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.

This may seem like being flippant to some people. I’m OK with that. I’m also well aware that there are millions of people who suffer from test anxiety. I do know what it is, primarily through observation. I’m far from perfect, and I have not passed ‘every’ test I’ve taken, but one of my observations over time is that I don’t seem to suffer from test anxiety.

First of all test anxiety is essentially a form of a panic attack. It’s a mechanisim that many people, perhaps even most, have of dealing with the uncertainty of their future, and how this exam can impact that future. The mind goes into overdrive thinking of all the possible ways things could go wrong, and what some of the really bad things that will happen if they ‘fail’ this exam.

Part of this has to do with the way our educational system had developed. You get one chance at most exams from preschool through your PhD disertation. Each time you are ’stuck’ with whatever result you got. Didn’t do well on the spelling quizes? Well that’s OK, we’ll just remember that through the rest of your school life. It won’t really matter anywhere else like your creative writing, or on any reports. But as you prepare to turn in your creative writing paper, or that project report, you fret about whether you misspelled words, and will you loose points for that. And yes those things do matter. However let’s take a look at a few other things, and we’ll see that all of these are things you can work around.

So you go through school, and then what? Well perhaps you dropped out early. Or you might have completed HS then went into the military. Or who knows, went into the work force, college, acedameia. The are all possibilities. Let’s take a look at a couple of ‘real world’ examples of things that some people do right out of High School. The results may surprise you.

So you go out and find a job. Perhaps its as a fry cook at the diner, or who knows. Along the way you earn a little bit of money and decide it’s time to get your own set of wheels. Of course it’s probably a good idea to get a licence to drive if you are going to get a car. Right? So you catch the bus, or walk over to the local test center, or perhaps look online, and see that there are two exams involved in getting a drivers licence. The first is a written exam. It might be administered by a computer, but you get the idea. It’s either true/false or multiple choice questions.

What are the questions on? Well, the questions are primarily aimed at making sure you understand the laws of the place you live as regards to driving. Oh, they are not going to ask you which law, and what section applies to a specific situation, but they are concerned that you know such basic things as when you may pass another vehicle, how and when to use turn signals, what the local laws are regarding headlights and windshield wipers. You get the idea. Because you are probably not ready immediately they almost always have a handbook available that you can read, which goes over the questions that will be on the exam and they will suggest taking it home and comming back when you are ready to take the exam.

The handbook is a larger format than a paperback book, but is significantly shorter front to back, and content wise is fairly short as well. Also they give you sample questions through the book so you understand the type of questions that will be asked at the exam center when you take your written exam. In fact they have more questions in the book than the test will contain, because most of the written tests are designed to be taken and completed in a faily short period of time, 20 min to an hour, and if they put too many questions on the exam, no one will pass.

That’s really the trick to passing most written exams. Know that your study material is going to cover stuff that will not be on the exam. You won’t know what the specific questions you will get on exam day, but in most cases you will have some idea of what the topics being asked about are. If you are prepared to spend a bit of money, you can often take ’sample’ tests to see how prepared you are. If you think this will help you to feel a bit more comfortable when you go in to test, take them. However the real trick is to remember that whether you pass the exam on the first time or not, doesn’t really matter.

Oh, the people at the exam center are probably not going to be all that happy about administering a test to someone who didn’t pass, but they see that often enough that they will take it with sense of humor if you are comfortable with that, and in most cases will explain to you what areas of the exam you need to bone up on before you come back.

Go home, crack open the handbook and take a closer look at the areas where the administrators say you need to study a bit more. Look at the sample questions again. Notice any that are familiar from the exam? Probably. The best part is that if you see the same question, you can now say, OK why is ‘that’ the correct answer? and get even more out of the book.

So you take your time, study, and you feel you are ready. Go back. Take the exam again. Whether you pass or fail again, you’re further along, and unless there is some fundamental reason that you don’t get the right answers, it’s almost a given that you will ultimately pass. A really ‘rookie’ mistake is to presume that the order of the responses given in the sample questions has some bearing on the order of responses on the exam. Usually this is not the case. That way you can’t ‘memorize’ the ‘letter’ response to a collection of questions and pick that letter just by knowing that ‘A’ is the correct response to ‘When you are aproaching an intersection with a train crossing…’ After all the examiners just may throw in a response to ‘A’ of ‘Don’t worry about it, the train only comes through on the 7th Tusday of the 14th month.’

