Soda In The Mail

After the snowfall seen in yesterday's post, there's not much to do right now in Minnesota...

...other than to consume sugar.

On that note, I just posted some fun good news on my Root Beer Blog. After about 10 weeks of root beer blogging, I got my first goodie package! Some people at Ozark Mountain Bottleworks saw my review of their root beer (which was quite good!). They wanted to send me 4 of their other sodas to try!! So 2 days after making contact with them, I got these goodies on my front porch:

Opened up, with four "4-packs" folded on top of 17 bottles.


Underneath, there were 4 bottles of 4 different kinds of soda
(plus a bonus Root Beer in the upper left).


Ozark Mountain Root Beer, Grape Pop, Lemonade, Cream, and Orange Cream.

(I posted a little more about Ozark Mountain in this post in my Root Beer Blog.)

I haven't posted about any of the sodas yet, but I tried the Grape Pop last night - it was good! (I thought Grape Faygo was a LITTLE better, but my wife thought Ozark Mountain was a LITTLE better - we'll have to get some Grape Faygo and do a blind taste test with one of our remaining Ozark Mountain bottles.)

Anyway, swing by my Root Beer Blog now and then. It's winter after all - time to hit the sugar HARD.

p.s. "Mouse over" the photos on my Root Beer Blog... I tend to make semi-sassy comments pop up when you hold your mouse over the image.

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Closing In On My First 1,000 Mile Year

(... and a few sledding photos.)

Currently, I've ran 958.81 miles in 2012. I'm less than 42 miles from my FIRST EVER 1,000 mile year! My previous best was 911 miles last year, and I posted that I broke that PR at the end of last month.

Friday night, we got some snow. About a half inch stuck around, and both Pharmie and I got in a run on Saturday because another few inches were predicted for Saturday night / Sunday morning.

A little snow still around on Saturday afternoon,
leading to just a few icy / slushy spots on the trail.

So Saturday afternoon, I headed out for a 13 miler. I warmed up for 2 miles, used mile 3 as a "building" mile (6:52), and then did 7 miles harder. (The effort was somewhere between my half marathon race-pace and a tempo run.) Those faster miles were 6:34, 6:44, 6:36, 6:25, 6:17, 6:03 and 6:02, for a total of 44:41 (or 6:23.0 pace).

Sunday, it REALLY SNOWED! We were going to take Henry sledding for the first time. Here are 10 quick photos:

Heading to the park in the snow.


I've never seen snow "fill in" a chain link fence before!
And look at how it's piled up 6 inches on top.


Henry's not so sure about the snow...


Pulling Henry and Momma to the park.


Henry and I ready for his first run!


Crabby faces at the bottom. He didn't like sledding.


Henry and Momma ready to try it!


Nope. He didn't like sledding with Momma either. Time to head home.


Leaving the park and all the kids behind.


The saddest snow angel EVER!!!

OK, maybe Henry will like the snow next year. Let's hope.

And then as it was still snowing yesterday afternoon, I decorated our front tree with 1,200 lights:

So with all this snow, running has changed for the rest of the year - it will be harder to get out for a run with the stroller.

On July 3rd, I went on a run with Henry that put my total yearly mileage at over 50% with him (around 498 TOTAL miles, and 251 of those were with Henry). Since then, my 2012 running miles have always been over 50% with him - July and August were REALLY "Henry heavy". Well, now that winter's truly arrived, I might end the year with under 50% of my miles with Henry. I'm at 958.8 total miles, and my "Henry miles" are at 481.5. Unless something horrible happens, I should be able to break 1,000 miles. But unless we get a mild stretch for a few days when classes are over and I'm hanging out with Henry, we won't break 500 miles together.

Dang.

STILL, it's been a GREAT year! Happy winter, everyone!

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Ready for Winter Biking

We got a little snow the last 2 nights here in Minnesota. Don't worry... I'm ready:

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Friday Funny 440: Movember's End

Well, "Movember" is officially over. I know it wasn't a contest, but this guy clearly won:

PSA: If you haven't already shaved off your Movember mustache, here's a little "how to" guide:


http://youtu.be/PXchNeYUmPA

Next time I grow out any significant facial hair, I'll have to paint a mustache painting...

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Friday Funny 439: Oversharing on Facebook

I've been known to "overshare" here on my blog, but I think that's what keeps some of you weirdos coming back for more. (For an example, read this.) But even I have a limit....


These are my TOP 3 INSTANCES of "Oversharing on Facebook."


NUMBER 3:

NUMBER 2:

NUMBER 1:

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Friday Funny 438: Instagram Parody

Two people sent me the link to this video. And as long as you know what Instagram is, you'll think this is pretty fantastic. (Mom, I'll explain why this is funny to you at Christmas. Love you!)

Collegehumor.com

I'm pretty sure I'm "that guy" they talk about who's 33 (but I'm only 31) and taking lots of kid pics at the 2:38 mark...

Related: The part about the cat wearing glasses reminded me of this photo of Henry wearing my glasses to entertain Pharmie's cousins at Thanksgiving:

Nerd.

