Day: March 15, 2006

Swim

Managed to drag myself to the pool this evening after scrubbing the bathrooms ’cause my mom’s showing up tomorrow. I even picked up my room. Funny how, even with kids of your own, your mom can make you feel twelve when you don’t see her so often.

The pool was wet. The pool was cold. C, my erstwhile swimming partner, decided to stay at home and eat chocolate. Something about wanting to get off early this weekend. Tall guy stood me up, too – this is like a week without seeing him at the pool.

The first 500 yards were good. Second were pretty good, too, but there was the feeling at the back of my mind that something wasn’t quite right. Probably wanted to get home to clean something. Started the third 500, and at the end felt really winded. Fourth 500 – pushed off the wall to get going, and just decided to bag it right there.

So, I didn’t make my workout goals, but I also didn’t push myself into extremis. I’d be upset, but I’ve gotten off of the couch three days in a row. There’s something to be said for that. Though I wish I’d snuck in a run on Tuesday.

Sorry – nothing earth-shattering tonight. Maybe Friday.

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Mooooore things the RBF could’a told you

Researchers have shown that Chocolate Milk works well as a recovery beverage.

Joel M. Stager, Ph.D., professor of kinesiology at Indiana University, said “Chocolate milk contains an optimal carbohydrate to protein ratio, which is critical for helping refuel tired muscles after strenuous exercise and can enable athletes to exercise at a high intensity during subsequent workouts.”

I’ve indirectly pushed moo juice here and here, not only for recovery but for weight loss, too. Plus, it just tastes great.

Which brings up something that’s been nagging at me for a couple of months. I started an as-yet unpublished exploration of how to set up a project to re-evaluate running and fitness memes by mining the blogs on the RBF. We’re somewhere north of 500 blogs, or a potential half of a person-millenium of raw data each year on real-life fitness. The advantage I’d see in mining RBF data as opposed to studies is that we’re essentially using real people, with real commitments, existing health issues, and lives to gather data on fitness, weight loss, injury and recovery, diet, etc. Most of the studies that current fitness wisdom is based on, like the one that Dr. Stager did, uses either groups of college atheletes or other easily identifiable controls to develop theories.

What I’d like to do, were I tech-savvy with a couple of weeks on my hand, would be to set up a flexible fitness correlary to Wikipedia, a place where we could list the various theories on weight loss or marathon training, for instance, and then tie them back to revelant real-world data. Answer questions like “What works for treating ITB syndrome?”, etc.

We’ve run the tests. We have the data. There’s an opportunity to re-write or confirm basic ideas about health, fitness, and going from a couch potato to a runner/cyclist/swimmer/whatever. Call it an “Open-Source Fitness” process; merge it with the work that the Cross-Fitters have been doing, whatever.

So somebody, please – write this up as a grant. Get yourself six months of funding and a new MacBook Pro out of the deal. Let us know things we’ve already told ourselves.

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One for me, and one for my Hobbitt

Warning! Spoilers for 24 follow.

What a day! Finally got some product out the door at work, though I don’t know how it’s going to be received. Read the boy his story. Turned in some library books (Is it just me, or is a good local public library the absolute greatest? Thank you, Groton Public Library. Flexible hours rock.) Caught the last half hour of work night at the church. Dragged the trash and recycling to the curb.

And finally climbed back on the stationary trainer to watch 24. It’s been a couple of weeks since I haven’t screwed up the VCR (if anyone wants to send me the parts to hack together a MythTV, I’d be happy to blog it), so I’m like 4 hours behind. Thankfully, the world is still about to end, and Keifer Sutherland still looks like he wants to kill someone. The President’s wife was still alive, so I’m guessing that the President called off the assassination of the Russian Premier. The terrorists were still mad, but I’m guessing they would have double-crossed the pres if he’d let them whack the Russians. ‘Else they would have had to rename the show “12”.

Big body count in tonight’s episode – Edgar, the chunky hacker bites it in a poison gas attack on CTU. Then the hobbit bites it. Which is kind of bad; I’d come to identify with his character – chunky public servant, handsom as all get-out, sharp as a tack. Sucks in a lungful of gas after saving the rest of the folks at CTU. There are worse ways to go.

45 minutes later, I climbed off the trainer. Thought briefly about doing Pilates, but then bed started calling.

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