We are 2 weeks into a long family/friends trip on east coast, and I did FINALLY get out for a run. It was 6:30am and overcast and still only 72 degrees… so I thought my time might be decent. Alas, the humidity was a challenge. My 5k 49 minute time was probably the slowest in past 9 years, despite the sea level advantage over my usual CO runs. Slower than my couch-2-5k walk/runs. But my Fitness Friends, I consider it a huge victory because I DID IT
Special bonus - our hotel is near the huge corporate grounds where my father used to work (and walk a few miles at lunch time - perhaps that is why he is doing so well at age 99). And where I worked one summer during college. So I just meandered on various sidewalks, road shoulders (few cars so early) and parking lot loops, enjoying the trip down memory lane.
Well done!!! Those 70+ degree dewpoints are a killer! Soul sucking. I’ve only run a few times at 5000 feet, but both trips were in the summer and I felt AMAZING and much faster than I was at home at 500 feet. Good for you for getting it done.
Today’s walk was 6 miles trough town and along the White Cliffs of Dover. Tomorrow is a museum day followed by train to Heathrow and we fly home on Monday.
Not too worried about my time. But… normally on East coast vacation I’d run at Cape Cod canal (sea level, breezy)… get a 3 minute advantage (5k) over Colorado - so I was surprised. Still ever so glad I did it.
I replaced my treadmill yesterday. My earlier treadmill is still functional, but with over 10 years of hard usage, the belt has sanded down a portion of the walking board underneath making the surface feel uneven. I expect a key contributing factor is 1-2 years ago, I realigned the belt by tightening one side. The side with the extra tight belt is the one that wore down.
Searching on Nextdoor, I found that my neighbor that is located ~1 mile away was selling a treadmill that meets my needs for only $25. She initially listed at a higher price and has been decreasing listed price rapidly until it sold. There is a special sequence of keys on treadmill to enter factory mode that shows lifetime usage stats for treadmill. In the long lifetime of the treadmill, it had only been used a total of 2 hours, with a total lifetime distance of 7 miles. I suppose there is a lot of home exercise equipment that is aspirationally purchased with the hope of working out regularly, but ends up getting used once or twice, then sits untouched in a garage for years.
The treadmill performed well in my constant pace running workout last night. I’d prefer a different shaped holder for my water bottle, but overall I prefer it to my previous one for constant pace running. My next HIIT workout on Tuesday will be the bigger challenge. I dislike that the timer constantly flips back and forth between incline % and time. I want to see the time constantly to know how far I am in to the interval. I’ll try placing phone on bookshelf rack, showing stopwatch. As a long term solution, I may attach a flat digital clock with stopwatch mode to the treadmill.
I will probably also try to fix my old treadmill with the sanded down walking board. I think there is a good chance that the walking board can be flipped upside down, such that the smooth side is on top and sanded down portion is on bottom. However, taking it apart and reassembling looks involved, with taking out motors and such. I’m glad to at least have a backup new (to me) treadmill, in case the fix goes wrong.
I haven’t heard of the 3-12-30 workout. Walking on a 12% incline no doubt makes it far more challenging. I have several different type of workouts on my treadmill. One of the more common ones is a 1 min on / 1 min off type HIIT, where I increase the incline by 0.5% with each interval. By the end of the workout, I am often doing intervals with the max speed and incline of the treadmill. A graph of my HR in my most recent HIIT workout is below.
If find HIIT intervals make the workout more interesting that doing the same thing at a constant pace for a long period. They also offer a variety of health and cardiovascular benefits that do not occur to the same extent in a constant pace workout. One downside is recovery is longer. It also interferes with sleep more as my attention remains high for much longer after the workout. For similar reasons, calorie burning remains high well after the workout.
This is the “hard usage” reference in my earlier post. The treadmill I replaced before the most recent one had a crack running across the full walking board, such that I nearly split it in 2.
Yeah, I was surprised to read that article and see she does it every day. I learned of it elsewhere, but I wanted to post something so people knew what I was talking about.
Reporting in from vacation. I had hoped to run at least 2 hours, possibly 3 while here. I don’t usually run on vacation since we are usually on the go all day, but this one with FDIL2’s family I knew would be different.
I wound up running 2:45 over the last 4 days. Pretty much the same route, as our Airbnb is in a rural area. The main road isn’t particularly safe with no shoulder. I would run on it 0.25 to the next street which was a little longer than our street’s half mile loop. It was ok for 4 days, but I’m glad I don’t have to do it all the time.
I’m also not used to waking up with daylight and it gets light here. 5:15 I’m up. H gets up about the same time. The other old adults about 7. The rest start getting up 8-9 with the last around 10-11. I’m used to being out and about by then. Here we start heading out around 2. But it’s been fun and interesting seeing how others do other things.
New study about the health benefits of a vegan diet: [1]
…switching to a vegan diet for just one month can alter the body’s epigenetic landscape in ways associated with reduced inflammation and biological aging…
Diet has long been linked to the risk of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain cancers. Yet scientists have only begun to understand how food influences the epigenome — the layer of chemical modifications that helps determine which genes are turned on or off without changing the underlying DNA sequence…
In addition to immune signals, the researchers found that the vegan diet was associated with increased promoter methylation in genes involved in several cancer-related and cell growth pathways. Increased promoter methylation can reduce the activity of genes within these pathways, suggesting the diet may influence cellular processes involved in growth and proliferation. The researchers also observed changes consistent with reduced activity in lipid metabolism pathways and increased activity in pathways related to insulin signaling, DNA repair and cellular stress responses.
Perhaps the most striking finding concerned biological aging itself. For this, the researchers examined biological age using epigenetic clocks — a mathematical biomarker that estimates a person’s biological age based on DNA methylation patterns rather than years lived. Two clocks designed to predict health outcomes suggested participants following the vegan diet experienced a deceleration in biological aging over the one-month study period.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mco2.70899 is the study. The comparison is between vegan and meat rich (>150g of meat per day). It appears to have been done in Germany. There does not seem to that much detail on what was in the diets.
