Skip to main content

Vacation Exercise

Got back Tuesday from a two-week vacation, and for the first time in the history of my vacations, I managed to exercise a lot while on vacation. 11 days out of 14. Part of the dedication was due to my setup. I was staying on a friend's couch, and his apartment had a shower, but it was only accessible through his bedroom. Since someone was usually sleeping in there way later than I woke up, I devised the ingenious plan of working out first thing every morning, followed by a shower at the gym. Two birds with one stone. Some observations:

- I used to think I didn't have enough energy to workout in the morning before eating. It's not true. As long as it's a reasonable workout (45 minutes or less), I had plenty of energy, probably glycogen still in the muscles from the previous day. Also a good way to wake myself up.

- On the flip side of the previous note, working out after heavy drinking the previous night is not so easy. Alcohol saps my energy in the gym like Kryptonite given to Superman. Makes me feel incredibly sluggish, but getting my heart rate up and the blood circulating actually feels like it's pushing toxins out of my blood.

So did I actually increase my fitness while on vacation? Probably not. I think I likely maintained it, though, and the lack of things I'm used to (e.g., a pull-up bar) meant that I substituted new exercises, which is always good to do.

I also took the opportunity to use the vacation to start doing bike sprints. I tried a few days of treadmill sprints at increasing velocities (see my previous note), but realized quickly that real sprinting on a treadmill is dangerous and stupid. I need a track. On an exercise bike, however, you're not going anywhere when your legs give out during the sprint. Some notes:

- Some exercise bikes are just not made for sprinting. This one bike at work seizes up if you pedal above 400W.

- Seat needs to be at the right height. If you feel like you have to be out of the saddle, your seat's probably too low.

- Man, it's hard to sprint all-out for 30 seconds! At about 15 seconds, my legs fill up so much with lactic acid that they burn like the Outer Ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell. Yet if I "save enough" for the second 15 seconds, then I feel like I'm not really sprinting. My compromise is the following: I try to maintain constant power output for the entire sprint (which I know means I need to save some energy), but I keep the intensity high by thinking of each 30-second sprint as two 15-second sprints. Simple, but this little mind-game totally works. I often do this on treadmill sprints as well, adjusting the speed by 0.1 mph every 5 seconds just to keep myself distracted from the fact that I'm doing a painful aerobic workout.

Quick improvement note - I now have a Zone 2 running pace! It's about 5 mph. =P This is probably nearly twice as slow as the Zone 2 pace of elite marathoners, whose competitive pace is around 4:50 but probably jog 6-minute miles.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

영어가 모국어인 사람들은 왜 한국어를 배우기가 어려운 이유

이 포스트는 내 처음 한국어로 블로그 포스트인데, 한국어에 대하니까 잘 어울린다. =) 자, 시작합시다! 왜 외국사람에게 한국어를 배우기가 어렵다? 난 한국어를 배우고 있는 사람이라서 이 문제에 대해 많이 생각하고 있었다. 여러가지 이유가 있는데 오늘 몇 이유만 논할 것이다. 1. 분명히 한국어 문법은 영어에 비해 너무 많이 다른다. 영어는 “오른쪽으로 분지(分枝)의 언어"라고 하는데 한국어는 “왼쪽으로 분지의 언어"이다. 뜻이 무엇이나요? 예를 보면 이해할 수 있을 것이다. 간단한 문장만 말하면 (외국어를 말하는 남들은 간단한 문장의 수준을 지낼 수가 약간 드물다), 간단한 걸 기억해야 돼: 영어는 “SVO”인데 한국어는 “SOV”이다. “I’m going to school”라고 한국어로는 “저는 학교에 가요"라고 말한다. 영어로 똑바로 번역하면 “I’m school to go”이다. 두 언어 다르는 게 목적어와 동사의 곳을 교환해야 한다. 별로 어렵지 않다. 하지만, 조금 더 어렵게 만들자. “I went to the restaurant that we ate at last week.” 한국어로는 “전 우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당에 또 갔어요"라고 말한다. 영어로 똑바로 번역하면 “I we last week went to restaurant to again went”말이다. 한국어가 왼쪽으로 분지 언어라서 문장 중에 왼쪽으로 확대한다! 이렇게 좀 더 쉽게 볼 수 있다: “전 (우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당)에 또 갔어요”. 주제가 “전"이고 동사가 “갔다"이고 목적어가 “우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당"이다. 영어 문장은 오른쪽으로 확대한다: I (S) went (V) to (the restaurant (that we went to (last week))) (O). 그래서 두 숙어 문장 만들고 싶으면 생각속에서도 순서를 변해야 된다. 2. 첫 째 점이니까 다른 사람을 자기 말을 아라들게 하고 싶으면, 충분히

10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else

Recently this article about 10 things that South Korea does better than anywhere else  has been making the rounds on social media, but when I first read it, I couldn't tell if it was sincere or satire. A few of the items on the list are not very positive, such as "overworking" and "using credit cards". So, I thought I would try to put together a better list. Here are 10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else: 1) Small side dishes, a.k.a. " banchan " (반찬) Banchan are by far my favorite aspect of Korean cuisine. Rather than the "appetizer and main dish" approach of the West, a Korean meal is essentially built around small dishes. Even a 5,000 won (about $5 USD) meal at a mall food court will come with two to four banchan in addition to the "main", and often people will actually choose restaurants based  on the banchan (e.g., seolleongtang , or beef bone broth soup, places tend to have the tastiest kimchi). Ther

The King's Speech (and me)

Tonight, I finally gathered the courage to watch The King's Speech . Why did I need courage to watch a movie, you might ask? The reason is both simple and intricately complex: I'm a stutterer (Edit: person who stutters; "stutterer" is not who I am, but something that I do from time to time), and I have been for as long as I remember. Well, there it is - I've said it. To be fair, I actually don't remember stuttering when I was little. My first very distinct memory of stuttering was sometime in seventh grade, when I had trouble saying "nosotros" (we/us) in Spanish class. But I also remember knowing I was going to have trouble saying it, because we were going around the room, and I counted ahead to see what I was going to have to say. Which means by that point I was already stuttering. When did it start? That's a question for another day. So why am I publicizing this fact now? First, I'm in the midst of a lifelong attempt to "cure&quo