Category Archives: Running

Mistreated Calories

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I am certainly blessed with good genetics as far as my weight goes, I have a great metabolism that hasn’t slowed very much so far. I will confess that while I enjoy exercise for the health benefits, my ulterior motive for exercise is to treat calories with utter disdain. I don’t eat too much fattening food, but I exercise so that when I do, I can pretty much just sneer at that Big Mac without any form of remorse at all. I exercise so I don’t have to care about those two beer, those four mini chocolate bars, and that pound of butter I ate last night.
I don’t respect calories at all. Never mind that I am undermining my own efforts when I do this, it’s one of the worst forms of discrimination, it’s calorieism.

My name is Courtney, and I am a calorieist.

Most folks have a lot more respect for calories than I do, I know that.  I need to change my perspective a bit, and put myself in their shoes for a bit.  Everybody hates them, the fewer calories there are, the better for most people.  Poor little buggers.  I should kiss and make up with this lemon poppyseed cake from Starbucks.  A little peace offering.

Nope, didn’t work.  I still ate it with a sneer.

Sigh.  It’s a long road.

Sweating it out at work

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I have been thankfully settling into a much more regular running routine since starting a new contract for an old client.  The shower facilities here allow for a midday run, which I really am learning to love.  It’s exactly the kind of energy boost I need sometimes, especially on days that I am particularly tired.  Even better is I get to run alongside the Rideau Canal, which is always picturesque.
All is not sunshine and roses though.  There’s a problem I have with exercising during the workday: sweat.  I can cover (a rather leisurely) 6km and get a shower done within an hour, which is my self-imposed limit so that I can still keep the billable hours up.  I eat lunch at my desk, and this passes my own moral test of conscience.  The real problem with this is I have no real time to do a proper cool down, so I hit the shower as I am just really starting to sweat profusely from my run.  I have the water as cold as it will go (for some reason this isn’t that cold here at work, but it’s still brisk) in an effort to chill my scrawny core down to below sweating-level, but it’s hopeless.  By the time I am half-way done getting dressed I’m still beading up and wiping off.  Rushing is not helpful.  I get back to my desk flushed and steamy, it’s not subtle, and it’s not the healthy glow of exercise that I have.  It’s more the gland-bursting, pit-stained frantic methamphetamine-induced kind of sweat that looks like I have been wrestling gorillas with Jane Goodall in the Amazon basin while wearing two angora sweaters.  It’s alarming to my coworkers to see a middle aged man sweating like that in the middle of the day.  I have had to fight off two separate workplace safety supervisors who were trying to start CPR to save me from my very obvious heart attack.

It’s entirely possible that I am extremely out of shape since I haven’t really done a heck of a lot of running this summer, and this will get better when I’m not working so hard.  I must say that the reality of running in the winter is looking more and more attractive, where before it seemed absolutely ludicrous.  Perhaps hypothermia will extinguish the internal heat in a more reasonable time frame.  Then it’s just the frostbite I need to worry about.

Too bad gamers are already fitness gods.

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Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) writes a really excellent blog that I follow religiously. This sentence doesn’t make sense, especially when you read a lot of his blog. Scott is rather sure that we are all moist robots living in an artificially constructed world, or possibly a very complicated computer program. It doesn’t matter, since this moist robot right here enjoys reading his stuff.

Recently he posted about an idea for a gym where all of the gym members participated in a MMO or multiplayer video game just by working out. The machines kept track of your efforts and these translated into points that made your team more competitive in the game. You could watch the game unfold in real time as you worked out on huge monitors, your team captains directing your real efforts so our team would beat others in the game. The harder you worked out, no matter what exercise you were doing, the better your team would do in the game. To say that this idea makes me excited is an understatement. I think I would be incredibly, scarily suited to this for many reasons:

  1. I’m a data nerd, the more detailed data the better. If it’s also about fitness, all the better. My running hobby (I wouldn’t call like 7 runs all summer a habit, but still) is largely driven by the fact that I can easily track it using my iPhone running app. If I wasn’t sure how far I was running, or how fast, or easily chart my progress, I wouldn’t give a crap. The game would have to let you keep track of your personal contribution as well as the whole. I would imagine a series of milestones, or badges, or something to keep you motivated. Maybe like Foursquare badges, something to keep you going and keep it fresh.
  2. I love video games, and games in general. I never have time to play, naturally (ask Wilson, I literally haven’t finished a game since Myst, I think it drives him nuts more than me), but I still love ’em. This would let me get exercise and play games at the same time, and it would probably prove to be an incredibly addicting combination. Scott even mentions that folks might need to be monitored so they don’t get too wrapped up in the game and work out too hard or something. I honestly believe this.

So, with that in mind, I am requesting that some brilliant tech wizard take Scott’s idea and start a bunch of gyms around it. You would very likely need to partner with a large game development company or technology firm to make it a reality. I will join. I promise. You will probably be rich. Now, off you go.

Thoughts on exercise this morning

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Some random thoughts that occur to me this morning after Nikki and I decided to suddenly start exercising this weekend after a rather long break from anything resembling exercise.

  • After apparently laying about like a gelatinous slug for the past millennia, muscles actually atrophy to the point where my body actually has to re-evolve the ability to have muscles.  It doesn’t like that, forced evolution of muscle in the span of a few hours hurts like a mother.  My splendidly-muscled laptop typing fingers excepted, of course.  My glide-pad finger has a six-pack.
  • I no longer have legs, I have pain-sticks upon which I totter about like a drunken circus clown on stilts, unfortunately afflicted with Tourette’s.
  • Sneezing has turned into an explosive shout-bark, especially hilarious in the middle of allergy season.
  • My recent habit of camping in a Starbucks to work when I am not at a client’s site is now some form of purgatory since sitting on a wooden chair on my recently punished glutes is agony.
  • The older I get, the more intense this period of “discomfort” is after re-starting exercise.  I thought we were pretty sensible about what exercise we did, taking it relatively easy.  It now seems likely that while I was asleep on the weekend I was drugged and beaten with sticks by a whole rugby team as I lay in bed.  There is no other explanation that makes sense.

The sad thing is the horrible horrible realization that I have to actually exercise again soon, or this will all be for nothing.

Exercise does not equal weight loss, but it does help keep it off

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Some pretty neat articles here on the New York Times website about exercise and weight loss.  Many people I know find that exercise makes them so hungry they eat more afterwards, ruining the calorie deficit required to actually lose weight.  It seems that this holds up in scientific studies, primarily for women.  Women seem to get especially hosed because the mechanism that wants to maintain the body’s weight works especially well for them, while for men it seems to not be as effective.  The guess is that women naturally retain more calories for reproduction.  Either way, women are getting the crappy end of this stick, as far as weight loss goes.

The other neat part is there is some evidence that the amount of exercise required to actually do some good might be a lot less than originally thought.  In one study they just prevented people from sitting down at all during the day and saw that while hundreds of extra calories were burned, there was no associated appetite increase.  Kinda neat stuff.

Go and check it out.

A really cool read, saw it on Metafilter.