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Friday Funny 437: Awesomest Pregnancy Documentation EVER

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Sexy Biking Calendar

If you were to make a calendar for cyclist, what should it contain?

How about bike parts!


What else is usually good in a calendar?

That's right! Scantily clad women!


The 2013 CyclePassion Calendar has real cyclists posing with bike components.

They have the LEGS of cyclists:

And they have the TAN LINES of cyclists:

So get this for that special someone on your Christmas list this winter...

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Stocking Stuffer Giveaway WINNERS!

It's time to announce the winners of the "Stocking Stuffer" giveaway from last week. If you remember, GU, Road ID, Injinji, and Hydrapak offered up some sweet goods.

• ONE winner will get 1 Supernova Firefly, 1 box of Peppermint Stick GU, and 1 pair of Injinjis.
• TWO people will each receive 2 Supernova Fireflies, 2 boxes of Peppermint Stick GU, 2 pairs of Injinjis, and 1 Gel-Bot.

There were 158 comments on the giveaway post. Factoring in the "extra entries" earned, there were 372 numbers "thrown in the hat."

Comments printed out (printed at 50%, which was 14 pages - or 7 pages
front-and-back), all numbered and ready to be picked.

I drew 2 numbers on random.com from 1 through 372.

The winners are:

• Amjeso
• You Momma Runs

And the winner from the Steve in a Speedo Facebook fan page is #83, which corresponded with Lorena Kerr Sims

Congrats to the 3 winners! Please contact me as soon as you can so I can get you your goodies!! And thanks to GU, Road ID, Injinji, and Hydrapak for the fun giveaway!

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Endurance Athletes Are Not Healthy

You've probably heard of the Wall Street Journal article making waves in the endurance community last week. Here's the part that freaked out people like me:

Until recently, the cardiac risk of exercise was measured almost exclusively by the incidence of deaths during races. For marathoners, that rate was one in 100,000—a number that didn't exactly strike fear. Moreover, data showed that runners generally enjoyed enormous longevity benefits over nonrunners.

What the new research suggests is that the benefits of running may come to a hard stop later in life. In a study involving 52,600 people followed for three decades, the runners in the group had a 19% lower death rate than nonrunners, according to the Heart editorial. But among the running cohort, those who ran a lot—more than 20 to 25 miles a week—lost that mortality advantage.

Meanwhile, according to the Heart editorial, another large study found no mortality benefit for those who ran faster than 8 miles per hour, while those who ran slower reaped significant mortality benefits.

The article goes on to show a bit of a "war of words" between 2 sides both claiming the other as an agenda (which is most likely true). Check out the full article here.

That article was interesting and a BIT scary. I don't doubt that pushing yourself to the limits year after year can have negative consequences, but to say that endurance athletes see no health benefits from their work was a bit shocking.

The next day, another article appeared on RunnersWorld.com in response to the WSJ article. Here's a bit from that article:

[...] there's no doubt whatsoever that the health benefits of aerobic exercise eventually reach a point of diminishing returns. Where is that point? No one really knows, but my personal feeling is that if you're running more than an hour a day, you're doing it for reasons other than optimizing health. Which is fine. But crucially, that doesn't mean you're hurting your health by running an hour a day, and when people start making suggestions like that, I agree with Thompson that they're twisting the data. Two examples:

(1) One of the major pieces of evidence the group cites is a study that was presented at a conference over the summer. The WSJ description:

In a study involving 52,600 people followed for three decades, the runners in the group had a 19% lower death rate than nonrunners, according to the Heart editorial. But among the running cohort, those who ran a lot—more than 20 to 25 miles a week—lost that mortality advantage.

But here, from the actual abstract, is the part they never mention:

Cox regression was used to quantify the association between running and mortality after adjusting for baseline age, sex, examination year, body mass index, current smoking, heavy alcohol drinking, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, parental CVD, and levels of other physical activities.

What this means is that they used statistical methods to effectively "equalize" everyone's weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on. But this is absurd when you think about it. Why do we think running is good for health? In part because it plays a role in reducing weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on (for more details on how this distorts the results, including evidence from other studies on how these statistical tricks hide real health benefits from much higher amounts of running, see my earlier blog entry). They're effectively saying, "If we ignore the known health benefits of greater amounts of aerobic exercise, then greater amounts of aerobic exercise don't have any health benefits."

Umm... yeah, cause THAT'S fair.

The Runners World writer goes on to make his second point:

(2) A minor example from the earlier review by this group in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Early in the article, they make this key statement:

A very large recent study found that [the benefits of endurance training] accrue in a dose-dependent fashion up to about an hour per day of vigorous physical activity, beyond which more endurance training does not yield further benefits.

So what happens if we actually dig up this "very large recent study" they refer to? Sure enough, the study, published in The Lancet, contains this graph, based on a longitudinal study of more than 400,000 people:

And yes, for vigorous activity, the curve starts to level off after about an hour. Are there no further benefits? That's what it looked like to O'Keefe et al., so they wrote a letter to Lancet making that point:

We are curious as to whether Wen and colleagues have data about long-term survival in individuals who did vigorous exercise for more than 50 min per day. Do the mortality benefits begin to erode away as the daily time spent doing vigorous physical activity increases beyond 1 h?

