Rusty's Blog

There is a bit of an issue of balance for people who are diabetic. For people who are not aware, a bit of an explanation may be in order. If you know what diabetes is and how it works, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs.

Diabetes is the inability of the body to regulate it’s blood sugar level. Humans are not the only creatures susceptible to diabetes, Pretty much every animal that derives energy from glucose being distributed through the blood stream. The mechanism of allowing the cells in the body to take in that glucose to use it as an energy source is a hormone called insulin which acts as a key to allow the blood sugar through the cell membrane. Insulin is generated by stem cells in the pancreas. There are two fairly well known mechanisms that show up that cause issues with the generation of insulin. The first is an auto-immune disorder which happens around the time that the body goes through puberty. Essentially the immune system detects the cells that are generating Insulin as a health hazard, and destroys them. This is called Type 1 diabetes, and the onset is often associated with a flue or cold that the immune system is also fighting. Detection may be weeks or months after the event when several major symptoms of high blood sugar are recognized, and a blood sugar test is performed. The other well documented variety of diabetes appears to be the results of overstimulating the creation of insulin and tends to strike later in life when the t-cells essentially say ‘Hey, enough is enough. You’re over working us, and we’re not going to take it any more.”. There may be symptoms that can be pointed at earlier, such as low blood sugar, but the only way that can provide a significant early indicator is to test for high insulin levels. The problem with that is that the tests to detect high insulin levels are very expensive and at this tome are not as well understood as we would like. About the only time it is performed is when the potential diabetic is known to have a family history of diabetes and is showing signs of being hypoglycemic while eating what appears to be a normal or even high sugar diet. The real problem thous is that what appears to cause Type 2 diabetes is that fat cells in the body are working to reduce the effectiveness of insulin in the first place. The part of the brain that detects high blood sugar, as well as low blood sugar, sends a chemical message to the pancreas saying, “Hay get up off your lazy butt and kick some insulin into the system.” Sort of a bit of a slave driver there.

With most Type 2 diabetics the most obvious hint that the person is may be diabetic is that they are significantly and obviously overweight. In fact some people suggest that it is a result of being overweight. As with most things, the reality is not quite so simple. But if you like the power trip you get from being able to criticize someone for being over-weight, it seems to be as good of a candidate for exploitation as any other I guess. The flaw in the ointment is that there are many people who recognize that Diabetes is something they may acquire, and they work very hard to avoid it. I know several people who if you met them on the street would say that they look to be in very good health, fit, etc. but who I happen to know are diabetic. I’ve even been in that situation.

So back to the premise. Treating diabetes is a bit of a balancing act. On the one hand you have several very bad things that happen over time when your blood sugar gets too high. Kidney failure, neropathy, blindness, etc. There are even some things that happen that don’t take quite so long to manifest themselves. As an example if your blood sugar level is high, scratches and bruises take longer to heal, and may just seem to linger for months when they should clear up in days or weeks. Gangrene can set in, and it’s not at all unusual that people loose appendages. So it’s pretty obvious that you don’t want to have those things happen. The other side of this coin is that if your blood sugar level gets to be too low it can seriously affect your ability to think, react, or even move. Low blood sugar can put you into a coma, and can also kill you. Generally not a desirable situation either.

Insulin dependent diabetics, which can be either Type 1 or Type 2 have to get insulin introduced to their body in response to the food they eat. This may be either through insulin shots, a pump that regularly introduces insulin a combination or some other means. A potential treatment is to replace the cells that generated the insulin in the first place. This has not been an easy process for most people. There have been a few cases where people have had pancreas transplants, usually for other reasons, and have stopped being diabetic, but those are very rare situations, and in most of those cases the imuno-suppressants needed to prevent rejection of the transplants are as much of an issue for ongoing medical care as the diabetes that is no longer the major issue.

Many Type 2 diabetics are not insulin dependent. And in some cases type 2 insulin dependent diabetics do loose the dependency if they respond well to other treatments. There are a few solutions which Type 2 diabetics may respond well to treating. The first is to reduce the uptake of sugar from the consumed food. Some drugs seem to do this reasonably well. We may see some alternatives in the fairly near future though as it appears that there are two varieties of organisms in our gut that deal with the food we consume differently, one of which makes uptake easier and also leads to obesity. The other seems to reduce the uptake of carbohydrates and calories from the food we consume, or at least does not make it easier to convert. I suspect that we will see more research and treatments investigating that in the near future, both because there is a large population of people who would like to loose weight that this might help, and because it does affect how the food we eat is processed.

Another attack on the problem is to address the other major method of introducing blood sugar to the system. That is the conversion of fat into glucose. This process is actually done in the liver. The vast majority of the glucose that is converted from the food you eat is transfered into your blood stream within 4 hours of eating. There are a few complex proteins that are handled later on, but for most of us that is not a significant portion of our diet. Since most of us spend between 6 and 8 hours of every 24 hours asleep, and onset is often several hours after we have eaten, you would expect that overnight our blood sugar levels would drop significantly. That is where our lives kick in and convert some of the stored fat we all carry around into glucose. On the off chance that this is entirely too efficient at working, some drugs try to suppress this function.

