Rain is pretty rare here on the south coast of Norway. So I take it as an opportunity to not actually walk or jog today. This is kind of intentional – although my walking shoes are watertight, I have decided in advance to not walk or jog when it rains, since I anyway should take the occasional day off and these are the best for it. Well, except in the heat of summer I suppose. But that seems pretty far away – except for a couple days after my cardiologist visit, it has been pretty chilly up till now.

It feels kind of strange to sit out two days in a row, but I may well need it. And at least my glycogen reserves should be fully rebuilt after this!

My knees hurt and my legs are stiff from moving too fast without warming up properly. I have reached the age where even my warm-ups require warm-ups. I am sitting out a day.

Conveniently, my digestion is also upset. I seem to react much more strongly to xylitol (the natural sweetener) than I used to. Xylitol is actually a sugar, but is not digestible by humans. I guess my intestinal flora is a bit confused at it too. I used to chew xylitol gum and eat xylitol candy in moderation but pretty much daily during my previous intestinal flora, but after the reset from the broad-spectrum antibiotics I have to be more cautious, it seems. Hopefully it will rebuild soon.

I have been writing way too much about way too little. Sorry.

Took just one walk today, the 75 minute route (took about 70 minutes). I’m not feeling as good as I did yesterday, apart from it also being a workday. The pulse went up after about 40 minutes, not to scary levels but more than on a good day, so I did not try to jog after that.

Removed the suture thread from the upper jaw drilling. It seems to have healed fine, but the thread went around the artificial tooth and this now hangs very loose. I have to push it back up all the time. This should not be a problem, in theory. Will talk to regular dentist tomorrow to get appointment.

As mentioned yesterday, the ever helpful people on the other side of the Internet have given away a free Runkeeper “app” for my Android phone (you can also get one for the iPhone, if you’re that classy). It uses the built-in GPS in the phone to track where you run / bike / walk /row etc, and calculate how far and how fast you go. It also, I found out, feels the urge to talk to you every five minutes during the activity, to tell you how long you’ve been at it, how far you’ve gone and how fast. It also quietly counts calories, but has the good sense to not talk about them out loud. Not that I would mind, but I understand calories are a touchy topic for many English-speaking people.

The calorie estimate is much lower than my Polar pulse watch. This is for the most part because the watch includes basic metabolism: If you sleep with your pulse watch on, it will report how many calories you have slept off. Most exercise equipment tries to calculate only the extra calories you spend. If I just sit on the exercise bike and read a book, it will report zero calories, while the watch will report something like 100.

According to my watch, this morning I walked for 1 hour and 30 minutes at an average pulse of 119, max pulse of 146, and burned 850 calories. So that would make about 700 extra calories above relaxing. Runkeeper has a more conservative estimate: After the first half-hour round, it reported 175 calories where Polar reported 300. If we subtract 50 for resting metabolism, that’s still 250 over 175, or over 40% difference in estimate. If Runkeeper is right, this goes some way to explain how long-distance runners can avoid starvation.

(EDIT: At the end of the day, I realized that Runkeeper had somehow set my weight to 38 kg rather than 84. I may have accidentally given my weight as 84 lb rather than kg… That weight would definitely require fewer calories to move!)

I once asked my friends on Google+, some of which are runners, how they avoided starvation. They assured me this was not a problem.  That is not exactly my experience from 2005 – at the end of the year I was hungry even after meals, and woke up in the night from hunger pangs.  That year my weight had fallen from 95 kg to 82. Over the past 12 months now it has gone from 89 to 84, a much more gradual decline, so perhaps it won’t trigger the same reaction if I hit 82 at this speed. It was quite uncomfortable back then, and I have a lot more respect for people who diet than I had before.

Anyway, my second round was abandoned after five minutes when I took off my show and saw blood on my socks. The new running shoes gnaw on the top of the foot. It did not hurt enough to distract me for the first round, but this time I broke off, went home, cleaned and patched up with salve and gauze. Then I switched to the old Asics shoes for the next round. They don’t hurt, but it feels harder to switch from walking to jogging in them. The new ones almost seem to encourage that. I find myself moving naturally faster in them, even when I walk. More likely this is because they are new and springy, not because Mizuno is somehow superior to Asics. I distinctly remember the same feeling with the three previous sets of shoes when they were new.

I walked without asthma medication today like yesterday. My pulse was lower, and despite jogging short stretches I did not have any sign of asthma. As I mentioned, I got up to 146 beats at one point, but mostly I went back to walking around 140. Unfortunately that only takes a short stretch of jogging at this time. Then again this could be related to not having run more than a few steps for 45 years… I have this idea that if I push the boundaries of my comfort zone every week, it will gradually expand, until one day I can jog as long as I want without triggering an asthma attack.  Well, that might have happened if I had started this when I was 23. Now that I am 53, I am not so sure. But it is worth a try. It is not like I have hungry children waiting for me at home or anything.

EDIT:

Ah, evidently everyone can view my walking on the Internet  when I leave this thing running. This could get embarrassing.  I guess I did go overboard on the first day. Quite a bit overboard. I blame it on the “honeymoon effect”. It is not going to become a habit, I am sure. Although it is kind of fun, for something that is not technically a game.

