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

This is old news, but it got me thinking. Justin Gatlin broke the 100-meter world record. His time was 9.76 seconds. The previous time was 9.77 seconds.

• ESPN.com – TRACKANDFIELD – Gatlin sets 100m world record at 9.76 seconds

That’s .01 of a second: one-hundreth of a second. What can you do in one-hundreth of a second? Break a record in track and field, I guess.

Today I run the Salt Lake City 5K. I haven’t been training for it. I haven’t even been running regularly. I’ve been slacking more than I want to admit. It’s not like I’m cross-training and riding my bike or swimming to protect my joints. I haven’t been exercising more than once a week, period.

So, I’m not expecting much from this race. My personal record (PR) is 34:15 minutes. This is not an amazing time. I haven’t quite got to the point were I’m actually competing in a race with anyone except myself. The Laura Moncur from 2004 trained a lot more for this race than I have, but something inside still hopes I kick her butt. I weigh less than the Laura Moncur from 2004. I regularly run faster. Somehow, I am still holding hope that I’ll beat that Laura Moncur from two years ago, even if it’s just by .01 of a second.

Wish me luck!

Via: kottke.org

Chris Pirillo was another one of the amazing group of people that I met at SXSW this year. After evaluating his life, Chris realized that he had gained some weight and topped the scales at 178 pounds. Two months later, he was down to 149. Twenty-five pounds in two months is an amazing weight loss. Here’s how he did it:

• Chris Pirillo – Captain 149

Captain 149 lost his weight by limiting his calorie intake and exercising three times a week. That’s it. No two hour fasts with a tablespoon of olive oil. No silly powders or mixes. He just kept his calories below his expenditure and he lost weight. It works every time.

The hard part is following the program. Chris was motivated to be healthy and was able to get back to a healthy weight and lifestyle. You can do it do. All you need to do is DECIDE to do it, no matter what.

Via: Free Fitness Tips: Weight losing blogger

Sometimes I think that “I don’t have time to exercise” is just an excuse. I find myself using that excuse, but there were times in my life when I was so busy and I was still able to fit in exercise. Here is how I did it:

• Schedule It In: When I worked two full time jobs, I treated my exercise time like an appointment. I needed to schedule my other plans around it. It really is an appointment with yourself. Keeping it will make your day go smoother because exercise can give you a peace of mind that is hard to obtain otherwise.

• Get It Done Early: I liked to do my exercise first thing in the morning because then my “duty” was complete and I didn’t have to worry about it the rest of the day. I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but it worked for me.

• Pack As Much Intensity Into A Short Workout: If you only have 20 minutes for your workout, make sure you’re working at the highest intensity that you can during that time. If you usually walk a certain distance in forty minutes, set a goal to do the same amount in your 20 minute workout. You might not be able to achieve it, but you will pack as much benefit into those 20 minutes as you can.

• Be Flexible: A workout doesn’t have to be forty minutes at the gym. It can be a 15-minute walk for your morning break, a 20-minute walk at lunchtime and a five minute stretching session right before bed. Be on the lookout for ways to exercise when you have a couple of minutes to spare.

“I’m too busy” is a common excuse that we give when we don’t really want to workout, but it’s just an excuse. If you are using that excuse right now, take a half hour and a piece of paper and write out all your feelings about exercise. You may find that you have other negative feelings about exercise that are interfering with your motivation. Until you move past those, you’ll never feel like you have enough time, no matter how many tips you follow.

Lisa Williams is another excellent person I met at the South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSWi). She is currently training to do a Century Ride, which is a 100-mile bike race. She talks about it here:

• Learning The Lessons of Nixon » Century Ride

This inspirational entry talks about the training, how it has affected her dreaming and how she is able to escape from the stress of work using her bicycle.

“I don’t think they can run as fast as I can bike, however… Part of my ride involves a shortcut through a graveyard. So many Irish names, then as I dash south, they begin to be interspersed with Italian and Portuguese names.”

All of it boils down to her work and what she wants out of life. With 100 mile bike races on her mind, she wants her work to last 100 years. She has a plan to make her life’s work last a century.

“The only way to last a really long time is to build something useful enough that people will want to keep it going after you die, and to cultivate a sense of ownership in other people. In short: make good shit and give it away as fast as you can.”

I wish her the best of luck with both her website and her bike race. It seems that pushing our bodies beyond their limits somehow shows us how to push ourselves in the other facets of our lives.

Worth 1000 had another Photoshop contest where you combine sports. Here is the complete list of entries here:

• Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Hybrid Sports 2

This one looked especially fun, Skateball. I love new ideas about extreme sports.

Next time you are uninspired by your workout, just think about Skateball. Practicing basketball and shooting some hoops would help you do better at Skateball. Practicing with a skateboard would help you do better at Skateball. Thinking about all the weird things that might exist in the future inspires me to keep fit now so I can try them out when they actually come along.