Another variety of treatment for Diabetes is to induce the pancreas to generate more insulin again. There are several medications that do this in one way or another. There is also a third fairly new attach which attempts to suppress the insulin resistance mechanism. Because of the reduced effectiveness of the insulin generation process in the first place, it is not uncommon to combine the treatments in various ways.

What turns into a fairly significant issue over time though is that people who finally find a way to manage their blood sugar, also end up setting up a situation where it becomes very easy to gain weight. The ‘working’ cells are not the only ones that make use of insulin to let glucose in. Fat cells do the same. As a result if you combine the increased capture of glucose by the fat cells and convert it to fat, with the suppressed conversion of fat to glucose enabled by the Liver, you set up a situation where it is easy to gain a significant amount of weight.

Balance in this case is not limited to keeping your blood sugar ‘controlled’ it is also a matter of figuring out what is the right amount of food you should be taking in in the first place.

“Oh, well, I’ll just exercise more.” some might suggest. Actually, it doesn’t work out quite that way. Getting to humans, there are three things our bodies are very clearly designed to do, and do with efficiency. The first is to run. No, we don’t run all that fast when compared to other creatures. In fact most other creatures can outrun us for a good distance. I’ve considered adopting a greyhound over the last couple of weeks. Within 3 strides, less than 40 feet, a greyhound can go from a standing stop to 40 miles per hour. Buffalo at full gallop are over 30 miles per hour. Horses, deer, antelope, goats, and so on. Try to keep up with a cat. Humans on the other hand can run for very long periods of time. If you train to run, you soon learn to leave your dog at home. They make wonderful sprinters, but if you are going to run a 5k, you will run them into the ground. Even if you are not ‘fast.’ The fact that most of your run is a controlled fall, and you are simply using two legs and feet to do that with means that you can do that more efficiently over long periods of time. How much more efficiently? A marathon runner who completes a marathon in about 3-4 hours, which means not usually an elite runner, burns up about 1000 calories during the run. Sounds like a lot eh? McDonald’s has been selling an Angus Burger sandwich that is alone 720 calories. Add in a medium fries at 300 calories, and before you’ve added a drink you’ve got more calories on your plate than a Marathon runner burns off in an event.

The second thing that humans are absolutely great at is using tools. When it comes down to it, this is more of an indication of our fine motor abilities in our hands than anything else. And a significant part of that is our very flexible thumb. That’s not really all that great for consuming calories however.

The third thing that really takes the cake though is our brain. Fully 20% of our daily calorie usage is devoted to brain functions. The average human consumes roughly 2500 calories a day. Highly active people, say recruits in basic training may be up over 3500 calories, but that’s not most of us. So looking at that 2500 calories, just sitting around, thinking all day, and being moderately active, our brain uses as many calories a day as a marathon runner uses running the event. Most of us are not aware that our brains are working that hard, but they are.

So, what does that mean for someone who wants to loose weight? First of all, you want to achieve that moderate level of activity or better. I won’t go into whether most of us do that or not, iI doubt if we do. How many of us can identify with the guy who gets up to go get the mail out of the mail box, and realizes on his way back that he’s winded, and he didn’t get any mail today? Moderate activity is there to help you. Go for a walk. start slow if you need to. (If you get winded going to the mail box, you need to.) Talk to your doctor and find out what a ‘moderate’ level of activity for you is. For a lot of people it’s about an hour of activity that increases the heart rate into your aerobic zone, for over an hour a week. 3 days of 20 min walks is a good start. Go further if you would like, or increase speed. It’s up to you. If you would rather dance, do that. If you have seen those ‘magic sticks’ and want to give that a try, then by all means try it out. It may look easy in the hands of the guy selling the things, but it will take time to learn. For that matter learning to Juggle will very likely change your activity level.

However by doing that you are adding ‘moderately active’ to your self description. That doesn’t change the fact that you are going to have to do something to reduce the calories taken in. If you are consuming 3000 calories a day, and have a moderate level of activity of 2500 calories consumed daily, that’s a 500 calorie surplus every day. 3500 calories every week. If you like those Angus Burgers at McDonald’s, that’s less than 5 of those a week. The added weight will pile up fast.

So the idea is to do what you can to helpfully affect that balance. And you are probably aware that if you drop to under 1500 calories you actually induce a new effect in the human body. You introduce the body to starvation mode. I won’t go into the details, but in summary, you don’t want that.

Balance. Take your time, and do it ‘right.’

Oh, and one guy who realized that he was wonted when he went to the mail box, addressed it by developing a program which took him from the couch potato he was, to a 5k runner in about 9 weeks. He now runs marathons.

