I realized this weekend that my back has nearly stopped hurting me. I was told I have multiple bulging discs, that are pressing on the nerve on the left side of my spine, causing me all sorts of pain and other issues. I was told it will continue getting worse, and eventually need surgery, and just to put it off as long as possible. A couple years ago I more or less gave up on long car rides. We drove to Indiana a few months ago and it killed me to sit in the car for hours on end – even in a very comfortable truck – and I was actively running a few miles each day at that point which was helping (even though I was told running might be too high impact). Normally a back sleeper, and someone who sleeps through the night, I gave up sleeping on my back a year or so ago, and uninterrupted sleep for sessions of tossing and turning to find comfort. Yet in the past week or maybe two – I’ve slept through the night and had minimal back pain throughout the day. I’m not sure if it is attributable to running and cycling, or to eliminating items from my diet that might be causing inflammation – but it is a welcome occurrence.
It was bound to happen at some point or another: my left ankle, always a problem for me, decided to flare up and start causing serious pain while running. In the past it has forced me to DNF backpacking trips and hikes, and now a few runs. The signs all point to IAT ((I)nsertional (A)chilles (T)endinopathy)), but during past episodes it has been written off as a strain or sprain by medical professionals. Could be both, since a strain can be defined as the aggravation (stretching or tearing) of a tendon. Ultimately the fix is (R)est, (I)ce, (C)ompress, and (E)levate (RICE). You can do flat eccentric heel drops as a strengthening exercise to hopefully prevent it from reoccurring. I’m doing all of those things – and three sets of fifteen, twice a day, on the heel drops, and after four days of rest it was feeling pretty good. Left the house for a 10K run and had to bail about 2K in, because at that point each step ran a sharp lightning bolt up my leg all the way to the small of my back.
So I came home, having logged only twelve miles for the week, and unable to log more. My weekly mileage has been in the 20-35 mile range for the past few weeks, and my activity minutes (time spent with elevated heart rate) well over 600. It was 340 yesterday, far short of what I’m striving for. I sat on the couch for a while, then decided I could turn my attention to cycling for a while and allow it to heal.
I have two candidates: a 27.5″ mountain bike, which was purchased almost exclusively for RV use, and was stored in a carport (covered storage) on a bike rack at the rear of our fifth wheel last winter, eventually gathering a lot of rust on components, and quite a bit of damage, despite my expectation that it would be fine. I brought it home from the garage and thoroughly cleaned and oiled it, but will need to replace a few parts before it’s quiet and comfortable to ride again. And second, my KMX trike. It is a custom build with SRAM X7 and Avid BB7 brakes (mountain bike components), extra wide BMX tires, and a heavy steel frame. Not what you want to use for long or fast rides. I’ve been wanting a road bike but am not interested in spending the money for one – the ones that will grow with you as you become a serious rider start at over a thousand bucks, and I don’t want to sink that kind of money right now. Eventually I’d like to get one, because among other reasons, they’re a lot easier to travel with than a trike.
I remembered that a few years ago I bought a trike trainer that turns the trike into a stationary vehicle with progressive resistance, which fit the day perfectly since the skies opened up and trails near our house began to flood while Kelly was finishing her 35 mile ride yesterday. I dug through the closet and found the trainer, and set up in the living room. I took the Garmin speed and cadence sensors off Kelly’s road bike and put them on the trike to measure speed and distance, and pedaled for an hour and twenty minutes to the Lore podcast on Spotify, a total of twenty miles. After the ride, I ordered my own sensors and swapped her’s back onto her bike. I decided that even though it’s not the right kind of cycle for the activity I want to be doing, it will do a great job of improving my fitness and costs a lot less since I already have it.
The primary issue with the ride yesterday was that my heart rate stayed in Z2 (easy zone) for almost the entire ride — great for endurance building, but overall not great for cardiovascular improvement. Something I will have to figure out, because my long runs on Saturday usually see an hour or more in Z4 (there are five zones) and that is what I am trying to replicate.
After posting about MyFitnessPal the other day, Cronometer was brought to my attention. It is essentially the same thing as MyFitnessPal, but as far as I can tell, does a few things differently:
Tracks micro-nutrients like vitamins and minerals
Allows for much more granular control over nutrient goals
Does not use a user-sourced database, instead only relying on verified information
Requires “Gold” (paid subscription) for sharing between users (no iMessage support)
Costs $34.95 per year, or $5.99 monthly
Diving right in, lets have a look at the website. This is the primary dashboard when you log in, filled with today’s values for me so far. Since we’re making our own smoothies, salads, dressings, and meals – I’m adding them as recipes elsewhere on the site. Note that the nutrient targets are colored according to whether you have hit your targets, and it gives you a lot more information than MFP does. So far today I am 92% on target, with the primary deficiency being calcium.
