Sunday, August 26. 2007Healthy lifeThe one thing that occurs to me lately is that getting healthy can be very expensive. Oddly, I always knew that eating healthy was horribly expensive compared to buying junk food, but now I realise the cost of things to help you be healthy are equally expensive. I love my empty calories, and as my metabolism is slowing down like the rest of my family, I'm regaining the pot-belly I once grew while I baked myself in the sun at a resort in Pattaya back in 1992. Get me another watermelon juice, slave! It's time to put an end to all that, and get a bit of catabolism going, beyond just walking everywhere. I've been saying for months that I should start running, but I couldn't motivate myself. Cyclocity instead encouraged me to cycle, and unfortunately for them I wound up buying my own bike. In order to force myself to start something like this, I wound up using a bit of psychological arm twisting on myself; To satisfy my geek side, and to trigger my stubborn side, I spent a bit of money on a Garmin Forerunner 305. I wanted a heart rate monitor, but something about a device with a built-in GPS to also log your speed, distance, and altitude really appealed to my inner-geek. The idea here was to battle my geek tendencies against my stubborn tendencies and get out there and start running. I knew of some success in the past with these things because I'd seen a Forerunner 205 in action with a colleague, and more recently I've discovered that Daren, another colleague closer to home, has its brother, the bicycle mounted Edge 305. Sadly, these things are not normally available in Belgium, so I wound up buying it online. The Forerunner 305 was particularly interesting to me because its adaptability. It can deal with not only running, but other sports such as cycling, including multiple bike profiles for those who mountain bike and road race, plus it can accept several wireless sensors such as a heart rate monitor (included with the device), a cadence sensor for cycling, and a footpod for running indoors (without GPS coverage). While the Forerunner comes in a slightly chunky wrist-watch form factor, it can be bike-mounted with an inexpensive kit like its bigger brother, the Edge 305, although that's something I'm unlikely to do. Other important factors in my decision were that it was fact that I could download information to my computer, it's waterproof to IPX7, and has the highly lauded super-sensitive SiRFstar Ⅲ GPS chipset. Despite looking a bit chunky and awkward, it comes with a comfortable rubber strap and fits on my wrist with no discomfort. It's light enough to not be noticed, and the clever but weird shape is due to the GPS antenna being placed under the screen to give it a greater chance of seeing the sky. Equally, the provided heart rate monitor has a comfortable adjustable strap and is also not noticed once actually exercising. Since I couldn't motivate myself to run, I instead bought myself a hybrid bike from Cicli Fransman in Jette two weeks ago, despite having nowhere to put it! The bike itself took a lot of researching, and is essentially a modified Viper TR 2.5 2007, to have tyres better for the road and slightly different gearing. The advantage of going to a real bike shop was presented to me with the amount of freebies I got with the bike, including full servicing in the future — it's like buying a car! I suppose the final tipping point for buying a bike was cycling with Al two few weeks ago. After a very trying ordeal, we finally managed to borrow some bikes for a quick tour in a posh area. This does in fact seem to be becoming a regular Sunday thing, since today we did the same. My goal is infact to commute to work by bike and break the monotony of mindlessly taking public transport every day. Despite the new metros, it's still a little boring. I'm keen to gradually buy good gear to cope with conditions for most of the year and continue cycling well into winter, phasing out public transport as my main means of transport to and from the office. As I live down-town within the Pentagon, everywhere I go is essentially up-hill. As Dragan put it, the only way I can “escape the hills is to cycle to Liège via Holland.” First thing in the morning I'm stuck with a drawn out ~30%-grade with several traffic lights. The Forerunner 305 comes into play here, keeping me within my limits while pushing me to go harder than I probably would otherwise. Once I've ridden to the office, I've been able to save that as a course I can train myself on. I can now race my past performance as a “virtual partner” and try to improve my level of fitness. I didn't really want this to become a review, but I will say quickly that I'm very happy with my new toy, except that I'm somewhat sceptical about the calorie calculations. The Garmin Training Center software that comes with the thing is pretty crap, but that's fairly normal these days when the hardware is good quality. The MotionBased service seems to overcome many of the bundled software's limitation, and other tools like EasyGPS also work with the device. I'm a little concerned about the four copper connectors underneath the watch that provide USB connectivity, but so long as they're clean and dry before connection they should survive a long time before turning black. Trackbacks
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