ICE – In Case of Emergency. – It may save your life.

I presume it’s available for the iPhone, but don’t know. I hope it’s available for Symbian based and Nokia phones in general, but I wouldn’t know how to confirm it’s available. I use the G1 Android phone, and can confirm that it’s a very functional and useable application, and interfaces with the portions of the system that I want it to.

First of all, what is the application? A few years ago you may have seen a flyer in your electric bill, or with your cell phone bill, suggesting that you add a cell phone contact named ICE. The intent is that if you are in an accident, or incapacitated, or the like that public safety people who encounter you in that condition can check your phone for the ICE contact, and call the person (or people) you designate there to let someone know about your situation. Presumably you have informed that person of any medical conditions that apply to you. That way the people responding to your situation will have additional information available sooner.

It’s a good idea, with a rather critical flaw. The major flaw is that many people do not want to leave their phone available for just anyone to place calls. Additionally with the amount of personal data that you may be keeping on your phone, including your browsing history and such, a large number of people have put screen locks on their cell phone. You can accept calls, and in many cases place something like a 911 call, but general phone numbers are out, and it’s almost a given that an ICE contact would not be available.

ICE – In Case of Emergency, the application does more than just provide a contact. First up you have an instructions page. You can also set up special instructions of your own on the page. There is a row of buttons down the left that read “Who to Call”, “ID & Insurance”, “Allergies”, “Conditions”, and “Medication”.

Within the application the ‘who to call’ contacts are directly callable. You press the contact, and the phone calls them. Pretty much the same way that any contact you set up in your phone is expected to work. However the application only lists those you want to consider your emergency contacts.

ID & Insurance is pretty self explanatory. who are you, where do you live, what is your health insurance numbers in case that will speed up medical assistance. Some hospitals won’t accept you without insurance. Som have to bill differently. You get the picture.

Allergies. If you are alergic to Bee stings or peanuts, this is where you add that information. Want people to know your alergic to asprin? Might be a good idea. Anephelactic Shock is not something you want to go through if at all possible to avoid.

Conditions. Are you diabetic? Have High Blood Preasure? Do you suffer from a specific sleep disorder, or have fragile bones due to osteoperosis? Note all that applies here. Someone going into insulin shock looks a lot like someone having a stroke, or any of a large number of other conditions. Many times seconds matter in getting the appropriate treatment. And knowing what you do know is already wrong with you will make a difference in how medics will try to treat you.

Medications. Again what you take, dossage, schedule if it’s multiple times a day, or once a day, when. It matters, and can make a difference with treatment. My own advice is to also add any herbal remedies you may be taking that are not ‘prescribed.’ If you are taking St. Johns Wart, that will affect some medication in surprising ways.

Note that there are quite a few places to record things that perhaps the developers hadn’t thought of. If you are a vegitarian, or vegan, note that in special instructions on the first page, and possibly in your ID block. If you have been a vegan long enough that you have adverse reactions to something like bacon bits accidentally added to your salad, it might be a good idea to add that information to your allergies.

I’m also inclined to suggest recording ‘lifestyle’ information if you think it might make a difference in what sort of treatment you might get. As an example, if you are a runner, you may have a higher risk of being hit by a car when you are some distance from home, or even when you are ‘almost home’ and SSS hits. SSS is Sudden Stupid Syndrome. Signs include suddenly not paying attention to what’s going on around you, having a sense of elation, and so on. If you look at the record for people driving long distances for commuting or even on a vacation, most ‘accidents’ happen within 5 miles of getting ‘home’. That’s because you’re almost home. You could drive this portion of the trip almost in your sleep. In fact that’s often what you’ve started doing. Oh, you’re awake, but you’re probably paying attention to a different set of things than you were when you were driving the freeway in an unfamiliar state or driving through those towns on old route 66. As a result you miss seeing the unusually large pot hole that opened up in the road last night and rips a tire off your car. Or you miss the kid down the street who just got his permit this week and is trying to show off to mom or dad just how good of a driver he can be. It happens to runners to. You’ve run for 20 min, or so, you’re just about home. You might even be in your warm down walk. Whatever. You’re not paying attention any more, and as you cross the final street, you miss the fact that you’re walking out infront of a bus that’s getting ready to go.

Running does do a few different things to your body as well. If you’ve started long distance running, you may have experienced a runners high. It’s a release of Dopamine into your blood stream. That reduces your sensitivity to pain, and can affect how you process stimulus as well. If you regularly experience that state while running, make sure it’s noted. James Fixx died of a major heart attack during his <a href=”http://bystander.homestead.com/run_heart_attack.html”>daily run</a>. The conditions of the heart attack, and the symptoms that had been happening in the weeks prior to the heart attack suggest that it may have been from before he started running, also there is a history of heart disease in his family. One thing to remember though is that a runners high can mask the symptoms to you, so it might be a good idea to have those conditions documented on the off chance that ambulance personel can respond appropriately.