The process of adding custom recipes is a lot better here than on MyFitnessPal. This alone probably sells it, but the database which does not contain unverified user-submitted entries is a huge selling point as well — there should be far fewer inaccuracies. The database still has approximately 50K items from what I read, and I haven’t found anything lacking so far.
Primary dashboard in web browsers
Creating recipes is simple, and the more controlled database should provide better accuracy. It notes micro-nutrient content, which MFP does not.
On to the mobile app, you have more or less the same information:
Primary dashboard on mobile
Detailed nutrition report
Detailed micro-nutrient targets
You can access or create your own recipes, or of course find items in their database. They also have an “Oracle” feature that suggests foods that will meet your daily nutrient goals.
This app looks very promising, and I’m going to use it in place of MyFitnessPal for at least the next few days. There is no trial, but the monthly subscription is $5.99 so I can try it for less than a serving of fast food, and decide whether to keep it.
Kelly has been cycling anywhere from 12-40 miles per day for a while, and recently began ramping up her training for a century. A century is, as you might deduce, a hundred mile course. She started out using her mountain bike, but it’s not the right kind of bike for that mileage, and once she started hitting daily rides over 40k, that became very apparent. We searched for a while and eventually found a 2017 DiamondBack Airen 4 Carbon on clearance. The originally $2199 bike arrived at our door for a little over a thousand bucks. There is a decent selection of road bikes fit for endurance riding starting around $600, but we opted to find an older model year on sale that would stay with her a lot longer: this one has a full Shimano 105 groupset, a carbon frame, and disc brakes. It’s good enough for serious riders and should live a long life. Any local bikeshop with a similar bike is charging $2k+.
Along with the bike of course, came all sorts of incidentals. A better helmet; cycling shorts. Look Delta pedals for when she’s comfortable using them. Hydration solutions;Â sensors. We bought a decent road biking helmet from DiamondBack when we ordered the bike, as well as the pedals. We went to Amazon and found a couple pairs of cycling shorts on clearance that fit her well. My mom and dad gave her a tri suit and cycling gloves for an early birthday, which she really wanted and is very excited to try out. I bought her an Osprey Dyna 15 hydration pack for both running and cycling, as an early birthday present as well. We went with the basic Garmin cadence and speed sensors that integrate with the watch, but are holding off on the bike display/GPS due to cost. Who knew cycling could get so expensive? Some bikes we saw online exceed $10k.
She’s using the Garmin sensors and her watch to create a custom, data-based training plan and that is helping her push more mileage every day. You don’t need all that data, and people have obviously performed well without it for thousands of years, but we love having it.
We’re both training for triathalons, but starting on different portions. I don’t want to shell out for a bike yet, unless the right one comes along, and it is comparably cheap to get into running since I already had most of the gear. Running can get expensive too, but not to the same extent. You don’t need a lot of fancy gear or shoes, but special clothing does help keep you cool in the intense heat, as does a treadmill (which we already had). Overall, training is going well and above is what Kelly is spending her daily workouts doing – cycling an increasing number of miles each day, on her way to a century.
We haven’t been strict about it for the last few years (after a couple years of being strict), but we still heavily list towards a plant-based diet. Typically, we’ll stray from plants-only with friends or family or out at restaurants for the sake of convenience, but our staple foods in the house, with our home cooked meals, are all relatively healthy, plant-based spreads. Most of our recent reading has been on endurance athletics: books like Born to Run, Eat and Run, and Finding Ultra, which are all by endurance athletes who compete in foot races traveling hundreds of miles at a time, often over a hundred within a single day – on a plant-based diet. And it seems, despite conventional wisdom, that these and many other ultra-endurance athletes attribute their successes to their diet, rather than despite of it.
