Thursday, November 21, 2013

Intro

I'm 52 years old. If I work out a bit harder than I currently do, I can get stronger. One day, I will reach an age where working out does not strengthen me. Instead, it will slow down the natural weakening that happens when we're old. So I want to get as strong as possible for when that day arrives.

My uncle Dave is 87 years old and has a tough life. I talked to him a few months ago. He doesn't have enough money for complete retirement, so he has to work. His body is tired. His mind is tired, too, because his wife of many years is in advanced Alzheimers, and she needs a lot of care. He says he looks at himself in the mirror and can see himself shrinking and getting weaker. To fight that, he works out every day. The result is that his body's decay is slower than it would be without working out. He says lifting weights is very important. "Tommy (that's what he calls me), you have to lift weights. I'm lifting weights. You have to lift weights. Tommy, are you lifting weights?!" So I promised to him and myself that I would lift weights and work out. He and my other uncle Abe are all I have left of my father, who died four years ago. He didn't take as good care of himself as my uncles take of themselves, and I think that's why he died sooner. He was younger than Dave and older than Abe.

This week, I got a Garmin Edge 200 bike computer. Rather than measuring speed and distance from the bike, it measures these things using GPS. It stores a lot of data, and I can upload the data after I ride.

The setup was extremely easy. The ongoing maintenance required from now on is brilliant. Every so often -- not even every ride -- I will connect my gadget to my computer and go to the dashboard web page. That will let me upload my data. It will give a readout like this for all the rides I've uploaded. I can share it, and if I want to go crazy, I could do deep analysis of the data. I can also make goals, and it can track and tell me how I'm doing at reaching those goals.

3 comments:

  1. Some good stuff, Tom. Thanks for posting.
    -NJGreyhead

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  2. Sounds like a good idea. Your uncle may be interested in reading about the compression of morbidity.

    http://aramis.stanford.edu/downloads/1980FriesNEJM130.pdf.

    A highly controversial book/website that deals with similar subject matter is "The Primal Blueprrint" (www.marksdailyapple.com). Mark Sisson's personal goal is to "Live long, Drop dead".

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  3. Hi Tom - I ran across your site whilst researching tire/rim width combination, from a forum posting you made ~5 years back. Your Edge 200 will do navigation, you need to feed it a .TCX file and you can get a 'breadcrumb' route map and cues.

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