So back to that major flaw. Many of us prefer to ‘lock’ our phones when we are not actively using it. It may kick in when the screen saver starts, or you may be almost automatically locking the phone, who knows. What ICE can do is hook directly into the screen lock program and if you don’t provide the appropriate password/gesture, the ICE application can come up anyway. That way you can carry the phone with you always, and anyone who needs to contact someone for you, can.

The application comes from <a href=”http://www.appventive.com/”>Appventive.</a> It’s in the Android Marketplace and I think it’s well worth the $0.99 they are asking.

Note that I’ve had the app for almost 3 months. It took me 2 months to figure out how to enable the screen lock access to the application. So if you are having trouble, take heart. You are not alone. Go into Settings on the first page, and go into the dialogs for setting up a delay for the screen lock. That’s where you enable the ICE lock which will allow you to set the phone to display that by default, and you can hit the unlock button there, or you can set a delay to allow you to unlock the phone, or if you don’t successfully unlock the phone the ICE lock comes up which allows the bearer of the phone to place the appropriate calls.

I hope that in the end I never need this application to save my life. However I happen to think that $0.99 is very much a great value for what this app does.

First of all, I don’t think my c25k program should be considered entirely successful. First of all while I did my final ‘run’ tonight, I didn’t run 30 min, and wasn’t really expecting to. In a way this is really a new program that I started, though I doubt that I am the only one to have done something like this.

My short term objective is to run a 5K a week from Saturday. I’ve got just under 2 weeks to do this. I actually have a 5k ‘course’ in my neighborhood that I am going to be ‘training’ on. It’s actually just barely short of a 5k loop, but I will be able to use it, and the walk in/out for the loop will take care of the rest I’m pretty sure.

Tonight I walked and ran the course in about 40 min. My immediate goal is to bring the time down from 40 min to under 30 min. As the final run of week 8 shows, I can run 28 min straight on a flat surface, and I suspect that with little effort I can turn that into 30 min as part of my current program. However I’m pretty sure that I’m not running a mile and a half out, and a mile and a half back as part of that 30 min, which means I need to deal with the distance as well in the next two weeks.

I wrote once a wile back of my running when I was stationed overseas. The compound we were stationed on had a perimiter of about a mile, give or take a bit. And I had a lot of spare time. My unit was scheduled to redeploy back to the US a couple of months after we got to the compound. Some of the people I was stationed there with spent their time on the roof of our building, developing a tan, and in some cases working out with weights, either improvised, or purchased on the local market. I was never really a weight training sort of a guy, so I didn’t get involved in that, and as a geek, a tan has never really been something I’ve chased after. The last time I ‘tanned’ I turned orange. I’m pretty sure I can explain the story somewhere along the line, if people show a serious interest in it, but it’s really a different story.

In any case I, as well as a few other somewhat independent types, took to walking and running around the compund. Walk for a bit, run for a while, walk a block, run for a while, etc. After a wek or so of this, you realize you are running the entire distance around the compound, a couple of weeks later, you’re doing laps. If you’re really dedicated, or just don’t have anything better to do, you run in the morning and the evening.

Of course the army being what it is, can’t quite leave well enough alone. 4 or 5 weeks into people doing this, some 1LT gets the bright idea to hold a ‘race.’ Invitations are posted all over the compound. Oddly enough about 3 days before the event, I spraign an ankle. I’m in a walking splint the day of the race, so I didn’t get to participate. Funny how some things work out that way.

I really didn’t want to race anyway. I think I had taken up the running to try to impress someone, and after a while I realized I wasn’t going to impress them, but I was gaining secondary advantages.

When I was called up for deployment, I think I weighed in at 210. They needed me, and I was able to complete the PT requirements (which I don’t think I could right now) and I lost the 10 or 11 lb they needed me to in order to pass the required limits for my age and height. (They may have done a basic body fat analys as well, I don’t remember.)

When I returned to the US, I weighed in at 180, and people who looked at my ID from when I was deployed generally agreed that I didn’t look like that any more.

Fast forward to today. I weigh more than I did when I was deployed. Actually I weigh more than I did when I started the c25k program. Part of that is the fact that I haven’t really changed my dietary habits much over the past 2 months, so I am probably eating more callories than I need to. Of course part of the weight gain is probably just the normal fluctuations in body weight from day to day, and I think the variation may also be the selection of clothing I wore to the doctor’s office. (not the lightest weight materials, since I rode the motorcycle over.)

That said, my endurance is up segnificantly. So the current program is to take a known distance, one of a few, and start working on improving my run for both distance, and time.