So you’ve taken the writen exam one or more times, and you pass. Now what? Well in most cases the state will give you a learner’s permit that has some specific rules attached to it. Depending on the local rules, you may have a couple of hand and eye co-ordination tests, or a brief visual test to see if you can read some letters at a projected distance. If you can’t you may be advised to see an optometrist to have your eyes checked out, and you may need to wear glasses when you go back. If that’s the case, be prepared to wear them whenever you drive. It will be noted on your permit and licence that you need to have prescription eyewear on at all times when operating a vehicle. (If you later on go through a procedure like Lasic and your vision is corrected to 20/20, or whatever the requirements are in your state, you will be given a document from the doctor that will declare that your vision has been corrected, and the restriction will be lifted from your licence/permit.

The next ‘major’ hurdle is the behind the wheel exam. For this you will want to do two things. First up get some classroom experience. In almost every city there is at least one school available to you to go through Drivers Education. The instructors are (generally) good humored people who want you to pass your behind the wheel exam and will give you a great grounding in the rules of the road as they apply to being behind the wheel. Oh, the rules are not different from those you studdied for the written exam, however putting the acedemic knowledge into practice is not necessarily simple. Better schools will have simulators of some sort that you can use to build up some skills, however at some point the instructor is going to put you behind the wheel of a car, that they are going to get into as well, and they will have you drive a variety of courses to become familiar with how to operate the vehicle.

Take advantage of these schools. Sure they cost money, but it’s almost a given that you will learn more from these instructors than almost anyone you might work with otherwise.

You may also find a car simulator that you can play with on your computer or game console. Most of the time these come with the explanation that they are a ‘racing’ game, or the like. Ask though, and it’s very often possible to find one that will also allow you to ‘play’ in ‘drivers ed’ mode. You don’t get points for completing laps the fastest. You loose points for doing things ‘wrong’.

For some interesting practical experience, find someone who is licensed and sit down with them. Let them know that you want to get your drivers license, and that you would appreciate it if they would give you some additional experience based on how they guide you around as a passenger. Oh, they may not be all that great at parallel parking themselves, but you’ll learn a bit more about how you interact with someone in the car with you besides that helpful instructor at the school.

Somewhere along the line you’ll decide you are ready to have a behind the wheel exam. Find out what the schedule is for your exam station, get on it, and go. You may need to bring your own vehicle, though if you have been working with a school, the examiner and school may be able to work with you to use one of those vehicles instead.

Again, look at the exam as a ‘how am I doing’ exam, not a ‘must not fail, must pass’ exam. If you go in with that mindset, you’ll be far better prepared than you might initially be expecting. And you will be far more relaxed.

That really is the trick to taking exams. After all in ‘real life’ as opposed to school, you can go back at any time and retake an exam that you feel it is important to know that you understand what is going on, or for which you believe you need the pass for. So take it with the understanding that if you don’t do as well as you expected, you can come back to it later on.

And when it comes down to it, there is some of that truth related to school as well. So you missed 5 words on the 20 word spelling test. Ok, what were the words. Write them down correctly. Do that a few times. Now do that a few more times. Use the words in a couple of simple sentences. You’ll most likely know them in the next day or two. And move on. There are a large number of text to speach programs out there now. Put together spelling tests for yourself. Have the computer read to you the word. wait a bit, then read the next word. Write each word. Go back and see how you did.

Get a tape recorder or use the audio recording program on your computer, and record spelling tests to give yourself later on. You’ll do fine.

There are other ‘exams’ that you may be running into that being relaxed and prepared will help for as well. There are a surprising number of people on high blood pressure medication because when they go to the doctor, they get concerned about what their blood pressure will read. The nurse may be a bit defferntial and all ‘professional’ like, and you are completely unaware that you are getting into a higher state of stress. Your heart rate goes up. and so does your blood pressure. And after a couple of visits, you are sat down and the doctor tells you that the results of the last few blood pressure exams concern him or her, and all of a sudden you are looking at a diagnosis of hypertension.

It happens. So be aware that it’s a potential concern. But don’t get worked up about it, or it will be a self fulfilling concern.

Remember to go out, take walks and run, play with the kids and the dogs, watch the cat, and have fun.

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.

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!

…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.

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.

I’m going to call it a success, though some may think otherwise.

