5/26/23: Pushing It

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Last Updated: 26 May 2023

I got off to a late start this week, missing Monday and Tuesday. This requires five straight days of running, which I'd rather not do. Garmin told me to take the day off, but I want a ramp: 20 miles last week, 22 miles this week, 24 next week, and 26 the week after. It was a good day, though. My run went well. In addition, since my Agency gave me a shortened day, I took a two-mile walk from my Agency's past to its future this afternoon. This gave me over 20,000 steps for the day. Steps are such a meaningless metric for a runner. A week gives me two cycles of my three-day weight-lifting split. By Friday, I am reduced to only one cycle. So, on this Friday, I dug in and did legs. I plan to sleep well tonight and do 3.5 miles tomorrow, along with an upper-body pull split.  Each week is different, but I strive for greater consistency.  {fastsocialshare}

5/17/23: Indestructibility?

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Last Updated: 17 May 2023

Today was the second of my three mid-week runs. My running mileage strategy is simple. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I run X miles. Sunday, the distance is 2X. This week, X equals four miles. 

My integration of leg strength training is going well. My sets are still sub-maximal. I do five sets each of deadlifts and back squats. Eventually, I would like to train my legs as I do my upper body. I use straight sets of five for those muscle groups, with the last one or two to failure. I felt a little residual tiredness in my legs this morning, but it was very slight. 

Today, in the evening, my body battery slipped below 20, and I feel the result. Consequently, I am sitting here writing about it instead of doing it.

This Sunday, my 2X plans hit a roadblock. I had bloodwork done by my healthcare provider on Friday. I missed their call on Saturday, but they left a message asking me to return it. Sunday morning, just as I was preparing to call them, they called me. My blood electrolytes were critically low. They wanted me to come to the emergency room immediately.

Notwithstanding an active life composed of the Marine Corps, some pretty aggressive scuba diving, and a lot of running and strength training, I have only been to the ER twice as a patient. Denise and I attribute our mutual good luck in avoiding the ER to active, healthy lifestyles and great care put into our nutrition. But the approach has not always been a failsafe. The first time I was in an ER as a patient was in 1997. I began having excruciating headaches after a week-long bout with the flu. The pain felt equivalent to having a nail driven into my head with a hammer, and I just wanted to curl up in a ball and die. Thinking I was having a stroke, my spooked doctor sent me to the ER. The hospital did an MRI but found nothing. The next day, after breakfast, the pain started to subside. Within a few days, it was gone altogether. I realized that week what had caused the pain. While I had the flu, I inadvertently went cold turkey on what had been an eight-cup of coffee-a-day habit. The headaches were the result of caffeine withdrawal. 

Sunday, the possible results of hyponatremia were almost as serious as a stroke. I was put on a saline injection to get the electrolytes back to close to normal. I spent half of Sunday in the ER, hooked to an intravenous saline drip to restore my blood chemistry. Ironically, I was planning an eight-mile run that morning. Denise and I follow a low-salt diet as a matter of health, shunning almost all commercial products with added salt. She cooks with no added salt. I also focus on maintaining light-colored urine as an indicator of sufficient hydration. Two days later, my low electrolytes mainly improved at a follow-up meeting with my doctor, but we continued monitoring them.

My lifestyle and fitness level have given me a sense of indestructibility over the decades. Sunday was a reminder that this sense is an illusion. I am looking forward to another twenty years before I see the insides of an ER as a patient again!

A Nation of Addicts

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Last Updated: 10 May 2023

I sat in the car this morning while my wife went into the local organic food store to shop. In my idleness, I found myself perusing the advertisements in the storefront of the convenience store: state-sponsored gambling, vaping, various tobacco products, sugary beverages, all manner of fried and highly processed foods, and all manner of products containing CBD. The only thing missing was alcohol, but that's conveniently located two storefronts down. All these products exhibit some degree of addictiveness. All are injurious to health. Some are directly connected to large-scale health problems in the U.S., particularly if they contain alcohol, sugar, high levels of fat, or highly processed ingredients. 12.5% of Americans still smoke despite its suicidal impacts on the cardiovascular system. In a democratic country, the people are free to grant themselves access to all manner of addictive substances that essentially poison our minds and bodies. It becomes a race to mediocracy. The downside to this is that we are declining as a nation. A recent report finds that the percentage of American youths unable to serve in the military has risen to 77% because they are either overweight, using drugs, or having other physical or mental problems.