Tonight I walked and ran a 3 mile loop in about 40 min. I’ll do the same loop first thing in the morning, and again tomorrow evening (or night) and I’m aiming for completing the loop in about 38 min or less. I think I can easily cut 2 min off the time overnight. Over the next week I am going to continue doing this and I’m aiming to get down to under 30 min for the loop by the end of the week. That’s a tougher goal, and might not be feasable. We’ll see. I’m then going to add half a mile to the timed distance, which I’m hoping that by Thursday morning of next week I’ll have in under 35 min. At that point I’m going to take a break for a day to prepare for the run on Saturday morning. I may walk Friday night, just to keep my circulation up, but it will be a much shorter distance.

One of the reasons I’m taking this route is that the run I did for 28 min was almost entirely on a flat surface. I did add a short (2 blocks) hilll at the end of the run, but I have no confidence that where the 5k will be run at the end of next week, will be on a level route. Minniapolis has many places where you can run on a level surface for miles if you wish, but in most cases just feet to your left or right you can find a route that is either one long slow rise, or one short steep hill. I don’t know that the route that I am working myself through now demonstrates all of those features, but there are hills, as well as some long flat areas. I can easily come up with alternate routes that have steeper hills, as well as some routes that have long shallow rises.

By the end of the summer, I’m hoping to build my endurance up to run about 5 miles. Who knows, I may hit that objective by the end of July, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I don’t know what my next objective will be. I”ve never been interested in running a marathon, and I don’t think I will take up that challenge. I think it would be a lot better to start with the plan of running 5 miles a day 3 days a week as a long term objective, with 2 or 3 days a week also visiting the Gym. If I get to the point of running 3 hours a week, and working out in the gym 2 or 3 hours a week, I think I’ll be more than happy.

As bad weather kicks in this fall, I will probably be migrating my runs to the gym on a treadmill. My life at the moment is no where near as dull as sitting on a compund in the desert. for 3 months. But I strongly suspect that the health benifits of the routine will be worth it.

C25K is a great program. the ‘Frist day to 5K’ podcasts are a great way to give yourself targets to stick with and a interval training routine to work within. Feel freeto use it, but remember to talk with your doctor before you start any workout routine. I would also advise talking to him or her before you do any significant modification to your workout regine. Rembember that the real reason to do this stuff is to be in better shape, have more fun, and be able to meet and handle chalenges that come your way. It’s work, but you’ll find it’s worth it.

I seem to forget each week that the reason I am doing this is to get better. This week the ‘improvement’ to meet was simply 3 more minutes than I ran last week. This next week it’s just running 2 more minutes. While I won’t call today’s run ‘easy’ by any means, it definately was doable. I might even have been able to complete it yesteday, though I got several other things done yesterday, so I shan’t complain.

Walking out to gegin the run is a bit interesting these days. It’s almost as if a part of me doesn’t want to do this. Oh, I’m not talking about the psychological battle looking at running 28 min, or 30, or trying to complete a 5k run. What I’m talking about is things like as I’m walking out, feeling like something is in my shoe, or in my sock. Maybe some sand, or smething. That said, once I start the music for the run, I don’t have that difficulty.

Since it has been a couple of days since I last ran, Friday evening in fact, I could feel the tightness of my legs as I started. Oh, not the same tightness as not having stretched, more along the lines of muscles realizing that they are going to have to do some work now.

The watch I regularly wear these days has a stopwatch function, though it can be difficult to use at times. Amoung the anoyances are the start/stop button does have a tendency to not start, or stop the stopwatch. The minute display is small and difficult to read, (is that 7, or 8?) but it’s on the watch, so it’s generally available. I chose not to take either a GPS, or a phone with me today, I went back to my simple MP3 Player, loaded up with the one track for week 8, and along with my keys that’s about all I took with me today. It’s not a mater of running light, just that today I decided that I didn’t really need to carry all that much that could confuse what I am doing. After all I’m going out to run, not really test new geek toys.

I had initially picked a turn around point that was about where I turned around last Friday. It’s a good point to turn around once I have my time up to where I want it and can start working on my speed a bit more. But as I was running I had a cood couple of minutes before I would have gotten there, and I looked at my watch and realized that not only did I not need to go that far, but that I was already close to my turnaround time. So where a fork in the trail existed, I turned around and started heading back.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I hate hills. Well, I realize that inthe long term I’m going to have to deal with them, and occasionally running up, and down them is going to happen. I got to about 2 minutes from the end of my run and off to my right was a long gentle sloap. I decided that rather thna run along the flat, and since I was that close to the end of my run, that I could probably handle running up that slope. Adn when I got to the top I realized I still had some time left, and off to my left was even more up-hill, if not nearly as steep. So I went that way till the end of run indicator came up. And my run was done.

Oh, my day is far from over. I’ll be heading to the gym this afternoon for another hour of workout, but I met the objective for this morning, and this week, even if it was longer than I like, so Onward.

Have fun, go run!

