Week 4

post 1:

• i guess the girl machines have some value . . . my inner thighs are sore today. i'm going to continue to use them. that way, the next time i wrestle with me whoever-ends-up-being-my-next-girlfriend, i can crush her torso in a scissor hold.
• i took the polar to the Y to calibrate it today. unfortunately, i screwed it up at the very end by not pushing the right button to end it, thereby cancelling it out. i didn't have enough time to do another calibration attempt. this was annoying. also annoying was the fact that it was accruing distance in km - and i couldn't figure out how to change it to miles. however, despite the fact that i didn't get to calibrate it, it was fairly accurate on the hazelwalk today. i drove the distance and it was right about 1.5 miles. the polar clocked it at 1.3 miles, however; i had to restart the stopwatch a tenth of a mile into the walk because i was using the wrong exercise setting. so it was about a tenth of a mile off. not bad for no calibration.
• i was suprised to look up on the treadmill and see the heartrate display tracking me, however, there was great fluxuation. because i was calibrating i wasn't able to see my hr on the polar. it started at 220, then went to 180. at this point i started to dispair because 181 is my max and i obviously can't be at the very max of my heart rate the entire time - it wouldn't be good for me. then it went to 128, 140, 160 and then back down. i don't understand why the treadmill display would be so all over the place. it stayed in the 130 - 140 range for most of the time and i was happy about that.
• i'm very impressed with the polar. after the hazelwalk i simply plugged in the IR usb thing, chose file 1 (it saves 99 files of exercise data) and pushed connect. unfortunately it seems you have to send over each file separately. not a huge deal if you do it after every workout. i wish that it was capable of a true sync - where you push the button and it syncs based on the timestamp of the files. i love the polar. i want to marry it.
• i took a screen capture (click on the picture to enlarge) of the report generated from today. i'm pretty impressed. i will probably post week aggregated results vs. daily results. you have three options for how often it takes a snapshot while recording data - 5, 15, and 60 seconds. i choose 15 seconds. the amount of data the watch holds depends on how many elements you are recording (alititude, speed/distance, ect) as well as the snap shot frequency. it changed from 14hr to 45hr when i changed the snap shot freq from 5 to 15 seconds.

post 2:
was able to calibrate the polar today. at times the distance was dead on. at other times it was a 1/100th of a mile off. i think i can live with that. i'm sure the deviation is due to the fact that i calibrated on a treadmill. the instructions are very specific are stepping off with the foot wearing the pod and then stopping immediately when you exactly cross the calibration distance that you entered. obviously, this isn't really possible as the treadmill doesn't stop or start immediately.i decided to scale back the walking/running. i should be on week 4 of the program i'm doing, which would mean 2 min running followed by 3 min walking. i'm a little concerned about my heart rate during the run times. as you'll notice below it spiked up to 190 and above a number of times. i think i need to stick with the 1 min run / 4 min walk for another week or two. at this point i'm not sure what to do with my training program. the run/walk 10k program i'm doing has me going 45 - 55 minutes each time. i'm wondering if it is better to go down to like 35 or 40 minutes and just stay there, gradually increasing the amount of time i spend running. however, i'm not sure this would be the best thing either. i have to believe there is value in going for 45-50 minutes, even if i don't end up running as much as i want to.i am in love with the polar. i found out how to program my training session using intervals. mary thought i should be able to do this and she was right. there are 5 exercise sets that you can program. for each one, you can choose interval or not. when you choose interval you have three timers - warmup, interval with a recovery period and cooldown. i set it for a 5 minute warmup, 1 minute interval with a 4 minute recovery, then set it to repeat that 8 times. after that i set a 2 minute cool down. i have to say, it is really nice to see the count down timers for each phase and interval. i really wanted to be able to do this with my sports instruments watch but couldn't.the good thing about setting up an exercise set is that the results graph includes all the intervals. if you look at the graphic you can see all of my phases. was also surprised that the distance was accurate even though my pace varied. i calibrated at 3.5 but my workout was 3.0 (warmup), 4.7 (run), 3.3 and 3.5 (walk), and 2.5 (recovery).i felt really good during the workout although i was very tired afterwards. surprisingly, my calf and shins didn't bother me even going 3.5 like they did yesterday. i only felt a very slight pull on my right lower shin and heel for a small portion of the time and even then it didn't bother me. also, going 3.3 felt too slow and i was able to do 3.5. i ended up going back to 3.3 during the walk for the last third of the workout because i was concerned about my heart rate being so high.[Photo]

post 3:
well - i did it again. seems i might need mary to print up the hours for the Y after all. got up there about 8:52pm and wondered why the parking lot was almost empty. it closes at 9pm on fridays so i turned back around and went home. thankfully, i have the rower, which i did for 30 minutes. it's really difficult. the idea is to get the watts higher more than the strokes per minute. it is actually really difficult to only row 22 spm while having high watts. and it also uses completely different muscles. i think it uses all or most of the muscles but i really felt it in my upper arms and quads.Total Time: 63.45 Total Kcal: 590