Erasing my high scores

I am a huge fan of the Expresso Bike system and have said many times that it is my favorite video game. The concept is simple: take a stationary bike and attach it to a computer generated environment, then make it interactive. It is easily one of the most fun things you can do while trying to be active and staying in one place. The system remembers your last ride and saves it as a "ghost" which races you the next time you choose that map. This has been a great motivation for me every time I have climbed on the bike, but because of my aforementioned heartrate problem, I decided tonight to erase all of my fastest times and set up new times with my heartrate between 127 and 140bpm, which translates to 65 to 75% of my maximum heart rate. As far as I can tell my true maximum heartrate is right around 178 to 180 so I'm about right on there.

It was pretty disconcerting to watch "old me" zoom by and beat me by minutes on the maps. On the other hand, I was still well ahead of the pacer which the program gives you as a guide for how fast to go. It is still a reminder of how far out of shape I am and how far I need to go to get back to a reasonable fitness level.

I made it through 4 maps and I intend on clearing out all of the maps that I have run so far, and there are several. It will take me hours to get through them all. I will be starting fresh though and that is a good thing.

I also stopped by the assisted pull up machine and did 7 pull ups with the machine taking care of 150lbs of my weight. I still have a long way to go before I am doing one unassisted, but that is progress and I have all year to get myself up.

I finished out the evening by walking for 30 minutes on the treadmill. The treadmill, however, decided that it could help me out by having me install their app on my iphone so I could listen to music while walking. It's an interesting app, which says it will record my workouts, but I have not explored it in depth yet. no doubt there is more to come on that front.

I do realize that I am over 7 days since my last post, so keep an eye out dear reader for a second post before the end of the weekend. I can promise some blacksmithing updates.

TRX, Juicing and my heartrate problem

This week has been pretty crazy. I have been working massive amounts of overtime due to a Windows 7 deployment at work. Everything was going well until we found a problem with the testing procedures which delayed my getting home until 10 pm on Wednesday and found an issue with the compatibility of the latest model of CPU with our old receipt printer. What this really means is I did not get to the gym at all from Monday through Friday. On Saturday that all changed as I went to my first TRX class at the gym. TRX is an exercise system which uses body weight to provide resistance. It pretty much looks like a couple of pieces of webbing hanging from the ceiling with handles about a foot above the floor. I didn't realize the class was an hour long, so I went pretty hard for the first half hour, which meant I was pretty well spent for the second half hour. I got through it and ran to the store for almonds and rice puffs, which I was then craving.

There was no down time as the house inspector was already at the prospective new house with Kathy. I went straight to it and joined the process. The evaluation is enlightening, but the only piece of it that really makes a difference is the roof, which has been hit quite hard by hail. We are hoping the current owners' insurance will cover a replacement. The new house is not yet a foregone conclusion.

We did however, get a new juicer. This one is a masticating juicer, a distinct change from the centrifugal juicer we have been borrowing up to this point. The eventual plan is to attempt a week long juice fast, but willpower is a bit tricky when dealing with appetite. The machine is quite astounding as it will extrude pasta, grind nut butters as well as juice fruits and vegetables and it is much quieter than I thought it would be. This afternoon we tried mango, cucumber and cantaloupe, which was quite tasty. I hope we make it through a week even if we have to start by doing a day or two first.

Lastly I made it to the gym this evening to attempt something that I have not tried before. I spent a half hour on an elliptical machine, maintaining my heart rate at 127bpm. Usually I try to go as fast as possible and not worry about how high my heart rate goes. I was speaking with one of the owners of the gym and he told me that I should really try to not go to hard for to long as the body may stop using fat as fuel and use protein from muscles to fuel the activity. So today I decided to exercise for a half hour at roughly 70% of my maximum heart rate. I found out two very interesting things at the conclusion of it. One, I ran almost as far as I do when I am going full out.. Second, I burned nearly as many calories as when I go full out. Turns out pacing myself may be a boon for me.