Questions is right. Well, I ran today, and I felt a lot better about it while running than on Wednesday, but still working out sore muscles and such from the Tuesday Gym Experience. Going there again tomorrow, thoug I have not heard about pricing, so I may notactually be working with a trainier tomorrow. We’ll see. Then another runon  Sunday. (Monday?)

Worst today was probably the feeling of wanting to have somethingto drink (water) I didn’t have a need to get something to drink (thirsty) but knew that that was in the cards at some point. The conversion from drinking Diet Mt. Dew to non-carbonated, no caffine beverages is taking it’s own time, but is happening.

Hardware problems today. Hardly something unusuall, but it did affect my routine. I didn’t want to be carying around a mic on the headphones today, not that it’s obtrusive or anthing,but the headphones that came with the cell phone have a button on them that switches the headphones from audio playback to ‘phone’ mode headsets. I suppose if you are out at the park, sitting watching the birds and the dogs, that being able to press a button to answer the phone is nice. I’m not really happy with it though. I think one of the problems I may have been having on Wednesday may have been tied to that, as the dial pad was one of the things that I was seeing on the screen andI don’t think that that was a shake managed device, or app. In any case the problem today appears to be related to the headphone adapter for my phone. It appears thatit is not providing a solid contact for the headphones at some level. The headphones would sound really distorted, which I otherwise would have thought of as a problem with the playback codec needing to be reset. In fact I even power cycled the phone to see if that would help. No good. I finally realized that I was hearingdifferent results as I actually moved the headphone plug around with the adapter. So I appear to have a faulty adapter (headphones have been working in other devices, but I won’t entirely rule them out either.) Most anoying was that Buddy Runner was trying to give me status points and i could hear that it was ‘saying’ something, but not hear what was being said.

In all I suspect that I would have been better off without the headphones at all. I may even give that a go.

Nope, didn’t complete the run today. Though I think I did better than Wednesday. I’m contemplating repeating this week, or even going back and repeating week 7 again, though I think I completed that week acceptably. I had been thinking that this week was 30 min of running, but it’s only 28. Next week should be 30. It doesn’t seem like a huge step to add 3 minutes of running to what I did last week, but then the conditions are a bit different this week as well, with the workout at the gym.

Oh, well, enough for now. Have to get cleaned up for work, and if I have time, stop in and pick up a pair of shoes and shorts for the gym. Not really interested in wearing the running shorts again, though the style is OK. (I really need to add to my exercise wardrobe.)

Stay safe. Run. (28 days to the 5k!)

…not just longer.

As the astute reader will note, I’ve been participating in C25K. Today I started Week 8. I was originally planning on doing that on Tuesday this week, but last week I signed up for a session at “The Gym” with a personal trainer, and I wanted to be able to focus on that yesterday, an drecovering from a run would not have helped.

So I did what I could of the run today. Since I had been at the gym yesterday, and worked fairly rigourously on a full body workout, I’m actually recovering from that a bit today as well. Not so happy about that.

The work out started well enough. Other than whatever is going on with my phone. I think I will need to discard a feature that I installed a couple of weeks back. First I listen to the podrunner intervals podcast with the phone, and that seems to work out OK. I also added the Buddy Runner app to the phone a while back, in the hopes that I would be able to use that to keep track of my running progress. So far so good. Somewhere along the line I also added a ‘shake’ app manager. The idea is neat, want to switch to a different app that’s running? No problem, shake the phone. Well, there is a bit of a problem. Shaking the phone is almost a given when running.

So I started the podcast. got the buddy runner app launched, and ready for me to hit the ‘start’ button as I’m doing my warm up walk. I get to the end of the 5 min walk, reach over to hit the ‘start’ button, and… that’s not the buddy runner app. Ok, rip the phone off the upper arm. Close a bunch of apps that I had not intentionally opened, and finally There! I can start buddy runner. All the while I’m trying to both manage the phone and run. Not a good combination.

I headed south on the lake today, and one of the things that Buddy Runner does is gives you status updates for where you are on the run. I got a half mile update, followed by a 1 mile update. I go along to where I planned on doing my turn around, and start comming back, and realize that I should have gotten another update. OK, pull off the phone, App close, app close, app close, … Ah, buddy runner isn’t tracking any more. Wonderful.

I don’t think I got a full 2 miles into the run before I switched to walking. I am not sure if the reason that buddy runner stopped tracking was because I had gone 1 mile, or if there was something else happening. We’ll see now that I’ve removed the shake based task manager.

While I think that part of my early drop was due to the recovery from the workout at the gym yesterday, I do note that while running, and in the walk before and after, I actually felt a bit more fit. I’ve got sore arms, legs, and so on, but they are mostly good sore, rather than incredibly painful sore. We’ll see how the run goes on Friday after I’ve had a full day of recovery.

Well, today is more of a success than even Friday was. I did get all 25 min of running done. I’ll admit that it is still more of a jog than a run, but for now the important part for me is to get the duration up.  The distance will come soon enough.