Most recently, I started looking into NoMeatAthlete, which I believe started out as a podcast and fanned out into an enterprise of books, personal coaching, and meal planning. The thing that I was searching for was guidance on how to eat not just a plant-based diet, but a consistent, easy-ish to follow system to provide all the nutritional needs for Kelly’s cycling training (she’s going for a century, and currently riding 12-40 miles every day, with a longer ride each Saturday) and my marathon training (currently running about five miles a day, with a longer run on the weekends). When I started using MyFitnessPal a few months ago, I realized I wasn’t eating enough. Since then I increased my caloric intake to what it should be, and lost about ten pounds. So it seems, carefully planning out your nutrition is probably a good thing to do. For a lot of other people, the inverse seems to be true – they overeat or overdo it on certain food groups. Macro tracking can’t hurt to try.
Note: NoMeatAthlete (to a lesser extent), Dr. Fuhrman, Keto, Paleo, and all sorts of popular diets, many of which I will occasionally cite, give me a feeling akin to the one I get when reading books like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, The 4-Hour workweek, and Good to Great. That is to say — I don’t inherently trust them, and they seem to be selling fairy dust. But parts of them, with consideration, can be both insightful and useful. You have to draw your own conclusions based on the evidence available to you and not follow anything blindly, and the conclusions in this post are ours – they are not necessarily the same conclusions you would draw from the same information.
Moving forward, Kelly and I have decided that we’re going to be a little more strict about it. Our personal beliefs and aversion to animal products is multi-faceted, and has room for occasional exceptions. For simplicity, I’m going to break it down into two parts.
== Health ==
Though there are many competing studies regarding diet, with a variety of conclusions, the majority of them find that a) it can’t hurt to eat more fruits and vegetables, and b) it can’t hurt to eat fewer animal products. There are quite a few studies that link meat and dairy consumption with a variety of different diseases, including heart disease and cancer, and a sufficient amount of studies to prove that a well designed plant-based diet will not adversely affect you. Then, you move into anecdotal evidence.
I’m a bit skeptical of some of the claims by Dr. Fuhrman, and documentaries like What the Health, but will consider their experiences and lessons as valid anecdotes. And then you have an entire wave of athletes – and not just ultra-endurance athletes like I’ve been citing here, but world-record-holding strongmen like Patrik Baboumian and famous football players like David Carter and Tom Brady also have their own tales of dominating sports on a vegan diet. And if such athletes can not only survive, but thrive on such a diet, your every-day common man, who spends most of the time sitting on the couch, can too.
Finally, there is our personal anecdote: we feel better.
I’ve ran across what I’m going to call the 90/10 rule. 90% of your diet must consist of unrefined plant products for optimum health. Once you reach that threshold, the other 10% are up for grabs. That doesn’t mean you should make 10% of your diet refined sugar and ribeyes, but it does serve as a what sounds like a pretty reasonable guideline to me. Everything in moderation.
== Ethics ==
Our ethical issues with meat and dairy are with the supply chains – not necessarily with the use of animals themselves. Though we believe that every animal should have a right to live (and live in peace), there is a natural food chain and inevitably, we understand that all things must come to an end. In the last fifty years we’ve moved from family farms where animals were given freedom to roam and live out their lives until slaughter, and then were slaughtered humanely, to the factory farms of today. Today’s factory farms pack animals so tightly that often they cannot move. They live a life of abuse until they are sent, terrified, down slaughter lines. With birds, for example, the current line rate is usually 140 birds per minute. With a single slaughter line at 140 birds per minute, you have less than half a second to dispatch each bird. They are often missed and then plunged into boiling water while still alive. And the speeds are just increasing as demand to a) reduce labor costs, and b) increase yields inevitably see fruition. Not only is this inhumane, but the increases in line speeds are thought to be linked to increases in food contamination and disease outbreaks. Similar situations exist for the beef and pork industries, though typically speaking, cows have it the best of the three. Dairy has its own subset of problems. Industrial farming is trashing ecosystems and commercial fishing with nets has decimated our oceans and they may never recover. This concern leaves room for the exceptions: there are farms out there who produce meat, dairy, and eggs in somewhat agreeable manners to us, though they’re not the ones who sell to fast food restaurants or large chain grocers. By not purchasing animal products, we are voting with our money.
Similarly, we have no problem with private fishing or hunting. In fact, license fees for hunting and fishing are responsible for many of the conservation efforts out there, and though counter-intuitive, hunting and fishing plays major roles in conservation efforts across the globe (both through the use of fees, as mentioned, and the fact that numbers need to be maintained, especially of invasive species)…
We’ll eat what we catch or hunt ourselves. I bought a boat for tuna fishing, and still hope to catch a few.
