After three days with minimal exercise – basically only the walking that is part of my commute, about half an hour a day – I was getting rested and restless at the same time. I was aware that my glycogen reserves were almost certainly full and any carbs above the basic needs would just be floating around as blood sugar until it could get converted into fat or burned off. So in the afternoon, I took a rather long walk again. Well, an hour and a half is pretty decent, I think – I burned some 800 calories even though I jogged very little.

As expected, my pulse stayed fairly low. It was not anywhere near record low even when I started, but it held up great. And after an hour and a half, I was less tired than I usually am after one hour. I am pretty sure the glycogen is involved in the low pulse, not sure about the tiredness.

Of course, as soon as I came home, I drank a couple glasses of Pepsi. ^_^ All the sugar you eat right after exercise is stored in your muscles, or that is the impression I get.

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.