Sunday, March 12, 2023. Faster Running

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Last Updated: 10 May 2023

I've had a love-hate relationship with running at greater than 85% maximum heart rate (MHR). Since returning to running and serious training at 49 in 2004, I've read hundreds of peer-reviewed research demonstrating that high-intensity running is perfectly safe for people at any age, provided they have sufficient foundational training. Yet I retain an irrational, residual fear of injury or even coronary events that add to the inertia that so often prevents me from embracing serious anaerobic training. As a result, my running pace has declined dramatically over these last two decades. In my first years of marathoning, my times put me in the upper third percentile of runners in my age group. I was close to the upper quarter. In my 2019 Marine Corps Marathon, it was barely in the upper half. Admittedly, the 2019 MCM's conditions were adverse. It started at 40 F. in heavy rains. Two hours later, strong winds joined the rain. By mile 20, the sun broke out, and the temperatures approached 80 F in the last miles. The effect was brutal on my finishing time. But the message was sent: I have slowed down too much over the years.

Running is full of harsh dictums. One pronounces, "to run fast, you have to run fast."

I felt winter beginning to lose its grip in Maryland four weeks ago. This created a sense of urgency. I felt I had to dovetail my reach for a faster running pace this year with the break of oppressive winter. I ran three consecutive weeks with total miles exceeding 20 miles to establish a base, and then I took a down-mileage week. Today, on my last run of that week, I gave my body a taste of more serious faster training by running a 4 x 400 repeat session. I had dabbled in fast repeats last fall, so I was at least familiar with the intensity of effort. It reminds me of taking an exam when I was an electrical engineering student. For those few minutes while running at near maximum effort or that hour or two in an exam, I place every effort on one singular focus on performance. I can say that I live more intensely and more fully than any other moments in my life. The fear-laden inertia gives way to an almost joy in the performance. Today, I felt something that I have not felt in four decades: on my stride push-off, I was actually aware of the period of time that I was airborne between foot strikes. What I took for granted in my twenties became a moment of joy in my late sixties. Admittedly, my 400-meter repeat pace is now over two minutes slower than my 5K race pace was in my mid-twenties. But the moment of joy remains in my memory. Next week, I will run 5 x 400 meters. 

Covid, Python, Data Science and Gun Deaths

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Last Updated: 10 May 2023

In 2020, as the pandemic’s momentum gathered, my employer reduced our workforce to 50% by having us work alternating weeks. The goal of the reduction was to slow spread by keeping us more physically separated. When this had limited effect and as the pandemic spread, we went to a skeleton crew and only mission-essential staff went to work. In the months off, I had the time to investigate the latest technologies that were of interest to me.

My initial data science interested arose when tracking the international Covid-related data. The infection rates were not per capita. Absolute infection numbers when comparing Italy and, say, the United States were absolutely meaningless. I remember coming across a chart showing the infections for “selected countries”. The U.S., of course, was present and ranking at or near the top. But what about the other “selected countries”. What was the selection heuristic? How would the U.S. fare in a ranking of all countries? The inability to find graphs showing this information hugely frustrated me. I began a search for a way to represent the data myself.

I discovered Python, the first scripting language that I actually liked. Perl can be amazingly arcane. Any language whose design motto is “There’s more than one way to do it.” is going to present a neophyte with a bewildering array of choices to do even simple tasks. The code is full of side effects that, while nifty for those who call themselves Perl Monks, is confusing to the rest of us. This makes for a steep learning curve. Ruby is an elegant fully object-oriented language, but no one uses it. Then there’s Python. It took the world by storm, beginners and experienced programmers alike. Since then, scientists and researchers have adopted it, implementing a huge amount of programming packages to support their needs.