I started in the lower left corner with the 5 min walk to warm up. Even with pausing to wait for a car to turn a corner, I actually got further in this walk than I had in previous sessions along this route.

if you want to look for yourself on maps.google.com, or google earth, the .kml I generated the image from is available at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/c25k/May10.kml just copy that url and paste it into the search field on maps.google.com, or download the .kml file and tell google earth to open the file. (if you just paste the URL into the address field of your browser, and you have google earth installed, it may even ask you if you would like to open the file with google earth, go ahead.

Along medicine lake on my route is the Sunny Hollow Elementary school. About a quarter of the way across the portion of the sidewalk that is between the exit and entrance fo the parking lot I started my run.

About a quarter of the way along Hidden Valley Park is where I had turned off this path Friday morning, and knew I was going to be doing some walking then. Today I was feeling a lot better, so I continued on, and almost immediately felt better for not stopping or pausing along the way. My turn was between points 57 and 58 on the run today.

There’s a gentle slop there on up to the catholic school, and the corner at 36th. All along that I felt pretty good. I made the turn and knew that I was about half way through the run, but since I had not grabbed a stop watch, and there is no ‘midway’ indicator in the MP3 mix for today, I wasn’t exactly sure.

In any case there’s a brief downhill slope to where the creek goes under 36th, and then a much steeper slope up to next turn. Someone else can check, but I think the change in elevation is about 40 feet in less than half a mile. I know that it was beating me up a bit, and that I did not maintain my hoped for minimum 5 mph or higher through that section. But I did continue to run. I made my turn and continued on. It is a much more gentle slope here, but still up hill, and finally I couldn’t run any more. I walked for what I thought was about 15 seconds, caught my breath and then started running agin. and got the ‘run finished’ indicator tones 10 seconds later.

So while it was not perfect, I do think that it was close enough that I am going to continue on with week 6 this week.

I will give myself a day of recuperation. This next week I will be running Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Following that I will run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but from then on I am going to be running more on my ‘weekend’ than anything else. I’m switching first to Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (afternoon) then I’m planning on making my workouts be Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. Saturday will be when I wake up after work Friday night, or before I go into work Saturday night, on those days.

Perfect? No, but completed to the point I’m going to move on. I suspect that had I a running partner, I would have completed today without any concerns this time. I’m not throwing horse shoes or hand grenades, (or atomic bombs for that matter) but I’m comfortable with ‘close enough’ at this point.

Have a great day everyone.

Well, as you can probably tell by the title, I’m not really satisfied with my results today. I can come up with a number of plausable reasons, or combinations of reasons, but it comes down to either re-do this week, or redo today’s run this weekend.

As I’ve indicated before, I work nights, and last night was no exception. So when I ran this morning I had come off of a 12 hour shift, along with about a 1 hour bus ride each way. On top of that, I did not sleep well yesterday. I think I was up some 5 times in the 7 hours I was planning on sleeping. So when I went to run this morningI was not in the best condition. That said, I had hoped to do better than I did. I would say that I don’t think I did as well today as I did Wednesdayh, but I could be wrong.

I started out well enough. I got further during my warm up walk than I had the last time I too anything like this route. Once I started running I was going along well enough, but at about 7 and a half minutes I had to recover. I walked for about a minute, then got back going again. 2 and a half minutes later I needed to recover some more. This time I think I walked for a minute and a half. Then I got back to running. I’m a bit fuzy on how long I ran this time. I wasn’t tracking the intervals this time very well, but I did take another walking break and got to running with about four and a half minutes left, and stuck to it till the end of the 20 minute interval. So worst case I walked about 5 min of the 20, and best case I walked about 4 minutes.

My plan at the moment is to try to get a good night’s sleep Saturday night, and make another attempt Sunday morning. If that works, I’m going to roll Week 6 a day back and start Tuesday morning. I’ll take to running before I go to work in the evening. Presumably I will get a good day’s sleep on Thursday and Saturday. Then I’ll continue on with Week 7 the following Monday.

This schedule presents some problems for me participating in the 5K in June, as if I didn’t have enough problems with that, but I’m hoping that by then I will be in much better condition, and should be able to do a run like this, or longer, OK, quite a bit longer. It may not be ‘with ease’ and I’m not planning on setting any records in any case, but we’ll see what things look like in a week or so.

I suspect that one thing that will happen this weekend, is that I will force myself through a affine withdrawl headache. I suspect that is one of the things that kept waking me up yesterday.