Active

Today I'm kind of catching up for not posting for several days...

You know what website I kind of love these days? Active. If you're looking for information about running, biking, training, nutrition, almost anything health related, it is such a great resource. They have knowledgeable writers author a ton of different items about how to train, get fit, build base, cook, how to stay hydrated, almost everything. It's really pretty awesome. You can also go there to find where and when different races are occurring.

Some of the tools available on there have calculators to help you figure out your body mass index, body fat index, caloric needs, etc. Apparently I'm supposed to be consuming at least 2700 calories a day to maintain my body weight. And that's at a moderately active level. If I'm very active, it goes up to 3100. Woohoo! That means I can eat almost anything! But...40% of my calories should be in carbs, 30% in protein, and the remaining 30% in fats.

Peter Vidmar was one of the guys who spoke at the YSA conference over the weekend. In the '80s he was one of the guys assigned to the Presidential Fitness whatever council. He mentioned that in some of the studies that they had done that exercise patterns for 15-year olds tend to remain pretty steady for people throughout their lives. Or, people who are physically active as 15-year olds tend to be active 45-year olds. And they also found that people who exercised very intensively were about as content as those who didn't exercise at all. However, people who exercised in moderate amounts tend to show higher levels of happiness, and other related subjective measures. I don't know why I bothered to mention that, just thought it was interesting.

I guess I'm just saying it only takes a few hours out of your week to make yourself feel better. It may sound like I only exercise when you read this blog, but I only spend about 7 hours a week exercising during the week, and right now I'm on the heaviest exercise level I've been on since high school. But before I started the marathon training, I was only doing about 5 hours a week. And that includes soccer. I tend to be most tired right around 6 o'clock when I get home and can easily fall asleep during that hour if I let myself, but if I go running or do something active instead during that hour, I hardly feel the effects at all of my sleepiness. The hardest part is just getting out the door sometimes and doing it.