Devauld.ca

I have not gone running, just for the sake of running, since my days in University. With my new resolution for fitness, I've picked the torch back up and have been slowly increasing my endurance and strength.

Helping me track the progress is my Nike+iPod, which diligently keeps track of what I'm doing while I keep myself distracted from the pain listening to a state of trance. Through it's website, it allows you to set and obtain goals tailored to each individual. It also contains a plethora of snazzy graphs and charts:

This morning run was part of Nike's Human Race which had hundreds of thousands of participants around the world. With thousands of results still to come in, I'm currently in 17,516th. You can see from the graph that the uphill battles wore me out more during the second 5 kilometers. Although, I was able to find some reserve energy and finished the last kilometer pounding out the best time I could.

With my 10Km goal under my belt, now my goal is to get faster. Currently I can run 2km at a pace of 6m45s/km. My run today, being 5x the distance, averaged me 7m12s/km. I'd like to run 10k in under an hour, so I need to shave 12-13 minutes off my time. The first step is to get my mid-day 2km runs under the 12 minute mark, then to bleed that anaerobic work over to the aerobic engine.

One thing is absolutely certain. With my heart rate monitor telling me I fed over 1600 calories into the engine of exercise, and my pedometer telling me I killed over 1300, I am certainly allowed to relax my 'no processed carbohydrate' diet and enjoy a beer.

or two...

A common theme amongst my family members is that they can't easily get to my photos since the move to WordPress. Clicking on the images is not self evident, so I decided to put the flickr badge back in the sidebar. Logging into the administration area, WordPress' usual message that I was out of date was hung at the top of the page, and as soon as I saw it, I figured that I would also want to update that as well. I installed WordPress using Dreamhost's wizzy one-click install, so I figured that I would check them out to see if they had something to help in this area.

Since I've made the switch to Dreamhost a few years ago, I've been very impressed by them. Again, they did not disappoint. Under their one-click management page, there is a simple button that says upgrade. Clicking on it will tell you where all your backup files will be placed, and confirming that you've read it they tell you that it will be done by their happy robot in a 10-15 minutes. By the time I brought my e-mail up, the upgrade was done.

A trip through the widget gallery and I had my Flickr badge and Xbox gamer card added back to the sidebar. The upgrade and changes made in less than 15 minutes. The experience brought back memories of running the server myself, and having to do upgrades manually.

I stepped on the scale.

One's mind always has an expectation, and my expectation was a whole pile lower than what the scale threw back at me. I was stunned, although in honesty, not as stunned as when I saw the pictures of myself in what used to be a lose fitting t-shirt. It is becoming more apparent that my lack of physical activity, coupled with the refined carbohydrate diet has built a load of fat up on me. I'm currenly over 280 pounds with a whopping 32.5% body fat. Calculating my BMI puts me into the Obese category, which is a far cry from the fit 210 pound rugby player that existed five years ago. I've seen friends of mine undergo massive transformations in their health and fitness and now it's my turn.

Currently I'm attacking two points of fitness. The first is my diet, and the second is fitness. I'm not going to make any drastic changes in diet, specifically in quantity, but rather on what I eat. I'm going to be cutting out refined carbohydrates, filling the void with fruits and vegetables. Eating foods that have less energy density, as well as foods that don't cause as much of an insulin response will drastically help in this area without me getting all cranky about being hungry.

The second front of attack is adding regular fitness back into my life. The key in this area is to not try and tackle a mountain at the start, instead to just add small bits regularly until it becomes routine. I'm going to be mixing in interval training and plyometrics to break up the aerobic training. If I'm too lazy to go outside, I'm going to force myself to some casual time rowing in front of the television. The key here is not to have intense workout, or even long workouts, but to get the heart rate up regularly.

The old adage is "If it can be measured, it can be improved". The first step is to know where I currently stand. It would appear I do more sitting than standing. I wore my heart rate monitor while working today and came up with a resting heart rate of 93. I'm sure my future is going to contain a database so I can track progress, and determine if I've stalled, but for now paper is sufficing. I also picked up the cute little Nike Sport pedometer, and paced out a route with my GPS to test it's accuracy. The GPS registered 2.17km for the trip, and the pedometer registered 2.14km, inside 2% even before it is calibrated. Now the largest thing to overcome: Keeping motivated.

Sonja and I had one story that definitely comes to the front of the mind when asked about the trip we just had. Nearing the end, we drove from the West Coast to Edmonton to attend a wedding on Saturday. On Friday night, with some time to kill, we check into the Trailway Motor Inn and watched some of the Olympics. Once we'd relaxed from the car ride, we decided to head out for some sushi and a movie.

We took in The Dark Knight and I was blown away. The direction of the new batman movies is phenomenal. All the way back to the hotel I was geeking out on the various degrees of awesomeness that were contained within, although I'm not sure if Sonja shared my level of enthusiasm.

We arrived back at the motel, and grabbed our purchases and brought them to the door. I used the old key to open the door, and reached inside to find the light. When I couldn't feel the switch, I glanced to the wall to find it and from the chain clasp was a small bat.

Seriously.

I made a remark along the lines of "That's odd" and reached up to poke the critter to check for life. Just as Sonja was asking what I found so odd, I made contact and spooked the slumbering mammal from the chain. He flew out into the light, narrowly missing my torso, and then flew straight at Sonja.

Her screamed no doubt screwed with his sonar, and he circled between the two humans at the door and the coke machine. He was moving fast, and we tried our hardest to stay away from any contact. After a couple shrill shreaks, and a couple dive bombs the terrifying moment was over and our furry friend flew off into the night.

Then it got weird.

The door next to ours and a man filled the doorway. He was an older guy, his hair losing the war 10 years ago to grey and a new battle with the forehead beginning. He was larger, and obviously drunk. His intoxication was not only evident from the slurring of his voice, or the odour streaming from his room, but from the fact that he was not wearing any pants or underwear. In fact, the only thing he was wearing was a black tank top. He came out yelling, wanting to know if there was some sort of problem. For some reason my brain could not put together a bat story to tell the nearly naked man. In fact, my brain felt like it was trapped in a Pink Floyd video.

Through the open door I went, assuring him that everything was fine. He managed to keep the conversation, or at least his end of it, going stammering about a domestic dispute. We both kept telling him that everything was fine, all the time making a very conscious effort to not look at him in any way. Oblivious to our desire to the the conversation, as well as the fact that he was in fact indecently exposed, he stayed in the doorway while we quickly put a plan in motion to get the hell out of there.

In the space of ten minutes we had retrieved all the stuff from the room, received a refund from the manager, and painstakingly talked an obese drunken exhibitionist from the doorway. While we were driving about looking for another hotel, I asked Sonja if she had a pen and paper so I could write down what happened, because I knew I never wanted to forget it.

The holiday is over, and we're back at the home base. The trip did not wizz by in the way that I thought that it would. Having our 4 day hike along the second part of the Juan de Fuca trail was a good choice, as I was able to unwind relatively early in the vacation. Coming out of the woods, there was a nice sense of complacency. Continuously, the beauty of Vancouver Island stunned me and our surrounding and company were very enjoyable while we toured about in the heat.

I snapped in excess of nine hundred photos on the two week trip, which shows that I made progress in my effort to cut back on the number of photos. Hopefully this set can be processed in less time than the 2-week European vacation last year.

We decided to cut our holiday short by a day arriving home last night instead of this morning. The car puked up it's contents, half of which are still sprawled throughout the house. Already the tendrils of life are poking at me, knowingly winding me up for the work week ahead.