Learning Python brought me to Matplotlib. It’s a wonderful, hugely powerful visualization library. It can possibly display any kind of two-dimensional visualization in existence. I am recognizing its use in many research papers as it implements many statistical tools such as error bars. Armed with it, I wondered, after still another of America’s mass shootings, just what is the relationship between per capita gun ownership and per capita gun deaths. I downloaded the data from worldpopulation.com, a nice source of data in CSV format.

With Matplotlib, I produced the chart below. I used another software package, the scikit-learn machine learning library, to do a least-squares fit on the data. It produced a coefficient of correlation of 0.345, which denotes a weak positive association between gun ownership and deaths. I left out Wyoming as its gun ownership is extremely high on the basis that it is legitimate to exclude outliers.

I liked my chart but found myself wondering about the individual states. Which are they?

https://vause.info/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/gun_deaths-1024x598.png

I was tantalized by the wonderful visualizations on websites like ourworldindata.org, another great site for open-source data. To my delight, I found bokeh. Bokeh enables interactive mouse over events. It is another visualization package, perhaps not as able to produce the plethora of graph types as Matplotlib, but it does one thing that Matplotlib does not: user interaction. Now I could mouse over my states and produce popups with information called “tooltips”.

I believe that a good visualization encourages further questions. Of course, mine did. I moused over some of the states with the lowest death rates. Hmmm. They were mostly Democratic: Hawaii, Connecticut, New Jersey, even New York. Then I moused over some of the states with the highest death rates: Louisiana, Alaska, Montana. This lead to my next thought. Why don't I color code by party affiliation? Thus, I produced this (mouse-over for individual state information) :

Exercise, Obesity, and Health

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Last Updated: 10 May 2023

For almost 200 years, people have associated high fitness levels with health, longevity, and beauty. Eugene Sandow, the father of bodybuilding, began proselytizing fitness in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. As part of the physical culture movement emanating from Germany in the mid-Nineteenth Century, he embraced exercise as a means to greater health and because it sought to emulate the Greek standard of beauty in the figures of Olympian gods. This tradition lived on in Arlene Pieper and Jack Lalanne one hundred years later in the United States, with an emphasis more on health than physical beauty emphasis. Arlene and Jack advocated for fitness as a way of life and a way to better mental performance. In the 1960s, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, MD, noticed cardiac rehabilitation patients at his clinic recovered more rapidly if they were active. Dr. Cooper became the father of aerobics, and exercise, rather than bed rest, was adopted as a standard part of the rehabilitation of cardiac patients. Research floodgates opened: the London Transport Workers Study, the Framingham Heart Study, and dozens, if not hundreds of cross-sectional, longitudinal, systematic reviews, and even randomized controlled trial studies have the same result: the more a person exercises, the more likely that person is to have a longer life free of morbidity. Exercise and its resulting fitness are associated with reduced rates of sarcopenia, osteoporosis, coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, dementia, and some mental illnesses. And, yes, you look better, and your self-image improves.

Current research is investigating not if but how exercise increases longevity and lowers morbidity. But the mechanisms are as varied as the conditions attenuated. Strength training causes greater muscular strength and bone density in all age groups. This leads to many improvements in the functional health of people of all ages. Cardiovascular training significantly improves VO2Max, an important vital sign. Beyond this, multiple areas of metabolism are improved by regular, vigorous exercise. Telomeres regrow. Chromosomes replicate more accurately. Gut health improves—muscle mitochondrial density increases. Metabolic and hormonal function improve. Seemingly every possible physical and mental function is rejuvenated by vigorous exercise.

In this context, two recent research papers caught my eye. The first, published in iScience, is a large survey study of the relationship between weight loss, all-cause mortality, and various physical fitness modalities. It takes the unusual position of advocating for weight-neutral management of the health effects of obesity. Global obesity has continued unabated for almost three-quarters of a century despite efforts by both governments and individuals to stem it.  Instead, the article suggests focusing on the health outcomes of overweight and obese individuals. The article reviews a dozen peer-reviewed primary research on the effects of cardiovascular and strength training on all-cause mortality and cardiovascular (CVD) disease in lean, overweight, and obese individuals. The results show sharply reduced mortality rates and incidence of CVD in fit individuals largely independent of adipose tissue.