I have talked quite regularly about Dance Dance Revolution and how fun it is to burn a bunch of calories. I kind of thought the whole world knew about it by now. Not so…

• What the heck is Dance Dance Revolution? – TV Squad

CBS has announced that they are making a Saturday Morning show about DDR. This description on Yahoo! News makes the show sound like a modern version of American Bandstand, where people compete each week. I can just imagine kids all over the nation fantasizing about being on this television show and practicing thier legs off at home. EXCELLENT!

If you would like to start practicing to get your moves on, you can do it now. Just go to any arcade or play it on a gaming console in your home.

If you missed it, there has been a heated discussion about why women should be allowed in the NFL on my previous entry:

• Starling Fitness » The First Woman in the NFL

I believe all sports should be integrated and women should be allowed to compete with men and against men. Adjusting the rules of team sports games to be more like softball where there must be an equal number of men and women on a team is probably the most efficient way to accomplish this.

Segregating the sports isn’t the answer. Women’s football doesn’t provide as much access to corporate sponsorship because it doesn’t get equal time on television. Women’s basketball is filled with amazing athletes that aren’t allowed access to the financial opportunities that the players in the NBA are.

If you don’t believe this, log on to ESPN.com and try to find women’s sports. There is no mention of the WNBA on the front page at all. You have to hunt and search for it. Hunt and search ESPN.com for NWFA (National Women’s Football Association), and you will find NOTHING. So much for separate but equal.

In the end, segregation HURTS sports.

There are women who would have been the next Michael Jordan, but they were discouraged from entering sports because, “No one will watch you play,” or “There’s no money in that for women.” Just like when racial integration took sports to a whole new level, gender integration will do the same. Excluding half of the human race from participating in a sport makes the sport “gene pool” smaller, less diverse and ultimately poorer for it.

Just saying it amazes me. Half of the human race is not allowed to even try out for the NFL, the NBA or major league baseball. It doesn’t matter how good they are, they are just not allowed to play. How did we let it get to this point?

Every father who has a daughter should boycott all sports until they allow women to compete. How could we support an institution that rejects half of all our children just based on a 1-6 inch flap of skin?

TLC has a show called “Honey We’re Killing the Kids.” If you haven’t see the show, you can see their website here:

• TLC :: Honey We’re Killing the Kids

I haven’t seen the show, so I don’t know how realistic it is. Here is a guide of how to encourage activity with your children. They’ve broken up the activities into age groups, which help. I find the list a little simplistic, but it’s a good start if you feel totally lost with your children.

• TLC :: Honey We’re Killing the Kids :: Family Activity Guide

I have a hard time with most recommendations regarding childhood obesity. Sometimes eating is a control issue and children are just exercising their will on the only thing they feel they have control over. I feel like you can’t force a child to eat healthy. They have to do it on their own and the only way you can get them to do that is to provide a good example: “Do you want to be strong like Daddy?” or “Do you want to be pretty like Mommy?” Younger children will answer yes to that question every time. If Mommy and Daddy are eating healthy, then the children will automatically mimic that behavior.

Child obesity has more to do with the parents than the children.

Anica Mercado started out her weblog entry with the following phrase:

“This weekend entailed a roughly six hour drive to our first away game.”

I saw the picture of football players and thought to myself, “She must be a cheerleader.” It was so beyond my cognition to think that she could actually be playing on a football team herself. Man, just when I think I’m totally forward thinking, my prejudices smack me in the face with a Whiffle bat.

• A Blog for Fat Athletes: From Anica: Sweat, Bruises, and Far-Away Dreams

After playing a couple of games, she has dreams as big as any football player has had:

“I’ve also been sitting here and thinking about my dreams. I’m a big dreamer. So, baring my soul to you all, I will divulge one of my bigger dreams: I want to play football in college. If I’m really, really shooting, I want to be the first woman in the NFL.”

She immediately follows her declaration with a dismissal…

“Now, I’m not stupid, I know that those are very, very unlikely. Like I said though, I shoot high.”

Why does it have to be very, very unlikely? I think the NFL should play like softball, where you have to have a minimum of 45% women on the field. If we integrated sports that way, then we could prove how well women can do in sports. Why do we have separate women and men’s leagues? We should require each team to play with half women and let each team be equally balanced. I think they’d be surprised at how strong us girls are.

Good luck, Anica! May you be the first woman in the NFL!

I videotaped myself exercising the other day. I talked to the camera, letting you be my workout buddy. There are so many times when I have no one to talk to when I’m exercising, so I thought talking to the camera might be interesting. After going through thirty minutes of video, this minute and a half is all that I’m willing to share with you.