Now these points of data make a beautiful line. And we’re out of beta, we’re releasing on time! So I’m glad I got burned, think of all the things we learned – for the people who are still alive!

(Lyrics from “Still alive” by Jonathan Coulton. Picture from VG Cats.)

Today I did not feel like taking a walk at all. My legs were stiff and tired, my gums were sore and I had a bit too little sleep last night. It was the obvious day to stay home and relax.

But since when has that stopped any of us? So I walked for two hours, burning 1200 calories. It seemed like the right thing to do. (We do what we must because we can?) Anyway, 1200 calories is 300 gram of pure carbs, for instance sugar. It is also about half a day of sedentary life, the way modern men live.

I did not climb steep hills this time, only very gentle ones, and basically walked briskly for an hour, then turned and walked back the same way (or nearly so – I took a detour as I found myself moving faster on the way back. See my previous discovery of the force of familiarigravity.)

My pulse did not pick up all that much even on the way home, but from about an hour and a half, I could notice that it was 10 beats or so above what it had been on the first stretch. This makes sense since I have walked mostly an hour and a quarter for the last couple weeks, so the body probably has a small margin beyond that. At about one hour 40 minutes I could feel a gentle pressure on my chest, no more than when immersed in water to the neck. My legs grew rapidly more stiff and tired, and at 1:45 I sat down for a minute or two. This solved the problem.

There seems to be no connection between the stiff and tired feeling in the legs and actual depletion of energy / glycogen. Rather, I suspect the feeling comes from the posture muscles being locked in a static stance, and would have been the same (or worse) if I had just been standing around for the same length of time. Luckily, even a short break did a great deal to help with this.

After I came home, my pulse while sitting was about 90, against 65-70 before I started. However, even without eating, the pulse returned to near normal values after 20 minutes. So there seems to have been very little forced recharging of the muscles. My guess would be that the muscles absorbed glucose from the blood during this period, and the liver released a similar amount. I doubt my blood sugar was much reduced, but it is hard to say without actually measuring it. In any case, I drank some juice and ate some sweet snacks afterwards, so the muscles should be able to rebuild their reserves more fully during my sleep.

Speaking of which, it is past midnight again.  I should have been in bed an hour ago.