And so returns the prodigal son? November 4, 2006
Posted by Aaron in : Life , trackbackSo today on a whim I decided to take advantage of one of the new office’s perks… a small gym in the upstairs. I’d happened to wander in there at one point and poked the huge treadmill’s buttons (there are so many!), and I decided to return and play with the buttons. At first I was using a built-in workout, but it was raising the speed of the treadmill so slowly I gave up (7 minutes in it was still slow enough that if I switched to even a lazy running stride I was too fast for it). I gave up and just punched up 5 mph for about 5 minutes, then feeling good, bumped it up to 6 for about 25 more minutes. Ended up going an estimated 3.5 miles counting the early walking. As I was going I was doing division in my head out of boredom (you try running in place for even 10 minutes and staying focused on it). Quite on accident during the cool down afterwards I discovered that it has a built in heart rate monitor (you have to grab on to these two odd little handles with metal contacts) and discovered that about 2 minutes after working up a sweat, my heart rate had already dropped back to about 60 bpm. Oddly about half a minute after I discovered that I got really light-headed and had to choose between continuing my walking cool down and passing out, or sitting down. Before I sat down though, I checked my heart rate again, it’d shot up to about 140 bpm, which seems pretty odd considering I was fine through the run and it’d been fine shortly after the run. I wandered home, still a bit wobbly, and laid on the couch for probably an hour and seem to be fine now. I think I’ll do it again (preferably without the heart-rate weirdness), and now that I can check my heart-rate I can use that as a gauge for how hard I’m working. I had to use a generic formula to determine my max heart-rate though, since I can’t find my pulse except after I’ve been exercising. Anyone else have that problem? I’ve tried both the two fingers on the side of the neck, the wrist, heck I’ve even tried a few other tricks. Noticing that while holding my breath I can see my chest move slightly, I’ve even tried using that, but that always yields something like a 120-130 bpm, and since I’ve not really been moving I find that hard to accept. Especially when the max heart rate for someone in my shape and age is just shy of 200 bpm.
As I said above, I’m planning to keep this up at least semi-regularly. I’ve not figured out when during the week, though once the shower attached to the gym is finished, before or after work might work nicely. Perhaps come greenville’s next homecoming 5k I’ll be a threat to tim again (not that I expect to run as much as tim, but I’m hoping for a slight edge in natural endurance, after all he was a half miler and usually I did 2 or more miles hehe). Anyway, no more rambling, in those immortal words: Push the button Frank.
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