The two figures to the left are published in Obesity treatment: Weight loss versus increasing fitness and physical activity for reducing health risks. Figure 1 shows the impact of all-cause mortality of cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) on normal-weight, overweight, and obese persons. Note that the association between obesity and all-cause mortality is weak, and the observed increases are well within statistical margins of error margins. However, fitness reduces all-cause mortality by over 50% across all weight groups. The data suggest that overweight and obese individuals can achieve much greater reductions in mortality by becoming fit.  Figure 2 suggests that the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in unfit individuals of normal weight is slightly more than 100% higher than in fit, normal individuals. The risk in unfit, obese individuals is greater than 300% in fit individuals of normal weight. This figure underscores two points. In unfit individuals, obesity possibly contributes to increased CVD mortality, though, once again, the increases are smaller than the margins of error. But the greatest reduction in CVD risk occurs when comparing fit and unfit individuals at any weight range.  The study concludes that if the goal is to improve health outcomes of sedentary obese individuals, emphasizing fitness rather than trying to lose weight has the potential for greater success.

Unlike Big Tabacco, governments have essentially lost in their efforts to muzzle Big Food. The result is that we are flooded from cradle to grave with a continuous stream of marketing designed to both lie to us about the health effects of their products (1, 2) and to create addictions to those products (3). Consumers are confused by the cacophonous messaging about food, lifestyle, and exercise in an era when any individual or special interests can broadcast deception and lies over social media for no cost and no consequence. Thus, global obesity continues to grow and is unlikely to be checked.

All-cause mortality. Mortality rates (no. of deaths/100 person-years) for all-cause mortality in relation to activity level and blood pressure (BP) level. In the table below: No. of observations, and in parenthesis, no. of events is given.   Cardiovascular events. Event rates (no. of events/100 person-years) for cardiovascular events in relation to activity level and blood pressure (BP) level. Cardiovascular events are defined as admissions due to acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, stroke, or death of one of the causes. In the table below: No. of observations, and in parenthesis, no. of events is given.

The second study is primary research titled Dose-Response Association Between Level of Physical Activity and Mortality in Normal, Elevated, and High Blood Pressure.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221009639

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.119.13786

(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6109246/

(2) https://www.healthline.com/health/coca-cola-false-advertising-unhealthy-drinks#role-of-beverage-companies

(3) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2743554/

Belvedere

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Last Updated: 10 May 2023

Life is a four-dimensional process. We exist in space and move forward in time. To all our appearances, it only moves forward. Our perception of time is the successive layering of memories, some strong, some weak, all altered both at the moment of apprehension and in the processes of memory over time.

Photo Credit: The Apollo Belvedere (Beautiful to See), Dennis Jarvis from Halifax, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

But we are bombarded by two-dimensional imagery or sequences so short that they are effectively the same. Beginning in the mid-Twentieth Century, advertising slowly subverted our perception of time by deluging us with a never-ending stream of stimulating imagery designed to stimulate our instinctive, primal desires to sell their products. Under the guise of free speech, they transformed us into a herd of consumers constantly trying to quell unquenchable instinctive desires by purchasing illusory substitutes for satiation and happiness. Rather than making us full, these substitutes are designed to create more desire and more consumption. The chase for pleasure and easy acquisition of short-lived gratification leads us to forget the true nature of the process of life. We just binge-watch "Life with the Kardashians" while stuffing ourselves with some junk food, feining that these will somehow help us find closure for our desires. During moments of horrifying clarity, we occasionally stop and realize what we really are. Some vestigial memory remains Some need to strive. Is it for some end goal or illusive, impossible perfection? Or is it for the process, the flow of getting there? It isn't the race that makes us faster, it's the months of training for it that makes us what we are. It isn't the exam that makes the scholar, it is the months of learning to prepare for it. I learned decades ago that reaching directly for some ideal state is mostly doomed to failure and, if achieved, the one who grasps realizing that the ideal state was illusory. I realized that I regretted nearly all my decisions based on a desire to avoid perceived challenges or distress. I also realized that nearly every time I stepped up to challenge or self-doubt or fear, I was either rewarded or learned something invaluable. From this, I embraced a maxim that has guided my entire adult life: Never choose the easier path; always choose growth, opportunity, and challenge.

