Slice of Chaotic Life

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.