Wen and colleagues reply that yes, they do have data -- and it doesn't show what O'Keefe et al. hope:

By 120 min [per day], the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was around 0·55 [which is better than it was for 60 min per day], with even better hazard ratios for cardiovascular diseases... The adverse effects of strenuous exercise for incremental efforts for more than an hour a day did not seem to outweigh the benefits. We were not able to identify an upper limit of physical activity, either moderate or vigorous, above which more harm than good will occur in terms of long-term life expectancy benefits.

This exchange took place before the recent spate of review articles about the dangers of too much exercise was published. And yet the study is still being cited as evidence that doing more than an hour a day of exercise is bad for you. As a subsequent letter to the journal from Michael Bubb of the University of Florida put it, "The interpretation of the data provided in the review by O'Keefe et al is misleading, particularly given the response of the authors of the original data."

Yes, this is from a Runners World writer, so I recognize that he has an agenda too. But he's also simply finding holes in the Wall Street Journal article. Major holes. He goes on to close his article by saying "To reiterate, I'm not flipping to the other extreme and arguing that there's no point of the diminishing returns for exercise, or even that there's no possibility of heart damage associated with extreme ultraendurance exercise. These are open and legitimate questions. But this scaremongering about relatively modest amounts of exercise in favor of 'hunter-gatherer' exercise is silly. We can speculate all we want about 'potential' risks and benefits, but the real-world epidemiology is crystal-clear: if you exercise for an hour a day, you're likely to live longer than if you exercise less than an hour a day."

So go out there for your faster-than-7:30-per-mile runs that MIGHT last over an hour! (See yesterday's post for cute photos of Henry during our 90 minute run at 7:01/mile pace - take THAT Wall Street Journal article!) But don't go "all out" all the time. Be safe. And be healthy.

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Instagram of the Day: Foggy Long Run with Henry

Henry and I loaded up this morning when it was about 31 degrees for a long run. He had tired eyes and was ready for a nap:

It was REALLY foggy when we got up at 6, and most of it had burned off by our 10 a.m. run, but it still looked like this from the Franklin Bridge over the Mighty Mississippi:

We covered 12.39 miles:

Sweaty hand hair. Gross.

We ran the first 3 easy, "built" over the next 2 miles (7:00 and 6:50), and then ran the next 4 harder (6:30, 6:25, 6:14, and 6:10). Then we cooled down for 3.4 miles. I think the Thanksgiving Race I did with Henry really helped my stroller speed - I was working hard for those 4 fast miles, but I wasn't DEAD.

This is what Henry looked like as soon as we got done running:

So this run puts me under 70 miles away from my 1,000 mile goal for 2012! And it puts my "Henry miles" at 481 for the year - we're going to crack 500 together if we have another mild weekend or 2 yet this year!

Happy running!

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Racing With Henry, Looking Like SH*T at the Finishline

There's a big slideshow of photos up from the Tri-Fitness WBL "Fast Before the Feast" (the 10K I ran with Henry on Thanksgiving). Here are a few photos I want to share:

They tried to raise 6 TONS of food for a local food shelf! There were more trucks than this.


80% sure this is Rachel, one of my blog readers who won a free race entry.


See the volunteer in the sweet socks? I have a story about him!...

This volunteer pictured above was working about 3 blocks from the finish line where we all turned off the main road to head for the finish. He shot me a big smile and cheered me on. When I walked back with Henry to look for Pharmie finishing the race, he told me "I've been passed by those shorts before!" I laughed and stuck out my hand. "I'm Steve... where have we met?" He said his name was Pete and we raced the Cinco DU Mayo Duathlon back in May together! He was the one in my race report who I kept calling "Guy In Black!" He caught me on the bike, but I passed him with a mile left in the run to take second. Too funny! Nice to "officially" meet you, Pete!

Just before the start - I'm just behind the tall guy to the middle/left.


GO!


Melissa (who finished just in front of me in 3rd overall) cutting through
the 5K finishers in the neon calf sleeves.

Remember in Henry's 10K "race report" write-up how he mentioned that I actually leaned down into the stroller near the finish? Yeah, I was TOAST.

Want proof that I was toast? Here I am with the stroller about to finish:

Gross.

One of my worst finishing photos ever. Yet I oddly love it.

Walking back to look for Pharmie to finish (look in the background to the left).


Again, in the background: stopping to get a photo of the finish line.


Here comes Pharmie!! (She's in the background in light pink.)


Close-up of that last photo showing Pharmie back there ON HER WAY TO A PR!!


The "Kids Race" starting after the 5K and 10K were over!


A semi-awkward crotch-shot from the kids race. (Uncropped by me. I swear.)

My gross finishing shot is worth one last look:

Fannnnnnnnntastic.

Click here to read my "Fast Before the Feast" race report from last week (written by Henry!).

p.s. Last call to enter my big "Stocking Stuffer" giveaway! I'll be printing out all the entries shortly, and picking the winners early next week. Stop back to see if you've won!

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