Now, for the week I took bits and pieces from various sources, and added them my planner at plantoeat.com. I came up with the following meal plan, designed to be simple, easy to do, and provide ample calories. It is roughly based off this NoMeatAthlete post.
Breaking it down, you can see that every morning (during the week) starts off with a smoothie containing a couple cups of frozen fruit, three bananas, a couple tablespoons of flax seed, a bunch of walnuts, and a couple handfuls of spinach, followed by a base salad consisting of green leaf, red leaf, and romaine lettuce, kale, red cabbage, shredded carrots, cherry tomatoes, red onion, and great northern beans. Then, it has one of three oil-free dressings added to it. We planned three dinners, staggered so that we cook three times and eat left overs three times, so that we will not have to cook every night. Throughout the day we have a set of snacks, including both pre and post-workout options, and can include or remove snacks as needed to meet our specific calorie needs for the day. As listed, the bottom row includes the calorie information for each day: roughly 2100 to 2300 calories a day, sufficient for both of us except with the exception of Saturday, the day of our long endurance exercises, where we may throw in some additional snacks.
We’ll likely continue having coffee with a coconut/almond half-and-half replacer we found every morning, and will probably add in green tea at night. We take a multivitamin and vegan DHA/EPA supplement, which almost everyone should benefit from, regardless of diet.
Very few things on the menu are processed or pre-packaged (the glaring exception being Vitalyte), and by carefully planning it out so that it will require the least amount of effort won’t take any more time than a conventional, home-cooked diet plan. We work from home, but the lunch could easily be adapted to take to work with you, and the breakfast can be made the night before and stored in a cup in the fridge. The snacks are all easy to grab and take on the go.
I don’t typically use many apps on my phone – email, camera, phone, and text/chat are about the only things I ever open. Recently, though, I’ve been using MyFitnessPal, Garmin Connect, and Strava.
MyFitnessPal is free (ad supported) or paid. If you pay for it, you don’t have ads and you gain a few features. I have Premium, mostly to get rid of the ads, but Kelly opted to keep the free version as they don’t bother her. The paid version costs $49.99 per year. MyFitnessPal is able to track both food and exercise, but really lacks compared to the other two when it comes to exercises. However, both rely on MyFitnessPal for calorie tracking, and MFP does that really, really well. It has a gigantic crowd sourced database of foods, containing almost everything you might want to add. It syncs with other apps (like Garmin) so you aren’t stuck adding any info in manually.
The “food diary” is biggest reason to use the app. You provide your age, gender, height, weight, fitness level, and goals, and it will provide you with guidelines for both calorie intake and macro-nutrients. The diary tracks intake and progress. You add items you consume here.
It has a “Recent” tab as well as a “Frequent” tab, that will hold things you reach for quite often, so you don’t have to go searching.
You can add your own “saved meals” for quick access, or recipes.
Or you can search their gigantic database for items other people have added.
If you want to track macro-nutrients, it will break down everything for you. This is where the paid option excels, though I don’t use it that often.
Garmin Connect is “free”, but the cost is really embedded in the costs of the devices you purchase to use with it. Most Garmin fitness trackers work with it, but the higher end devices, like the Fenix and Quatix line, are several hundred dollars. The luxury Chronos line can run well over a thousand. I have a Quatix 5 Sapphire, which I upgraded to from a Fenix 3 Sapphire. I gave my dad my Fenix 3 when I upgraded, and he seems to really like it. I chose the Quatix over the Fenix for the stainless bezel, and chose the Sapphire model for the stainless band (quick change bands, I also have straps), WiFi and scratch resistance. With WiFi, you do not need to sync to your phone to upload workouts. Kelly moved from a Fitbit Blaze to a Garmin Fenix 5S Sapphire, after seeing how much more powerful the software is than what Fitbit provides. The Garmin watches have battery life that can be measured in weeks, are water resistant to 100M, and are built to handle quite a bit of abuse. Unfortunately with fitness trackers, the “you get what you pay for” mantra fully applies.
Connect presents you with a dashboard for your day, by default. I went for a short run this morning before work, which is shown.
It also provides an overview for the last week, and other durations you can choose. Within the app itself, you can really drill into the data and get lots of useful insight.
