Walk of Life - 2

I thought that title sounded too familiar. So much for originality. The local blog neighborhood will be flush with race reports from Gloucester this week, an area where I've nothing to contribute, so rather than blank space I'll ante up with yet another boring training piece, even though I haven't been training much.

In lieu of training, what I have been doing is looking at the dietary side of the weight equation. This week I began using the tools at Buckeye Outdoors to track all of my food intake, as well as my calorie burning. I found this site through the Throughth3wall Challenge. I've always heard that keeping a log of every single thing you eat provides the best way to understand your diet. I'm not sure what's under the hood at Buckeye Outdoors. It's a little slow, I think it's a bunch of Perl scripts linked to some database, but the tools are extremely well developed and worth the wait. There are lots of foods already in the database, and adding your own is very easy. The tool also tracks training, and even stuff like how many miles you have on a chain if you set it up right (you include an item in an "equipment set" and the tool tracks the mileage from your workouts. Very cool).

This past week I did a bunch of running, pretty much every other day, totaling 25 miles or so. Saturday I did the first 10 miler that I've completed since the spring time. I ran my Town Forest-Borderland loop that is mostly soft surfaces and flat, averaging exactly 8:00 minute miles. Kind of disappointing considering that my average HR was 144 and my perceived effort was rather high. Concerned, I looked back at the logs from last winter and found most of my long training runs had similar or slower stats, yet I was still able to produce sub 7's in all my races. Weird. I had one long tempo run on this course last Christmas Eve where I ran 7:45s, but my average HR for that was 154, a very hard effort. I think I need to get into a running race this weekend. This fall I've done double the mileage that I completed prior to the Canton 10k last year, but with no racing and the 11 day layoff from the surgery, I feel unprepared. Lacking any efforts on the bike doesn't help. Maybe I need to jump into a cross race to shock the system... Stay tuned.

Anyhow, entering these run workouts into the Buckeye tool, the system uses your weight and distance to come up with a "calories burned" number. I quickly noticed the number the tool was giving me was much higher than the number my Polar HRM supplies. Researching the Polar OwnCal S method reveals it takes into account the user's VO2 max number that was entered upon initial setup. I checked mine and it was 35, so I think I just accepted the default. I also discovered that I was still plugged in there with a max HR of 185 and a weight of 178, both obsolete numbers from years ago, which I adjusted to 178 and 170 respectively. So now where to put the VO2 Max?

In my quest to raise the standards of my training efforts this winter, one of the things I've considered was to invest in some comprehensive testing at a performance lab, getting the body composition, VO2 max, etc all professionally tested. That may still happen, but for now I just needed a number. I looked around online and found the Rockport Walking Fitness Test seemed to be an accepted method of estimation. I also found a quick calculator based on running times. Plugging my numbers into that one, I came up with around 51 for a peak aerobic capacity. Unsatisfied, I headed over to the high school to try the Rockport test. It was windy, but I walked the 4 laps of the track in 13:20 with an average HR of 95 and a peak of 100, which calcs out to about 49 for a slob my age and weight, so this is the number I used in my Polar. I refiled the last running workout and this bumped the calories consumed from about 780 to 800, but the Buckeye tool, and other weight/distance tools I found online give me over 1300 for a 10 miler. I'm not sure what is up with that, but it doesn't really matter that much either. By tracking my food, workouts, and weight, if I stick with it long enough, I should be able to gain a better understanding of my nutritional needs.

In other boring training news, there is a new post on Ferrari's site about crank length, but really the piece contains nothing new. Still, interesting reading for some of you. To everyone who is enamored with the cross scene, here is the feed I use to get all the latest cross pictures from flickr. There was something else, but I can't remember what it was. Thanks for reading.