I changed things up a bit today, in that I decided that there was no real reason for me to drive to my running course. My walk in was a bit longer than 5 min, and I started the audio for the walk a bit later than I would have liked, as I would like to have started the run just about the time I got on the trail, rather than about 2 min later. I did start my GPS track when I got to the trail.The first 11 track points appear to be from walking, as do the final 4 or 5. Apparently there is a spot on the path where GPS readings are a bit suspect. While there is a hill on the path, the variation in the altitude for this rout really is only about 30 to 40 feet, and almost all of that is at the north end of the route I took today. So when you look at the track around the lower right hand portion of the path, and see me running at over 40 miles per hours, 80 feet under water, I would advise treating those readings with a bit of suspicion. (If I can find a way to discard such readings in the future, I probably will.)

I mentioned elsewhere that I really hate hills. I guess that at some level I can’t get away from them. I suppose I could move to a location with miles and miles of nothing but flat ground, but since I don’t live there, and I expect that I will have to run on hills for some of the 5k events in the future, I’ll just have to live with them.

In any case as I mentioned there is a small hill on the north end of this run. I would be surprised if the height over the rest of the route were more than 25 feet or so, but it is there, and aproaching it from the south, I was more than happy that I was hitting it before my midpoint. It did feel better running back down it to the south than it did going up it to the north, but I was just as happy I hadn’t decided to go much further than that hill to the north.

I wasn’t exactly sure where my second turn around point should be. However I figured that if I went past the parking lot, that I would be fairly close to 25 min by the time I got back to where I got on the path. In fact it worked out fairly well, and left me with a route off the path that made my walk home a bit shorter.

The feeling of completing that 25 min of running, hearing the tones indicating that 25 min is done, was wonderful. I had done what I set out to do, and I felt good. Oh, I don’t know that I could have run another 5 min quite yet, but we shall see on Tuesday. No matter what, I consider this a successfull completion for Week 7.

The astute reader will probably note that I didn’t blog about running on Monday as my schedule suggests I should have. They will probably also note that today is listed as session 1 for the week, rather than session 2. They are right.

After my drive on Sunday, and return, I slpet fairly late Monday morning, and ended up being awake for about 4 hours in the middle of the day, and another few hours after 8 at night. I don’t think that the miss was a total loss, as the idea of the schedule is to run three times a week, rather than a 3 – 4 – 3 – 4 cycle. I’m going to be a day behind this week, but I’m not too worried about it.

I tried a different application for tracking running this week. A couple of weeks back I ordered an arm band for my G1 and that came in yesterday. I’m going to have to mod it yet, as the headphones that came with the phone are not a good match for the headphone jack on the G1. It appears that it would be a good armband for an iPod touch or possibly an iPhone as well if someone is looking for one. Picked up on eBay for something like 5.00 and 4.99 shipping. I ordered 2. The kit comes with both a neoprene armband as well as a plastic waterproof case with it’s own arm band, and a lanyard for wear around your neck. Nice I suppose if you are going snorkling, as it’s rated for up to 5 meters, but I hadn’t really been planing on taking my phone swimming with me, and I suspect it would not work well as an underwater speakerphone.

One of the objectives was to use buddy runner on my cell phone to track my running session. It’s designed to use the built in GPS and such to keep track of speed and position. I’m a bit bothered by the fact that once you hit ‘start’ on applications like this, if it tells you that you need to activate the GPS and cell location system, that it doesn’t recognize that you’ve done that and actually start when you get back to the application. In other words when I got done with my run today I discovered that I did not have a track of my running experience on the phone. Oh well.

Another mod I have to do to the case is punch a hole for the camera. One of the add-in’s on my phone uses the camera to determine the ambient light level, and if it deams the light level as ‘dark’ it dims the backlight on the phone. That kind of makes it hard to read the screen while it’s in the armband. I’m not sure how much tood that will do, as the armband may be holding the camera it self up to my arm, but the neoprene certainly isn’t letting much light in.

The run itself today was a bit worse than last Saturday. I followed the same basic course. The weather was significantly warmer, with relatively high winds. For the most part those winds were cross to my path, and much of my path has tree cover along the sides of the path to act as a wind buffer. The down side is that the wind increased evaporation, and the heat took it’s toll. I didn’t run even as well as I did Saturday, which in my opinion was no great shakes. That said, I think I got further on my way back on my final running attempt than I had on Saturday. Hoping that Friday afternoon’s workout ends up going even better. At the very least, it looks to be cooler.

I’m begining to wonder if it is going to be taking me longer than the 9 weeks the course is designed to get up to the distance and speed I should be going. I certainly don’t think that I’m ‘failing’ the course, as I have seen significant improvements in my endurance and my abilities in other areas. But it certainly doesn’t feel like I’m on ‘track’ for completing in 9 weeks. That said, I should be well on my way, and having registered for a 5k run this summer, I’m going to be working at making it happen by the time of the run.

