Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

Mana Energy Potion sponsored a treadmill modification to complete a race in World of Warcraft.

• [:Mana Energy Potion:] | RL Race Across Azeroth

What they did was modify some inexpensive treadmills to simulate pressing the “W” button.

Then they had a virtual race across Azeroth, which is an area in the game, World of Warcraft. Do you think running in World of Warcraft with these treadmills will be easier or harder than running in a real forest? You can see how they did here:

In the end, they ran 1 mile in the game, but only ran 1/2 mile on the treadmills. The game had them running at 12.0 mph, but the treadmills logged only 6.0 mph. So, running in World of Warcraft is still easier than running in the real world, even with fancy treadmills.

The race was sponsored by Mana Energy Potion, which is a high calorie energy drink. This may seem like a good promotion for fitness, but in actuality, they are promoting a drink that isn’t very healthy, so be forewarned.

Via: Play Girlz: Exercise World of Warcraft Style

After fighting through injuries and problems, SLB finished the Bulldog 25K Trail Race. He talks about it here:

• Quadrathon: Bulldog 25k Trail Race

His descriptions of the race trail make this an enjoyable read.

The first miles took us along the side of a dried out creek bed and then along the appropriately named Crags Road, so called due its “cragginess”, basically a it’s a dry river bed complete with the prerequisite jagged rocks at every turn, beaten down over the years into a trail but pretty gnarly at best.

Remember, losing weight and exercising isn’t only about looking good. It’s about doing things that you could never even imagine doing before. You can go places and achieve things when you are healthy that you can’t do right now. That’s yet another reason to keep eating well and exercising.

Our friend, Tom Mangan, who writes my favorite Two-Heel Drive blog has started a new blog called Hike Hacker. He tells you all the things you need to know about hiking. Here is a good article about hiking for weight loss from him.

• Hiking for weight loss | Hike Hacker

He lost 37 pounds in three months by hiking and here are the three things he did:

• He cut out Cokes and cookies
• He walked on hills for an hour a day
• He took long hikes on the weekends

Even if you don’t live next door to beautiful woods that are accessible all year ’round, you can still follow his plan for hiking your way to fitness.

If you don’t have access to hills for your daily workouts, you can do a similar workout on your treadmill. To do a hill workout on your treadmill, turn up your incline to the highest setting, walk on it for two minutes, then turn it down to the lowest setting and walk on it for one minute. Repeat for an hour each day.

Even in the cold and snow of winter, some of the Utah trails are still open, so make sure you check with your local parks to see what trails are available to you.

Hiking to get in shape seems like a perfect escape to me because you get to enjoy yourself while you’re out there. There is no drudgery when you have beautiful scenery to distract you!

I never thought of this technique for getting my favorite geek to take a walk with me. You can see the joke at Joy of Tech here:

• The Joy of Tech comic – How To Get A Geek To Take A Walk

I am constantly trying to figure out ways to “fool” myself into exercising. Going on errands is one way that I have achieved that. Any grocery errand I like to dole out a little every day so I can take a walk to the store, get a few things and walk home. That way my walk feels like it means something besides just exercise.

How do you fool yourself into exercising?

Today is the day that a lot of schools are starting up again. Will more of the students be driven to school or walk to school?

Well, back in MY day…

I used Google Maps Pedometer to check the mileage I walked to each of the schools I went to as a kid and pre-teen.

• Academy Park Elementary: 0.70 miles
• Hunter Elementary: 0.68 miles
• Kennedy Junior High: 0.30 miles
• Kearns High: 2.03 miles

I was expected to walk to Academy Park, Hunter and Kennedy, but I had a bus to take me to Kearns High. At only two miles, it doesn’t seem like all that much anymore. I only walked it once in the three years that I went to Kearns and it felt like a million miles. Now, I walk two miles every day without even thinking about it. How can I be in better shape now than when I was a teenager and be fatter? It makes no sense to me.

Should kids walk to school? I think most of them are driven to school because parents are scared of child abductions. I have no statistics about the likeliness of a child to be abducted, but I know that a parent who walks their child to school kills two birds with one stone. Your kids arrive at school with a little exercise and safe and you get your workout done.