Halfway

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Last Updated: 10 May 2023

2022 has been blazing past me. My psychological struggles with my running, which began in early 2021, continued. 2020 was an excellent year for my training. My employer kept me home most of the year. I was in great shape when I returned to work in November 2020. Coming off a year of often working out twice a day, my weight was in the low 140s, and my body fat percentage was below 15%. But I didn't fare well re-entering the world. We were at 100% mask use most of 2021 and have been most of 2022. The absurd argument about masks and freedom raged everywhere. The recent Ukraine invasion underscores America as the land of the entitled. With Ukrainians fighting for their very political, if not actual, lives, America's argument about mask freedoms is an international embarrassment. A nation of people who put their convenience and comfort ahead of the lives of even a few of their fellow citizens will never be great again.

The stress of work, the stress of the national political scene, and the oppressiveness of the pandemic all conjoined to erode my sense of purpose and focus. I found it increasingly difficult to hit my running miles, though my strength training remained strong. I became inconsistent with my mileage. The three running-related injuries I experienced in 2020 are unprecedented. I typically am forced to lay off running approximately every three years. Two layoffs were related to a mysterious pain across my right calf muscle. The pain is sharp, only occurs while running, and appears with little or no warning. The downtime is six to eight weeks. And nothing seemed to explain its source adequately.

Inexcusably, I gained ten pounds from November 2020 through May 2022. The reason is simple. Running thirty to forty miles burns a lot of calories. Twenty-mile weeks or being injured burn a lot less. I probably spent a third of 2021 not running because of injuries. When I don't run, my daily structure begins to crumble. I missed weight workouts and did not compensate for the decreased calorie consumption. Ten pounds of fat was the inevitable result. Quite honestly, some of that excess comes from ethanol.

In April 2022, the mysterious calf pain returned. This time my research found at least one article that seemed to explain its origin: micro-tears in the muscle. This time, the injury cost me five weeks of training. I think the sporadic training makes me more susceptible to injury.

Appropriately, my return to running occurred with one tentative run in the week of May 16, almost at the year's halfway mark. The first half of the year was inconsistent as I continued to lack the focus to build miles. I have half a year to redeem 2022. This week, I am pulling back to rest my tissues for a continued build over the next six months.

Life is a statement of who you are. I feel at age 70 breathing down my back. "Never, never, never give up."

Week 16, Back above 20.

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Last Updated: 25 April 2023

My week is closing out with a total of 23.6 miles run. I still haven't shaken the inconsistency that I picked up in 2021. I can't hold my focus across five days of running. I hit three consecutive weeks above twenty miles in early April, then the wheels came off and I hovered in the teens for four weeks. 2023 is about to be 25% over. This week, I return to success. The more consistent running makes me run more smoothly and improves my pace. 

I'm focusing on building up my running miles consistently over 20 miles a week along with longer runs on Sunday. This is to build a base for some really overdue speed work. As I've gotten older, my pace has slowed too much. As for Sunday runs, I plan to take them into the high teens. 

Monday, 4/17/2023 Energy

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Last Updated: 17 April 2023

151.8 lb.

I slept poorly last night, spending too much of it awake. I woke up this morning at least thinking I was ok. I ran a bit late on time, being able only to do barbell bent-over rows and reverse chin-ups. I then headed out for a short four-mile run.

That is where the wheels fell off. I spent the run trying to stay under 80% MHR, but this cost me an abysmal pace. Not wanting to bite into my energy levels too much before the day started, I cut the run back to 3 miles.

On the upside, the morning weather was glorious. I had temperatures in the low 50s and light breezes under ten miles per hour. This run would have felt wonderful if my body and mind had been ready for it.

By this evening, my Garmin Body Battery level was in my high teens, and I felt it. I felt compelled to pop off five sets of curls before calling it quits. 

Good night. Will strive to do better tomorrow.