For each activity, it will track metrics based on the capabilities of the equipment you are using. This morning I ran with my watch, and a pair of shoes that had a foot pod attached to collect more accurate stride information. This doesn’t show the entire breakdown — but only a small portion of it. I can see the pace for each mile, graphs for heart rate, elevation, pace, and others – that I can overlay on each other – GPS mapping of the run, and more.
A pace graph with heart rate overlay
Based on your activity (it tracks all sorts of things, but I happen to be working on running at the moment) you can view history, personal records, and more.
Garmin Connect goes a lot further than these screenshots detail — a few other highlights:
See how each individual workout will affect or improve your cardiovascular fitness
Tell you if you are doing enough, or too much, and recommend workouts accordingly
Save favorite courses and plan workouts, and send them to your device – even configure heart-rate based alerts to tell you to slow down or speed up
Schedule training plans you create, or choose from plans created by various trainers
Compare your fitness and progress to your peers or others in your age/sex demographic
Challenges and goals – including challenges against friends or strangers to reach times, distances, steps, etc
Track the usage of your gear – for instance, how many miles you have on a pair of shoes or a bike
Track your weight and body composition (best if used with their scale, of course. That is where they make their money…)
They have a web-based application, which I probably use more than the mobile app. It provides the same information and maybe a few more features.
Strava grabs its data from any number of Fitness trackers, including Garmin. It processes that data and presents you different information than Garmin does. While Garmin Connect has some social media aspects, it seems that Strava is trying to emphasize that on their app. In free form, it doesn’t seem to provide any data that Garmin does not. However, the paid form, which costs $59 a year (I’m using a one month free trial, currently… to see if it is worth paying for) provides a few things that might justify its cost. I’m not convinced it is worth paying for yet — the jury is still out.
With the free version, it felt that the focus of the app was following other people, liking and commenting on exercises, and sharing them. You need the paid version to access the deeper metrics, which they call “Summit”. As for the social aspect, I found three people I know on there. Of those three, only one of them has posted anything this year. The other person, who posts regularly, is a friend of a friend. And even if I did have lots of friends on Strava (especially at my current fitness level) I’m not interested in sharing all my workouts with other people.
Much like Garmin, it presents you with an overview of your workout.
One of the features I like about Strava is that it presents you with a “Best Efforts” section for each exercise, to let you see how your session compares to previous ones.
The other big feature I love is that if you run the same course multiple times, it presents trends in an easy to access, easy to interpret fashion. Garmin has the same ability, but it is not as straight forward and the Strava solution is much cleaner.
Again, Garmin has something similar to this, but I think Strava does it better. It provides you with a quick overview of how you are doing and if you are doing too little, just enough, or too much.
It has better challenge support than Garmin, with the ability to enroll in virtual races through the app. I can see myself doing these more than I see myself lining up on a starting line with dozens of strangers. Garmin may have something similar to be honest, but if so I haven’t found it. I haven’t really gone looking, either.
Now this is a feature that makes a ton of sense and I think would be really useful, especially to runners or cyclists like Kelly, who don’t feel comfortable going on a exercises alone, especially after dark when it has finally cooled off here. I have not used it, but assume it works well as the technology is pretty straightforward. I can see myself using it on solo trail runs in the middle of nowhere, but APRS (ham radio) might be a better option if cell signal is unreliable.
Over all, I like some of the things that Strava offers but am not sure I’m willing to pay for it right now. If I had more friends using it, or I was looking for something like their Beacon feature, I’d definitely spend the money. For now it’s another way to look at the same data (afterall, it gets the data from Garmin) that is free of charge for another three weeks.
Back in March, I started running. Or rather, tried to. I bought a new treadmill since it was “too hot” to run outside, and jumped right on. I had a fairly conservative goal that first day: run a 10:00 (6mph) mile. Instead, I ran maybe a quarter of that before grabbing my side with stitches and stepping off. I kept at it and before too long, I was able to run a single 10:00 mile, or up to 3 miles at 12:00/ea. We left town for a wedding and I knocked out a couple miles on the hotel treadmills, but that tapered off as we were busy on the road and I eventually stopped running altogether. I didn’t resume once we got home because the treadmill broke, and it took a month for warranty repair. Things just kept getting in the way.
That is a shame, because I found that running greatly helped my back (bulging discs, they suggested pain killers and PT to delay surgery) and improved some digestive issues I’ve been struggling with for years. A week or so ago, I got around to Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen on my Kindle (loaded it a while ago, but was low on the priority list for books to read) and decided to follow up the first few chapters with a quick run. I knocked out a 30:00 5K with relative ease, far faster than I’ve ever run that distance, and was able to replicate that for the rest of the week. I ended the week with 21 miles logged in Garmin Connect and Strava.