I never had to walk two miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways. Maybe that’s why I’m overweight as an adult.

No matter how bad your workout was today, at least your treadmill didn’t beat you up.

I was worried that this girl might be hurt, but she was laughing so hard that she must have just gotten a little tread burn.

When was the last time you laughed this hard when you were running on the treadmill? Next time your workout feels like a drudgery, remember these two girls just playing with the treadmill like it’s a toy instead of a tool.

I LOVE these two entries from my friend Jere Keys at Blind Prophecy. This one in June, he talks about getting fit, his memories of his father at the same age, and how difficult just jumping can be.

• Blind Prophecy » 06-03-08 » Jumping is my Kryptonite

[L]ast Friday when I was meeting with [my personal trainer], he decided to “go easy” on me by skipping our strength training drills and focusing just on cardio. First he had me doing sprints, which quickly accelerated my heart rate, but wasn’t impossible. Then he had me jump. Yes, just jump. First with random movements, then forward and back across a jump-rope, then side to side across the rope. And I nearly collapsed. I was embarrassed and mortified that at the age of 31 and with no serious health problems, I couldn’t jump for a minute at a time without losing balance or taking long rests between each set.

Just a month later, he was reveling in the approval from his personal trainer.

• Blind Prophecy » 07-01-08 » I have muscles?

My trainer today pointed out the difference between today’s workout and my first session with him. During that first session, I could barely last 25 minutes and nearly injured myself. Now, we’re doing 50 minutes with considerably higher intensity. He also pointed out that I actually have pretty big arms and chest, we just need to work on definition. So we worked on triceps and chest for about 15 minutes and he was pointing out how much my arms were starting to pop. I’ve still got a lot of work to do, but I’m getting there.

Jere had to move to Cincinnati for school, so I’m sending out a big karma hug to him in the hopes that he can find a personal trainer who can help him as much as Ben did in San Francisco.

It’s really easy to forget how hard a workout used to be when you are easily doing every day now. Take a moment today to look back on your workout history and give yourself a pat on the back for coming so far.

The iPhone Apps Store daily brings us new things that make our life better. Podphile recently reviewed RunKeeper, which is like a Nike+ app that runs on the iPhone and tracks your runs using its GPS features.

• Podophile » Blog Archive » Running With iPhone: RunKeeper Review

The review said that it works pretty well, but my iPhone thinks I’m in Minnesota instead of Utah most of the time, so I wondered how accurate it could possibly be when the iPhone GPS is THAT off. I downloaded the app and tested it compared to my Nike+ in the most difficult GPS area that I have found on my iPhone: my neighborhood.

Quite frankly, I was impressed. Not only did it give me the same accuracy as my Nike+ (which has always been good enough for me), it only took a couple of tries to get a GPS satellite signal. As I walked, I was happy to see that the mileage, pace and speed matched my Nike+ pretty well. So well that I secretly worried that it was just getting the signals from my Nike+ receiver in my shoe instead of the satellite signal. I couldn’t wait to get home and see if Runkeeper mapped my run around a neighborhood in Wyzata, Minnesota.

As soon as I got home, I checked my run on the Runkeeper website. The map showed me doing my run in Salt Lake City, where my home ACTUALLY is instead of Wyzata, Minnesota, where the Google Maps app on my iPhone thinks I am. I would show you the map here, but then you would know exactly where I live and I’m a little uncomfortable with that. Rest assured that the map was eerily accurate, right down to the spot where I crossed the street. I’ve tested it many times near my home and it takes about five minutes to get a GPS signal, but when I tested it in Las Vegas, last week, it only took two tries to get the signal.

The map is pretty accurate. It usually thinks I’ve crossed a street when I haven’t, but most of the time it’s right on. Here is a copy of my quickie run around the trails by the Las Vegas Hilton.

The coolest part of all is that I didn’t have it sync my iPhone to get my data to the Runkeeper website. It sends it directly from my iPhone. It also saves it on my iPhone so I don’t have to go to a stupid website just to see my runs. You would think that was a no brainer, but the Nike+ system has a problem with that and they’ve never fully solved it.

