<p>^^^But it would be amusing to watch.</p>
<p>It certainly would bring a new dimension to doing squats with curl and press!</p>
<p>Got up early to hit the gym and H came along with me. I warned him I am there for more time than he usually is! He can’t stay on a machine longer than 20 minutes so he flits around while I work at least a minimum of an hour on the bike, 20 minutes on the treadmill and then some weights. As I expected he finished and sat and read the paper waiting for me and then came over before I finished because he wanted to leave…grrrrr. I really wanted to burn some extra calories as we have some tailgating plans and I wanted some wine today/night. Oh well! Came home and made egg white omelets with veggies. He loved them! Have a good day everyone!</p>
<p>I can add today’s Hope On Wheels 73 mile bike ride to my top 5 most unpleasant athletic events. Horrible, horrible, horrible. At least when I get myself into a running situation like that it doesn’t last 5 hours… And women with pink boas on their helmets don’t blow by me. I am NOT a cyclist. I hate cycling. It was hot, humid, windy and hilly. The wind was horrible. I almost got knocked off my bike a few times. I got dehydrated and *****ed at my husband a lot of the way (except when he wasn’t near me). My leg hurt, both arms hurt and my feet hurt. I finally took the metatarsal pads out of my shoes because it felt like there were hot coals in my shoes. My husband said the air wasn’t circulating and he was right. I didn’t have ANY trouble last week on the cool, flatter 62 miler. Did I mention that I hate cycling?</p>
<p>Sorry to hear about your bad cycling experience, MoWC. I hate riding in humid weather too. </p>
<p>I have a happier cycle report. I just took 2 and 1/2 weeks to ride in the Sierra, loaded bike touring, mostly camping but some B&Bs. When I was packing my gear, I figured that I’d need to allow for weather from just below freezing to above 100. I was right: several days it was below freezing when I got up, and in the 80s by the afternoon. I had a few days of cold rain, a few hot afternoons where I could go for a swim. I did 865 wonderful miles, and-- despite a diet none of you would approve of, that leaned heavily on Coke, Snickers bars, bacon and hashbrowns-- I lost 5 pounds.</p>
<p>Just in case any of you were wondering, here’s a reminder (that I should have followed): when riding in the desert into a headwind, bring lots of water. At one point I came to a spot where I thought there would be a store where I could get water. Instead of doing the intelligent thing and treating some water from the river, I decided to press on for another 13 miles. Did I mention, into a headwind? I hope never to repeat that dehydration-a-thon.</p>
<p>Well, I do eat maybe a Snickers bar once every few years. They’re in the kitchen at work. The biggest problem I have had with them is pulling out temporary crowns. I’m fine with has browns too. Have given up Coke and I don’t eat bacon. 865 is a lot of miles.</p>
<p>Heading out to do weights.</p>
<p>Put on my wedding ring and it went on. I showed it to my wife and then took it off as I was worried about circulation issues. I will probably be able to wear it regularly when I take off another ten to fifteen pounds. Not doing any running today because of the knee twinge yesterday. It feels good today but a day of running rest isn’t a bad thing.</p>
<p>Hey BC, here’s a little gizmo you might consider for your iPod nano:</p>
<p>[Apple</a> - Take Nike + iPod on your run.](<a href=“http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike/run.html]Apple”>iPod touch - Official Apple Support)</p>
<p>There’s a sensor that you can attach to your shoestrings. Then, a little receiver (the same size as the connector on your iPod docking cable) plugs into the iPod. It measures and records your time and distance as you run or walk. Press the center button and a voice tells you your mileage, time, and current pace. When you synch your iPod, it uploads the runs to the nike website where you can review them and track totals, fastest times, and so on and so forth. For $29, it’s a lot cheaper than a GPS watch.</p>
<p>The little sensor fits in a cavity in the sole of Nike shoes. Or, you can get little velcro pouches designed to hold it in the laces and easily transfer between different shoes.</p>
<p>You can even go to a running track with a known distance and calibrate it to your own stride, although it seemed to be pretty darn close first time out for me today. A segment that I had measured as 1.56 miles on Google pedometer came out as 1.58 miles on the iPod. Close enough for government work! I don’t know which one is right.</p>
<p>I suspect that none is right. Just like flight trackers, these gadgets are a bit off. Otherwise, terrorists’ jobs would be too easy.</p>
<p>The iPod Nano fifth-generation comes with a built-in pedometer.</p>
<p>Also, I plan to use a wireless headset which uses the dock so it wouldn’t be available for another device. BTW, I did get the wireless headset to work again. It appears that sweat short-circuits the buttons and that letting it dry out gets it working again. Perhaps I need to do a better job at drying it out after a workout. I will keep my Sennheisers in my bag as a backup.</p>
<p>One other thing about the Sennheisers: you can use them as PC headsets with an adapter. I plan to get the adapter to place calls from my PC using gmail.</p>