The book explores barefoot and minimalist footwear running, among other things, which is right up my alley. I’ve avoided shoes for as long as I can remember, and have always had foot pain when wearing shoes. The pain disappears without, or with shoes that provide minimal obstruction. I run barefoot on the treadmill without pain during or after runs. The book goes so far as to essentially claim the footwear industry manufactured an epidemic of foot injuries and then profited off of it. It seems plausible and the author makes several great points, but I recommend the book so you can reach your own conclusions.
We went camping out at Lake Georgetown this weekend, and I started taking to the trails despite the hundred degree weather. I ran multiple ten to twelve minute, one mile treks each day, hiding in the shade with plenty of water afterwards. I would have loved to go further but the heat zaps energy out of you. My recovery times were faster than I’m used to, so that leads me to suspect I’ve had some pretty major cardiovascular improvements this year, despite the interruptions in my routine. After getting home, I didn’t want to get back on the treadmill. I decided it best to run at night, after darkness comes and it begins to cool.
That comes with an assortment of issues, varying from visibility to personal safety, and I assembled a few parts I already had, and parts I had to order, to come up with a suitable solution.
Even at night, with temps in the mid 80s, you need wicking clothing to stay cool – or at least I do. I purchased some Nike Running technical tees and cross-training shorts a while ago, and those still work great. I also have tons of Eddie Bauer technical tees that I wore before moving to the Nikes for every day wear, when EB unfortunately decided to change the material. I choose not to wear socks, and instead use knit minimalist shoes, which are basically socks with thin soles. Specifically, I love my Merrill Trail Glove 4 Knits, which are probably my fifth or sixth pair of Merrill Trail Glove shoes in the last several years. I started with the TG2, then TG3, and now the TG4 as daily footwear when leaving the house, so these were an obvious choice. They have about 100 miles on them which I track through Garmin Connect, and look like new.
You need light to run, so I opted to try some Night Trek 270 lights that attach to your shoes. They work pretty well, but in practice don’t light up the path as much as I would like. If I were doing serious trails at night, I would accompany them with a headlamp. For now, they work fine on their own since I am running on paved and gravel surfaces. They share the top of the shoes with a Garmin foot pod, which pairs with the Garmin Quatix 5 Sapphire I’ve been wearing since upgrading from my Fenix 3, which my dad now wears. The setup is still very light regardless of the extra bulk.
The headphones are Alptronix HX250s I bought a while back, and love. They have 8GB onboard storage and bluetooth, so you can pair them with a phone or use them by themselves. They also have waterproof earpieces and you can swim with them! The sound quality doesn’t compare with some of my high end equipment, but is plenty good for casual listening. They do block a little more outside noise than is probably desirable for running at night, so I turn the volume low and use ear pieces one step smaller than I usually would. The hydration pack is a Unigear pack I found for $20 on Amazon several months ago – light and functional. The bladder is a lot thinner than the CamelBack products I own for hiking, and I have my doubts about the longevity of it – when/if it begins leaking I will probably invest in a nice CamelBack or Osprey setup. Above is the entire running kit except clothes. I can cram my phone in the backpack if I want to take it with me. No keys and nothing else to weigh me down right now.
My training plan – laid out in Garmin – should have me running a half marathon by the end of the year and a full one by the end of the first quarter in 2019. I have no interest in running actual marathon races, but would jump at the chance to run a trail ultra if I thought I had the ability to complete one. I should have started training a decade ago. Born to Run and other sources I’ve found through online searches it prompted have stories of people decades my senior running the first mile in their life, and working up to ultras within just a couple years. There are people in their 70s completing 100 mile races like the Leadville LT100 and Western States 100. I may never do a 50 or a 100 mile race, but the fact that people over twice my age do suggests it isn’t too late for me to start working towards a lofty goal like that. And maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll veer off another direction and chase down a triathlon. But as an adult, I have tried various things to lose weight and get fit but have never had a concrete goal to work towards, so inevitably I fall off course at some point. I’ve made several improvements, though.