I was totally impressed with Runkeeper and the $10 price tag was MORE than worth the money. There are a few things that I wish it had:

• Calories burned: It doesn’t list the calories I’ve burned on the run and I can’t put my weight into the software to do it. My Nike+ does this calculation for me and it has been pretty accurate. I like the simplicity of Runkeeper, but that is one feature that is REALLY important to me.

• I can’t use it on my treadmill: During the hot days of summer and the freezing days of winter, I use my treadmill ALOT. Runkeeper won’t work on a treadmill (of course), so the Nike+ still has more usability for me there.

• No Challenges: The Runkeeper site is very minimal. That is a VERY good thing because it loads quickly and is very easy to use. The only thing I would add to it is the ability to host challenges like I can on Nike+. That was the KILLER feature for me and it’s what keeps me coming back to the bloated Nike website every day.

If you own a 3G iPhone and regularly go on walks or runs outside, then you owe it to yourself to purchase Runkeeper. For only ten bucks, you can add the functionality of a Garmin or a Nike+ kit without all the extra gear taking up space. I can’t wait to see what the future has to offer for Runkeeper!

Update 09-01-08: After two weeks of using RunKeeper, I’ve found that if I turn off 3G before running the software, it will find the satellite signal almost immediately. There must be something wrong with iPhone’s 3G that is interfering with the GPS signal. RunKeeper runs perfectly if I turn off 3G before I use it.

Laura,

I went looking on the Nike site for some running shoes. Yes, I’m out running now. I’m working my way up using a podcast for interval running and my goal is to run a 5k in November.

Anyways, I was looking at shoes and the Nike iD caught my eye. I had no idea what that meant, so I clicked on it. You may know this already, but it allows you to customize each shoe with up to eight characters. Each shoe can be something different. These are too expensive for me to get right now, but I’m wondering…

What would you put on your shoes?

Take care,
Ernie

Ernie,

It’s SO good to hear from you! I’m glad you’ve advanced from running in place with the Wii Fit to running in the “real” world. Congratulations!!

I must admit, I’m attracted to the Nike ID shoes. Mostly because it allows me to choose my own colors of shoes. To answer your question, I would LOVE to put the words “Femme Fugit” on my shoes. It means “She Flies” in Latin. Unfortunately, they only allow eight digits, so I would end up putting “Moncur” on them just in case my personally designed shoes got mixed up with someone else’s. Here are the shoes that I designed for myself:

Ironically, I just bought a new pair of shoes from Nike. My old ones were over a year old and WAY over their mileage (they should be changed every 400 miles). I bought the Air Max Moto+6 (Nike XD 324492-162). It looks like this:

The funny thing is, I tried on four pairs of shoes that looked EXACTLY like this at the Nike store in Las Vegas. One felt like something funny was in my shoes along the inside of my foot. That one was for overpronaters, but I don’t have that problem. Another one felt like it was going to scrape my back heel raw when I walked on their treadmill. After trying the Vomero, the Equalon and the Pegasus, I can’t believe how different all those shoes felt because they all looked the same to me.

So, given the chance to choose my own colors and personalized message, I would pass it by just to get a pair of shoes that fit perfectly from day one. Fortunately, I was able to find that this time. Who knows whether they’ll still be around next year when I need new shoes.

You didn’t tell me. What would YOU choose to put on your shoes? I would suggest “Homme Fugit,” but it doesn’t fit either…

Best wishes,
Laura

If you are one of the many people who have bought a Starling Fitness Yearly Journal, then you know that the quote of the month is about getting stronger. You can see the quote here:

It is amazing how much crisper the general experience of life becomes when your body is given a chance to develop a little strength.

Frank Duff, A Coder in Courierland, 03-20-05

Frank Duff used to be a computer coder, but he traded it all in to be a bicycle courier. He wrote about his adventures here:

• A Coder in Courierland || kuro5hin.org

I found that quote over three years ago and the story still is inspiring today. Next time you think you can’t bike to work, read Frank’s story and you’ll know that you can do it.

If you would like to order your own Starling Fitness Yearly Journal, you can do so here:

• Starling Fitness » Order Your Starling Fitness Yearly Journal

If you order it now, you can choose the month you want it to start and it will last you a year from that date. You won’t have to throw away any unused days from the first of the year. You can start fresh now.