<p>I-Dad thanks for the report and the pictures. You look great!</p>
<p>I tried a jog/walk as part of getting ready for our summer hiking in Vermont and that was about my pace for a similar jaunt. I don’t have a fancy Garmin and know I wasn’t consistent about the interval work. I keep meaning to do that route again, because it’s a good length, but I am fundamentally lazy.</p>
<p>Got a pretty good work out at the gym. I lengthened some intervals to two minutes to see how high I could get my heart rate, (160), but the idea of pushing on to exhaustion just wasn’t appealing. How is one supposed to measure recovery heart rates? Mine goes down about 20 to 25 bps, in a minute. That going from pretty fast to a leisurely aerobic pace, not standstill. </p>
<p>I don’t know anything about timing and healthy looking people at the grocery store, but the people at the upscale farmers market all look fit!</p>
<p>Idad, great job on the 5k! I loved the picture too. Sounds like you had great weather for your race.</p>
<p>BB, I’m looking forward to reading about your training for Boston.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, welcome, and like others have said, try using the livestrong site to track your calories for a while. It can be really eye-opening.</p>
<p>I am going to test out my toe with some running today. I’ve been on the DL for a full month now, so I’m going to start back with the C25K. I still can’t wear normal shoes without some pain, but my running shoes are ok, so I’ll see how it goes.</p>
<p>We were at S’s school for parents weekend this past weekend, and happened by a marathon in the area. I jokingly said that maybe I would do that next year when we visit. S basically said, “mom, you will never run a marathon. Something will happen, work will make you too tired or you’ll break a toe or something.” Ouch, the truth hurts :).</p>
<p>Denmark’s new tax on saturated fat went into effect today. It’s levied at the wholesale level based on the saturated fat content and includes all products – butter, meat, dairy, etc. – with more than 2.3% saturated fat:</p>
<p>160 could be up there pretty high. The highest I’ve ever seen in nearly a year and half of monitoring every workout is 169. I’m pretty sure that’s all I’ve got.</p>
<p>Starting on page 9 of this PDF are two simple tests you can do (stepping up and down on a step and sitting and standing from a chair) that can be used with a “fitness factor” to estimate your max heart rate without doing a full-bore stress test. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it was pretty close when I did it a year ago.</p>
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<p>Heart rate recovery is simply the bps reduction in heart rate in 60 seconds after peak heart rate. There’s some debate about whether you will recover faster coming to a dead stop or continuing at a very low speed… and frankly, I don’t think these tests are that precise as they vary a lot. The Timex heart rate monitor had a recovery button that you could press and it would count off 60 seconds and display the recovery.The software that I use for the Garmin finds the best recovery for the workout and records it.</p>
<p>In my experience, very high heart rates are associated with crossing the “anaerobic threshold” – the point at which your body can no longer provide sufficient oxygen to the muscles being used. That’s also at the point where you will start to “feel the burn”. Once you hit the anerobic threshold, you can only maintain that pace for short time (seconds, maybe a minute). That’s why intervals can gas you so quickly – they are basically short excursions into the anaerobic threshold.</p>
<p>New activities seem to push into the anaerobic threshold quicker (for example, my jogging intervals) as opposed to an activity you’ve done a lot and become adapted to supplying oxygen to those particular muscles in that particular way. That’s basically the adaptation that has taken my heart rate from 90% walking up steep hills to 70% and the same adapatation that will eventually start to bring down my peak heart rate on these jogging intervals (I hope!). It’s also why doing the same cardio year after year starts to lose its effectiveness. If you try to overcome that acclimation with increased mileage, you are asking for injury, sooner or later.</p>
<p>Speaking of heart rates, I matched my highest average heart rate for an entire workout yesterday, averaging 90% of my max (149 bps) for the 42 minutes. I was not seeing my usual recovery on the walking intervals yesterday. I saw a 30 bps recovery on Tuesday compared to only 22 bps recovery yesterday. Shows how it can vary from day to day because I wasn’t particularly gassed yesterday compared to the other days I’ve done the same route.</p>
<p>@ idad - yeah, the Denmark thing, wow. If you look at what meat prices are like in all of Western Europe, slapping a tax on top of them makes a simple steak a real luxury meal.
Pass the brød, I guess…</p>
<p>Took my tired biking legs out for a run in my new Brooks Pure Connect shoes. Very light and pretty. 5.1 miles on a gorgeous afternoon- 70, dry, sunny. No wind, of course. The wind was reserved for my biking days. Felt good to run, even though I’m tired.</p>
<p>I guess the fat President thread got too political. Well, maybe a few posters will join us over here.</p>
<p>three miles, 9:30 pace, fastest I’ve run three miles in over ten years. Also spent a little time on the Smith Machine. It didn’t take much additional effort to run the faster pace and it was still a comfortable pace. My feeling is that I’ll just try to keep the pace between 9:30 and 10:00 outside of 1-mile runs.</p>
<p>Just realized that I’d posted this in the other thread, and that folks here might have some suggestions:</p>
<p>And to top that off, I was smited a good one by my Theraband, which I’d stretched over the top of a door to do pulldowns on; something that has worked just fine up until now. This time, while the band was at maximum extension, it came off the door and smote me across the top of the bra area. Ouch. And when the t-shirt came off, I had a lovely welt the entire way across. Which is still visible this morning. </p>
<p>Long way around of asking: I need something to wedge in a closed door that has a biggish loop through which I can thread either a Theraband or a stretchy tube with handles for my exercises. Any suggestions? (I already own all the bands and tubes I think I want for the moment, but I wish not to be smote again. Ever.)</p>
<p>Tie a knot in one end of the Theraband. That’s what we do in our PT clinic… We have a loop or a knot in each end and stick them in doors all the time… No problems at all…</p>
<p>Sorry, arabrab for chuckling at your plight.
I had a similar situation where I managed to whip an Xertube into my ponytail, painful and very hard to detangle!</p>
<p>Here’s the Theraband brand door anchor, sold separately for $7.95. If you wait a few weeks, they’ll have their free freight deal. I use the door anchors that were included with my bands. Same basic thing.</p>
<p>The key to using any of these door anchors safely is to put them on the side of the door so that your pulling force is trying to pull the door shut, not wedge it open so the anchor can slip out and smote you.</p>
<p>You could improvise by rolling up a wash towel, looping the middle of the theraband around the towel, with both ends coming back thru the loop to cinch it around the towel. Then, just stick the towel on one side of the door with the two ends of Theraband coming over the top of the door.</p>
<p>This won’t work as well with the tubing.</p>
<p>A door anchor is just a loop of nylong webbing around something that is too big to come thru the crack in the top of the door.</p>
<p>Really dumb questions. What does it mean when your lungs feel, for lack of a better word, “milky”? That’s the only word I can think to describe it - almost like you’re breathing milk. (And no, I have no lung problems, asthma, etc. It’s just that a certain level of workout will induce this sensation.)</p>
<p>Also what does it mean when you sweat and it smells like ammonia - does that mean you are working too hard, not hard enough? (or that you Windexed yourself instead of the elliptical?)</p>