Having checked that my pulse was decently low today too, I decided to make a couple half-hour rounds without Airomir, the asthma medicine I took yesterday.

Remembering the warmth of the last couple days, I set out in just trousers and a thin shirt (and the new running shoes, of course). But it was overcast and a chilly wind today. It would still have been OK if I could jog, perhaps. But around the time I had warmed up (ten minutes walking on the first round) my pulse watch had gone weird. It would easily take minutes between each time it updated the pulse, and then it would sometimes give obviously wrong numbers (like 77 or 181, when I knew I was in the 120-140 range). Since it was so unresponsive, but mostly around 130, I did not take the risk of doing any longer jogging, just a short stretch here and there, and otherwise just walking fast.

I still completed the circuit, which usually takes 33 minutes in walking shoes, in 28 minutes. So it does seem I am moving faster than usual, even with almost no jogging. That is interesting. It means my pulse may not be THAT much higher than it should be compared to my exercise. (Although I doubt I really burned 1000 calories in two hours yesterday, especially since I was just pottering around part of the time.)

When I came back inside after the first circuit, the pulse watch suddenly worked perfectly again. I thought the cold might have had something to do with it, and took a second round with a windproof jacket. Since the cold wind was the major problem, I now felt comfortably warm the whole trip. But the pulse watch still became unreliable after some minutes, although not quite as bad as the first time. Bad enough however that I could not follow my pulse when jogging – it might take a minute or two before the number changed.  So I still jogged only short stretches and walked fast for the rest.

Since I did not jog for long, I did not really risk a full asthma attack. I did however get a light bronchial cough and excess phlegm, same as the previous days. There was really little difference with or without Airomir with the current workload. I assume if I started jogging longer, there would be more difference. The pulse watch is a year old, so perhaps I need to change battery in the belt. I can’t do that myself, will have to send it in, which will take some time. I may buy a new and have the old changed at my convenience. Of course, that was what I thought last time too, and mislaid the old eventually before I got around to sending it in.

I have also downloaded an Android app (Runkeeper) which should be able to keep track of distance and speed automatically while I walk, whereas the pulse watch monitors my pulse, time elapsed and calories used. So if I get to use them both, I should have a pretty good idea of what I am doing. But it won’t be today. While I might have been able to take another round (my feet are less tired than yesterday), my digestion is acting up again, so I’m not going anywhere.

Yesterday: Stress-tested my heart on an exercise bike, then tried out a new pair of running shoes.  (OK, I did not really run in them. I walked mostly and jogged now and then. But still, it’s a step up.)

This morning: Struck “super-fast regeneration” from list of suspected superpowers. Ouch!

This afternoon:  Why is my pulse back down to vacation levels? Where did the stiffness and soreness go?

So I put on the new shoes again and went on my half-hour circuit. Once I was out of the town proper and had warmed up by walking, I started jogging part of the time. It is not really that much faster than walking, compared to the energy used it actually seems ineffective. It is probably something artificial, I have never seen children jogging. When they don’t walk, they run, not this half-hearted and inefficient movement. On the other hand, it is less draining than an actual run, yet more than a walk. So as an invention for the purpose of exercise, it is actually useful. For people who are out of shape, I mean. For fat people who have walked for enough weeks to not hurt themselves by speeding up a little beyond what walking can do. And for people like me, who have held back every day and every night for over 40 years, for fear of what might happen if we exerted ourselves.

That fear was not entirely misguided since I had, and still have, exercise asthma. It did not trigger during the stress test, but then I had used the inhaler two hours or so before. The short intervals of jogging yesterday afternoon did not trigger asthma either, for some reason. But today I got pretty close. I guess I did jog longer at a time today. And my pulse got up to 140. Normally I have kept it below 125 except very briefly uphill. Anyway, I could feel my chest tightening a bit, and slowed down. On my way home I coughed a bit, but did not go into a full asthma attack with wheezing and stuff.  But if I try this again – and I probably will, unless something very untimely should befall me – I may use the inhaler before I start.

I hate the idea of depending on a drug when it is not absolutely necessary to survive. And I can survive without jogging. On the other hand, the asthma drug is supposedly not habit-forming. Perhaps the opposite: By exercising harder than I otherwise could, my lung capacity should actually expand a bit, so that I would be able to be more active without drug in the future, if any.

Despite the joke from the cardiologist, I am not planning to become some sort of athlete. The purpose of my exercise is to show my body that it is still inhabited, not to impress people. And beside everything else, I would probably lose ridiculous amounts of weight if I could run as much as I walk. I’m already down to approximately 84 kg (185 lb), and the trend is still downward. That is not dangerously low, of course, unless I for some reason have to starve for weeks. But based on my experience in 2005, it is only a kg or two above the level where my body panics and goes into “always hungry” mode, where I am starving even after meals and in the middle of the night. This is unpleasant and probably unnecessary, as my BMI is already now 23.5, pretty much in the middle of the recommended range. And with my inability to digest fat, there is no way I can add another 1000 calories to my day without making my blood sugar even much higher from all the carbs I would eat day and night.