I’m down fifty pounds, from 225 to 175, and my body fat percentage has dropped to a fairly healthy 16.5%. I’m no longer considered overweight for my height. I lost a lot of that weight on my own by adopting a vegan diet, and then the “mostly plant based” diet I follow today – vegetarian most of the time, with possibly one or two meat-containing meals a week, and the various exercise phases I’ve gone through. This year I started logging to MyFitnessPal and trimmed another ten pounds while following recommended dietary guidelines. I use the paid version to avoid ads, but recommend it to anyone interested in getting their diet under control. Speaking of the “mostly plant based” diet, it seems that is the diet of choice among many ultra runners, so it absolutely can be done.
With running, I’ve finally passed the mythical bridge I’ve only heard of, the bridge where once you pass it, you actually look forward to the workouts rather than dread them. And I have a goal — I can do this. I just knocked out a 3.8 mile training session on the treadmill with Garmin, and when it gets dark I’ll head out for the other 1.2 on the foot path by the house.
Fedex delivered the flooring I ordered last night, and I went to work. I was using the .001″ thick Mylar sheeting from Amazon as a template here. It worked okay, but after finishing the back of the boat (one sheet), I opted not to use it going forward. If you want to use templates with this stuff, you need to spend the money on the thicker sheeting that won’t crinkle and move as much.
This morning I got up and knocked out the rest of the boat. Without using the Mylar templates, the edges aren’t as nice, but it went a whole lot quicker. I used an X-Acto knife to score where I wanted to make a line, then used a steel ruler to make a straight cut. I free handed bends, rounded edges, and corners. Viewing from a sitting or standing distance, I think it looks great.
I had four 1Mx2M sheets of material to work with, and ended up running the deck in a different direction than the rest of the flooring to minimize the amount of seams on it. I had a little left over, but with the way the cuts had to be made, needed all four sheets. I used a little of the spare to run across the top of the cooler, which I think is a nice touch.
Before sticking down the self-adhesive on the back of the mats, I cleaned with Windex and then Acetone. I found that Acetone does a really good job of removing stains from the fiberglass and started working on a stain under the port seat, but the orange dye from the new microfiber rag opted to come off and create a new stain. I’ll have to get back out there in a bit and get it off somehow.
Overall, I think $240 in sheeting was absolutely worth it, but wouldn’t recommend bothering with Mylar. I used four X-Acto blades of the 30 pack I bought, and two are still usable, so you could probably get by with a five pack.
We finally got to take a trip out on the water yesterday, which went really well until the prop hit a large rock under the dock. The boat has a bad vibration, but I believe it to just be due to the prop damage — fortunately we had the aluminum on and the stainless stored under the helm seat. Hoping that is all the issue is, at about $80 worth of damage. I ordered a new Solas Aluminum Rubex 4 14.5×17 to replace it with, which is probably a better prop. $72 plus about $9 shipping.
The water levels are low and the dock is almost entirely resting on land at this point. I didn’t really get a photo of it, but only the very bottom edge is touching the water. You can sort of see how steep the dock is.
We were able to use the ramp for the first time, and the dogs really took to it. Violet had no issues, but Maggie took a little more coaxing. They both now jump in and out of the boat and swim on their own. It didn’t take long. I have no doubt this was the right choice for our dogs.
Maggie found that she can be partially submerged yet supported if she just lays in the ramp. That makes for a happy Maggie:
The tie-outs I made didn’t really work, and we ended up using the paracord to better secure it. I ordered some soft nylon rope that we’ll just tie on the dock cleats with a cleat hitch, on future trips.
A big issue for us is now that the dogs are using the ramp, there is a lot more water coming in and onto the boat. While the boat has a supposed non-skid surface on it, it doesn’t seem to work really well. It’s worn in some spots and, really, was probably only somewhat effective to begin with. The dogs run across the engine box at full speed, but it slopes off to the outdrive and we’re really worried about them falling on the drive and getting seriously injured. I found a cheaper alternative to Sea-Dek, called Blacktip sheets, and will be installing it over most of the deck areas in the next couple of weeks. It looks like this:
It’s a cut-to-fit, foam sheeting with adhesive backing that you cut with a carpet knife and stick down to the hull. Sea-Dek has been on my radar for quite a while, but at over $600 for just the sheets was on the back burner. The Blacktip seems to have good reviews, and ran around a third of the price. If it does have issues, I’ll deal with them then. Sea-Dek has an expected life of 5-7 years, and there are reports of people happy with this product after five. The foam is the same kind of foam that is used in a log of yoga mats, and is very non-skid.