I’m only 44 (45 a week after the week 9 cutoff) I may not be the 25 year old who takes the c25k experience and turns it into a lifelong career of running marathons, but I’m not quite dead yet either. And I’m working to make this go even better.

Stay safe.

I should have gotten another hour or two of sleep.

Never really a good blog begining when the subject is week 6′s wrapup session for c25k, is it? Not all that much I can do about it though, it’s a rough weekend for me. My niece graduates tomorrow afternoon, and I’m going to be doing a bit over 500 miles of driving to get there and back so that I can be available for SkyWarn on Monday. I won’t mention what I got for my niece for her graduation present, but I had to pick that up this morning, as well as make sure that the car was ready to go (oil change) do a recording of a radio net and helping someone check that they have access to the repeater system as well. I was up after work yesterday until after 11 am today, woke up at just after 3:00 pm and got ready to perform my session.

I could blame the wind, or just being tired. but I don’t know if that’s quite right. In any case it doesn’t really matter why I didn’t get quite as much running done as I would like. I just have to keep at it.

I did get to my turn around point, 12-13 minutes out, but the return was not as well done. I would say that I ran a bit over half the time.

I’m not going to get overly concerned with that unless I don’t see an improvement on Monday morning. It doesn’t matter at this point if I try to ‘re-run’ the session or not, as all of week 7 is the same routine as the final session of week 6. A brisk 5 min walk, followed by a 25 min run. I have great confidence that I will be completing that, and moving on to 28 min, and 30 min sessions the next two weeks. I may not be running a full 5k at that point, but I’ll be able to start from there and start building my speed over the weeks to come.

With all that I have to do this weekend, I really could have used a couple more hours of sleep…

Well, I didn’t go to the lake, but just about the equivalent. For the past several decades, railroad right of way has been being converted into bike and running trails. Now I don’t ever expect to be trying to bike the full series of trails, much les run them, but they do have a couple of nice features for runners.

Unimproved surfaces, actually they are improved over what was there to begin with, tend to be gravel that has not had hundreds of 5,000 lb cars driving over them every week. Improved surfaces tend to be blacktop. Both tend to be easier to run on than concrete (sidewalks) though not as nice as a level grass area.

The other major advantage is that they tend to be very close to flat. Railorads do not like to drag trains up hills, or have to try to slow them down comming down hills. Where they do, accidents tend to happen. One of the early solutions to this was that in general railroads have no more than a 3% grade, and usually under 1%. Now the trails that you can ride and run on beside the tracks don’t always follow those guidelines, but for the most part they tend to have a similar slope.

I was complaining that on both my Week 5 session 3 run, and on my Week 6 session 1 run that I ended up havign to take a break when dealing with running up a longish hill. For me a long hill is one that has an elevation change of greater than 30 feet, over a length of 3 city blocks, without a grade change. So today I ran along a portion of what becomes the Luce line trail further out. As I was running, I was not keeping track of exactly where I was in the interval, time wise. However we tend to be reasonably good at estimating how much further we can go at the current pace, and I was looking out over to the top of the next hill and saying, “Yes, I can make that if I have to.” near the end of each of the 10 min intervals.

So I have to say that today’s intervals went very well, and I’ll be looking to make further use of track-side trails, as well as lake side trails in the near future.

This past week I’ve gotten a couple of offers to join a Gym in the area. They are having a membership drive, and they normally charge $40 a month, pluss a fairly high (more than one month’s dues) sign up fee. To get more people in the gym, they opened 100 registrations up, first come, first serve, for a 2 year membership with a one time fee that equates to pahying $19.95 a month. So I stopped in yesterday, signed up. I’ll be going in tomorrow morning to pay my fee, then my membership starts Monday. In theory I could start earlier, however what I have to do beween now and Monday is going to make it very hard to get in to the Gym even this weekend. Monday is soon enough. In truth, I probably won’t get in till Tuesday, as Monday is a running day for me, and should be session 1 of week 7. (3 more weeks to go!)

If that offer is begining to sound attractive, some people may think it’s excessively high even at $20 a month, check your mail. I suspect that the Gym I joined is not the only one working on building membership.

One of the reasons I joined is that I hope that the upper body, core, back and arm workouts will help with my longer term endurance, and also I’m hoping that I can do some leg work that will help me with those hill climbing runs. The hills that are giving me issues, I don’t think should be doing so in the long term. I’m hoping this will help.

Odd bit of spam that Akismit hit this week. Someone suggested that my blog didn’t display correctly in Firefox. Considering that’s all I look at the blog in, it kind of surprised me. About the only thing that I can think of that really didn’t lay out the way I wanted it to was the caption for my run Sunday. And that was an issue even in the writing. I don’t think that it was a firefox specific problem, but I could be wrong.

Oh, well, Have fun, run, feel great.