New House

For those of you who have been wondering why I haven't posted any work yet, the reason is simple: I do not yet have a place to forge at. That will be changing now that Kathy and I have finally gotten an accepted offer on a house with a HUGE garage. The house has 1900 sq. ft. and Kathy has a series of ideas for the indoor spaces, but my focus will be getting a workspace set up for the forge and anvil. This is all contingent on the inspection of the house. Stay tuned dear reader, there will be metalwork aplenty to come. Of course this blog is meant to chronicle the progress of setting up the forge and all that comes after, so the joy will be in the journey, not the destination.

If at first you don't succeed...

Today I went about 500 calories above my allotted 1700 plus or minus. That is the bad news. The good news is that Kathy and I put an offer in on a house in Bardstown. To my friends in Alaska, you may have a place to hang out if you come down to visit. It also means that we have committed to about 10 more years in Kentucky. The big part for me is the GIGANTIC garage and the point 41 acres surrounding the place which will allow me to build the shop that I want. In the back yard. If the offer is even accepted. Which it may or may not be. Because the offer is about 30 grand less than the asking price. That may or may not matter because the house has been on the market for the better part of the last year. We celebrated the offer-making with ginger beer floats with rum. That put me a few hundred calories over the 1700. Okay. Back to the diet and weight loss thing tomorrow. Oh yeah, forgot. I'm going to try a juice fast next week. We'll see how that goes.

New Year 2012 Let's see how this goes...

It is soon to be 2012 and I am working out my new year's resolutions. There are a lot of people to give credit to while I explain where these resolutions come from.

1) Lose 40 pounds.
         The primary reason for this one is my wife over at Brave Food World who has already lost 60 pounds. Go Kathy.

2) Run a 5K race by my birthday.
          This one goes to my brother, who may or may not have a blog. He has been running for a while now and finally ran a half marathon. I hope that am in that kind of shape next year, because I want to make a really cool resolution next year.

3) Update this blog at least once a week. There, I've said it, now let's see if I can do it.
           I have been inspired by Krista over at cucina 49. Whose blog is really an impressive feat considering how crazybusy she always is.

4) Finish my MCSA. What you say? You do IT stuff? Yup, that's my day job. I am only one exam away from completing my Microsoft Server 2003 MCSA, but that last exam is a doozy.

5) Get the shop up and running again. Last year I took apart the forge space I had to save myself money and time, as I was no longer working nearby. this year, I am hoping to start forging again.

I can only assume that this is enough goalsetting to get me through the next 12 months. Should be interesting.

Chainmail - To you, Patrick

As I get older there are more and more people who I have known in some capacity who have died. Patrick taught me how to put together chainmail. Patrick is dead now. He had pretty aggressive cancer when I met him and he was hoping that a move to Oklahoma and some pretty heavy radiation or chemotherapy was going to get him back on his feet. it worked for a while, or so I understand, but this wasn't Patrick's first go around with cancer and I found out a while ago that he passed away. I had received some chainmail a few years ago that had been used in a weapons demonstration. It was pretty hacked up and several links were separated or missing. I ad been messing around with it, but recently I have been taking it, repairing it and using it to make new pieces. I have a couple of belts, a few bracelets and as a joke to some friends back in Anchorage, I may end up making a thong. Every time I make something though, I think of Patrick. I remember sitting around the shop, with Donavan deciding that it was too crappy a day to fire up the forge, which I now realize it was really because Patrick had come in and the last thing anyone wanted to do was waste time that could be spent with Patrick. Patrick was sitting in the office with the rest of us and pulled out the rings and started showing me how to put them together. It is deceptively easy and yet deceptively hard, If you do it right it is faster than you think and if you do it wrong, it can take all day to get anywhere. Patrick got me started though, and every time I put a couple rings together, I think of him.

Hello world

So here I am, I moved to Kentucky from Alaska to be with my wife. You can see her blog here. I am trying to start my own forge in my spare time, what little of it there is. If I update this blog at all, it should be to update on the progress of the this endeavor.