<p>Perhaps Apple will add a GPS to the iPod Nano in the seventh generation. Adding maps would be cool so that you could navigate using GPS while walking in the city.</p>
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<p>Yes, but all that does is count steps, correct? It doesn’t track time or distance as I understand it.</p>
<p>I just looked and yes, it does just count steps.</p>
<p>As I understand it, pedometers can be calibrated to track distance. All you need to know how much distance you cover with each step - you measure how many steps it takes for you to run a certain known distance and then you plug those numbers nto the pedometer, and it does the math for you as you run.</p>
<p>The issue with pedometers is accuracy as your stride distance can change considerably with speed. I think that a GPS approach works better though I haven’t personally tried one out.</p>
<p>Cardinal Fang, I’m impressed. Except for the dehydration, it sounds like a great trip! (#4705)</p>
<p>^^ What VeryHappy said.</p>
<p>The iPod mileage thing (isn’t it called Nike Plus?) is worthless. I know people who have tested them at length and they are extremely inaccurate- and by a LOT. Pedometers are also worthless except as a tool to aim for x number of steps per day or something like that but NOT for distance.</p>
<p>It was a wonderful trip, VeryHappy. On every bike tour, there will be some difficult parts. You get through them, and they become the stories you tell the next time.</p>
<p>^^ What a great trip! The gorgeous scenery must have been memorable too.</p>
<p>I am impressed and inspired by the serious commitment to exercise on this thread. I’m at the “something is better than nothing” stage. I was good about exercise up through my 30s (my S recently found my original Jane Fonda album and admired it like the relic that it is). Then I was haphazard in my 40s (though having a child at 41 kept me moving), and I don’t even want to talk about my 50s. I’m not totally sedentary–more like moderately active–and my normal energy level is pretty high. I live in the city so I tend to walk more. I just need to commit to something simple but effective. So far I have increased my walking and added a free-weight routine that I have started doing three times a week as of this week. We belong to a gym, but not a fancy one (the treadmills are terrible, IMHO). I’m getting a new pedometer that counts steps. I’m going back to something I started last winter: getting up from my home office desk twice a day and stair-climbing (on actual stairs). I have cycled through this process so many times over the years that it isn’t funny, but I’m trying not to beat myself up over that. This decade is just going to be different!</p>
<p>Went to the gym for half an hour, did lots of ab and upper body work (still being careful about my sprained ankle), then went to the pool and swam about a mile. I was planning on swimming more but my ankle started to hurt so I called it a day.</p>
<p>It’s still more than I’ve done in one day in a while, so I’m calling it progress.</p>
<p>Plan for this week is M: pilates and yoga, T: yoga, W: pilates, Th: zumba, F: gym and pool, S: gym and pool. (all these classes are free through my college, so I might as well take advantage of them!)</p>
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<p>The concensus seems to be that the Nike + is accurate to within at least 10% right out of the box and can be as good as within 2% after calibration. Now, 10% is a pretty big deal if you are training for a marathon. It could be as much as 2 miles off.</p>
<p>It was pretty darn accurate for my first walk. I have a portion of my walk that is clearly visible on Google Maps pedometer, so I can plot the route accurately, including my driveway and the side of the road I walk on. I touch a wooden gate across the road at the halfway mark, a gate that is visible on Google. Google says that round trip is 1.589 miles. When I touched the fencepost yesterday, my iPod said that I had walked .79 miles. That’s pretty darn close.</p>
<p>I can’t get quite as accurate a read on my entire walk because about a third of it is in the woods and I can’t find the exact trail locaton through the trees on Google satellite view. But, the best I can approximate, Google says that my route yesterday is 4.16 miles. The iPod and Nike + said that I walked 4.24 miles. That’s withiin 2% and I haven’t calibrated the unit yet.</p>
<p>I’ll go to the local high school track and walk a 2k (5 laps). The unit will use that time to calibrate to my stride. As I understand it, the unit is pretty accurate if you calibrate it using a typical pace, not as accurate if you calibrate it with a 400 meter pace and then go out and run a marathon pace.</p>
<p>People seeing large errors are usually attaching the sensor upside down or attaching it so that it is loose and can jiggle, which is a problem since it measures the foot strike force and time.</p>
<p>On a run, you start out slowly, run at various rates and then slow down or sprint to the end. At least those are my usual patterns. My running pace can be as slow as 4.5 miles per hour to over eight miles per hour. In general, I try to keep the steps per time unit from varying too much which means that my stride increases considerably when running at a faster pace.</p>
<p>My guess is that the pedometer-style devices are okay for walking where your stride is fairly constant.</p>