Or at least the bike / pedestrian path that is found alongside all major roads here in Mandal. Yesterday and today I was out walking again, feeling pretty much the same as before the heart race episode. I burned over 800 calories each walk, so all in all it was a good day! :p

I still don’t know what happened, but the jolts and “glitches” of the heartbeat that I have felt off and on lately seem to have faded for this time. I wonder if these aren’t in some way related to the heart racing. In any case, I try to pay more attention to how I feel and not press myself too far.

It is not like I am looking to lose X pounds per week, or am training for a marathon.  I simply want to keep the diabetes at a safe distance and show my body that yes, it is still inhabited.

Plus, walking is a great opportunity to think, or be inspired, or just be. Sometimes it is good to not have an agenda or anything to, but just watch the land as I walk through it.

Having skipped the afternoon walk yesterday (the day after the heart episode) and tanked up on carbs, I took a 55 minute walk today. The pulse was very low for the first 35 minutes, and it never started racing this time, but I also didn’t provoke it once it rose past 120 after about 35 minutes. I am still a bit wary, as you may imagine.

During the 55 minutes, someone removed the 5 days old rubber boots I had left standing near the front door. It has been raining cats and dogs most of the summer and fall so far, so I am sure they can come in handy.  The street is not really a thoroughfare, there is no reason to drive it if you don’t live nearby. So I must assume one of the neighbors has appropriated the boots, after seeing that I left the building. It would be kind of suspicious to stop a car outside a house to steal something unless one already knew nobody was home. So yeah, it seems this is the kind of neighbors I have now. A bit of a change from living in the countryside.

Ironically, I only bought the boots to walk around the house. Because I had somehow lost the key to the front door (presumably inside, since I locked myself in with it), I had to use the back door. Unfortunately, the grass in the garden is higher than my jogging shoes and teeming with ticks. I am not sure there is even one day I have walked through it in my jogging shoes and not found a tick drinking my blood a few hours later. That is where the rubber boots come in. Ticks here on the south coast harbor three potentially life-threatening diseases, so I try to avoid them.

But today the family upstairs handed back their keys, and I got one of them from the landlord, so I no longer need the boots. Not that my neighbors could know that, may God have mercy on their souls. I just hope they can resist the temptation to break the windows in the back yard and empty the house while I am at work. Probably they can. It takes just a moment’s weakness to swipe a pair of good boots, but at least a minute’s weakness to actually break in.

In any case, I would not leave stuff outside if I couldn’t afford to lose it. This is pretty much what I expect from neurotypical humans*. Still, it takes a bit of courage to nab things in broad daylight in a place that is visible from three or four houses.

(*I don’t mean to say that all ordinary people are thieves. Rather, that there is a randomness in us humans, as there also is in the rest of nature. If you expose a number of people to temptation for an increasing time, the likelihood rises that someone will break and fall for it. The risk varies with the temptation, but small and inconsequential temptations usually don’t take many people or a long time. There is, as I said, a randomness, a fluctuation in the human mind, so that it acts in part like a part of nature. And nature is not moral, it is seemingly random. When a stone is loose in the mountainside, it will eventually fall, unheeding of who may be passing beneath it.)

Anyway, now that I unexpectedly have my key, the boots would just have become one more  part of the heavy load I carry with me from one house to the next every time I move. Someone up there is still looking out for me, it seems. ^_^ Of course, that would be the case even if I did not see it, but it is still nice to see it.

A big car came and took with it a lot of stuff from upstairs where the couple with the toddler live. Actually, it would seem that they are not going to live there anymore. If I scared them away, it was certainly not my intention. Perhaps they were disturbed by my loud farting? I can’t think I have made much noise apart from the toilet-related, as I am a big fan of headphones when not living on a farm (and actually mostly even then). I have also restrained myself from dancing at night.

In hopefully unrelated news, my front door key is gone. It must have been lost in here somewhere, for I used it to lock myself  in on Friday. When I should go out for my daily one-hour walk, it wasn’t there! I searched for hours, even moving my bed to see if it had fallen down there.  Panic! At this point, I have not yet realized that I can use the back door to the garden and simply walk around the house, and that I could indeed have done this all the time and in effect had my own entrance. Not that I think my using the front door scared away my neighbors, although it did cause me to let out the cat accidentally from time to time.

Tomorrow I will remember the back door. (I know this because this entry is backdated.) Today, I am panicking. I have to go to work, but how will I get back in? Luckily, a window to the garden is low enough that I should be able to get through without breaking anything. As some of you will know, the first thing that appears to me if a door is locked is “Window!” It is slightly narrower than my hips, but I am sure I can get through if I just turn diagonally. After all, the square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the two, uhm, other sides. I could try it out, I guess.

Or I could go to sleep and remember tomorrow  that there is a door to the  backyard from the tiny food storage room I rarely use.

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.

Today, somewhat delayed because of rain, was the eat & walk experiment.

Background: Muscles “store energy” in the form of glycogen, as stated by respected websites on the topic. Glycogen still needs oxygen to release energy, but nothing more. The pulse therefore remains fairly low during moderate exercise. Once glycogen reserves fall below a threshold level, muscles request nourishment from elsewhere in the body, and the pulse increases. If the glycogen is further depleted, an emergency recharging takes place after exercise, and the pulse remains elevated until glycogen reaches an acceptable (for the muscles) level.

After a carbohydrate-rich meal, blood sugar rises. Body releases insulin, which orders muscles (and liver) to absorb sugar and convert it into glycogen.  This continues until blood sugar reaches normal level or glycogen storage is full.

Hypothesis: By walking briskly after eating, the insulin should flood the leg muscles with glucose, which they can burn instead of depleting glycogen during exercise and replace it later. The body should secrete less insulin and there should be no spike in blood sugar.

Observation: My pulse increased early to above 120, against normal 110 at this phase. This is to be expected, since the heart would have to supply plenty of blood to digestive tract, liver and muscles all at once.

I walked for one hour and 25 minutes, ten minutes longer than normal for the last couple weeks. The pulse was still in the 125 range at the end of the trip. Energy use was calculated by my pulse watch to 900 calories. This is in a similar range as the meal eaten.

Pulse after exercise was slightly higher than after inactivity. This could be a sign of moderate recharging of muscles, or of delayed digestion. Inconclusive.

Sleepiness and lethargy that is often experienced after a meal was not present during the walk.

Subjective experience of stiffness and tiredness in leg muscles was consistent with a 900 calorie activity. It would seem that the stiffness of muscles after activity is NOT caused by depletion of glycogen reserves. Cause still unknown. The effect seems incompatible with intelligent design if we assume unlimited access to food. Otherwise, incentives to restrict unaccustomed activity in adults may have been useful in the past.

Conclusion: The experiment was slightly unpleasant and did not bring a clear conclusion as to whether light exercise causes less blood sugar spike / insulin production, although the lack of drowsiness may imply this.