy, but I found a lane with like-speeded people, though one of the guys was slumming. I recognize his stroke; he can swim way faster than I can. But by the time I was done 750 m everybody was gone, and I got in 5x 100 all less than 1:45 on 2 where it belongs. Several laps of water running and chatting after were all good.

I'm wondering if they've changed the pool chemical concentration. After the swim I was smelling much more pooly than I usually do, and as soon as I got my towel and stuff out of the tote bag Linda dragged it downstairs to be washed.

Being the social butterfly that I am, it's taken 73 monthly meetings for me to become aware of the Social Media Breakfast, and finally attend. Today was the first one for me, and won't be the last. I ran into several people I knew, including this guy.

Martin gave a really good talk mostly focused around his 250 marathons in one year back in 2010. For many of these people running a marathon, just one, is an inconceivable thing. To do 250 of them just melted their brains. The twitter traffic was really interesting at that point.

In fact, what's interesting about these is that doing a talk would be a tough gig. Most speakers want the audience to be looking at them. It gives them a chance to interact and see how the talk is going over. But here most people are looking at their phone, watching the social media feed. It's fun. The WWC convention has much the same thing happening, real life and a roughly aligned twitter stream.

This is Kelly Hofer with his attention grabbing suit worn during his talk on wearable tech.

There was a rep from Vivametrica talking about not just collecting biometric data from wearable tech like fitbits, but actually analyzing it. Very interesting, if a little scary. There were several other talks as well, but the sound was terrible and I had a hard time hearing a couple of the people. The big open area in Eau Claire was very echoy. The sound system died entirely at the end so I have no idea what was said.

Like it or not, social media has become part of our landscape. Mostly I like it, but I can see why some people are nervous about it. I think we're just getting started on all this, and the people that can really figure it out are going to make a ton of money.

What I'd really like to see is social media better used to help form government policy. Right now many people in government have some sort of presence, but it needs to come a long way. It needs to be easier to find information, easier to solicit and get considered feedback. Nobody needs more of what passes for comment in all too many places. It should be possible to have ongoing discussions about an issue, moderated of course to weed out the trolls, that are actually an exchange of information. From there the government policy wonks can draft legislation that has a basis in reality. One can but hope!

We need more powerful messaging tools, though. Reply threading, topical indexes, hashtags or labels just aren't going to cut it. Maybe someone at one of these groups will figure it out and we'll all be better off.

What would you like to see happen in or with social media?