Dave's Not Here

So, there have been lots of comments / questions on facebook, so I thought I’d address them all at once.  But, I have to brag a little first.  I ran 3 miles today w/o walking.  in about 40 minutes.  (Averaging 4.5 MPH for those of you who can’t do math).  I was doing this cycle with my heart rate: (click for larger image)

And, yes, I’m pretty pleased with myself.

Workout Schedule

My workout schedule is this:

• Monday: 40mins on treadmill, 1 hour of yoga.  Yes, this kills me.
• Tuesday: 40 mins on treadmill, Upper Body Weights
• Wednesday: 40 mins on treadmill
• Thursday: 40 mins on Treadmill, Upper Body Weights
• Friday: 40 mins on Treadmill.
• Every day, 30-60 minutes of walking — NEPA (Non Exercise Physical Activity) — very difficult to get this in — if at all.

I was advised today that I should stretch after my warmup on treadmill, so I’m going to try to work that in. . . I’ve been stretching cold.

Diet

There have been several questions about my diet.  Here’s what I’ve been doing, tracking everything on DailyBurn (I’m user CodeMonkey there — but I think you have to register to poke around):

Calories:  1300-1600 (200-300 more when I work out, M-F)

I have also been trying to eat raw (as in unprocessed foods), but, I still do eat some — convenience is a bitch.  I eat about 5 meals a day, but I can’t seem to fit the sixth in in the evening.  Here is my typic mealplan:

Breakfast:  The easy one, diet wise.  I eat one of the following

• Oatmeal (Either instant Weight Control, or No Sugar Added), or, if I have time, I eat real oatmeal.  ~ 160 kcals
• Nonfat flavored yogurt w/ 1/4 cup of low fat granola (like Bare Naked).  ~250 kcals
• Protein Shake (Lo Carb Metabolic Drive from Biotest) either 110 or 220 kcals (1 or 2 scoops)
• 2 servings of egg beaters: ~150 kcals

Morning Snack (After workout snack)

• Protein Shake from gym: 200-300 kcals
• Protein Bar from gym: 200-300 kcals

Lunch – This is where it starts getting tougher.  I usually have a protein, and some veggies.  But, depending on how hungry I am, I may have a carb too.  So, this is usually 3-4oz of some grilled meat on a bed of lettuce.  If I need a carb, I either bake a small sweet potato, or, eat some Tabuleh or something.  In general, this meal is 300-500kcal

Lunch Snack – This is my bad meal.  I start getting hungry again around 1-3:00PM, and sometimes snack badly.  We have some organic animal crackers lying around, and, when my sweet tooth hits, I’ll start grabbing handfuls.  It’s my goal to make this snack a Metabolic Drive Protein shake.  Probably 200kcals to get rid of my sweet tooth.

Dinner – Similar to lunch, only with more veggies.  Typical meals are a protein (4-6oz), a fiberous starch (sweet potato, beans, someitmes rice), an veggie or two (steamed), and a salad.

Where I cheat:

• I have not completely dropped the diet cokes.  If we eat out, then I drink like 10 at the table.  I need to cut them out completely.
• Eating out is tough.  I’m fine at Outback, but, anywhere else, it’s hard to order healthy.
• Animal Crackers.  Nough’ said.
• NEPA (Non Exercise Physical Activity) – I’ve been trying to get the family walking on evenings.  But, it is VERY hard to find the time.  So, we’re lucky if we get in 1-2 days a week.  This really needs to be every day.  (Just walking, briskly, for 30-60mins — but — it’s hard to find those 30-60mins)

Conclusion

I’m not sure what else to do.  I’m pretty comfortable with my plan.  But, I’m still plateaued.  I’m actually ok with being plateau’ed this week, since I ran 3 miles.  I’m open to the possibility that I’m building a little muscle in my legs.  But, if I don’t drop next week, I may have to revisit this plan . . .

Last week was a week of pure IT hell for me. It started off fine . . . just a few little tasks to do. And, the repercussions are still not over yet.

First, my NAS started failing. I bought two 1Tb drives, and decided that since I never eliminated my server, I might as well use it. Especially since I got AFP working, and it shares files VERY WELL to my macs now. So, I started backing up data from my NAS. But, it kept disconnecting. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll just pull the drive out, and extract the data from it.” Should have been easy enough. ReiserFS filesystem. Very readable by linux. But, no, the drive would not mount. No normal partition table, and, nothing I tried could extract the data.

So, I plugged the drive back into the NAS. I’d just keep retrying till I got off all the data. But, whatever I did by disconnecting the drive was fatal. When the NAS did come back up, it was empty. NAS went into the trash, and drive is now on my spares pile, though, I doubt I’ll ever need a spare IDE drive. Luckily, my brother had a copy of most of my music (Being FedEx’ed at the moment — should arrive today). But, I did lose all my audio books, all my recent iTunes purchases, all my e-Books, and most of my recent downloads. The lesson I did take away was to use raid 0 now — even for stuff I don’t care about that much, because I do care SOME

Todo: install the 2, 1Tb drives, get them up with LVM, and start restoring. This may be a bit tough, since I can’t find the third rack in my little hot plug drive bays. GRRRR

But, that was a minor annoyance compared to the other IT issue.

I decided to reboot my iMac. The NAS NFS connection wouldn’t shut down, and I decided it had been a while since I rebooted (like months), so, why not reboot. When it came back up, I accidentally missed with the mouse and clicked the guest account. Annoying. It came back to the login page by itself. Strange. I logged in as my regular user, and my home directory was gone. In Mac speak: This means that all of my personal files, videos, movies, etc are all gone. No documents. No web pages. No iMovie stuff, nothing. After some googling, I found the reason: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10346974-263.html

I had added a guest account for my Lojack software. The thought was: if someone steals my mac, I want him/her to use it, not simply reinstall it, so that the lojack can track them. And, obviously, I had that installed in Leopard. So, complete loss.

But — I had just started using Mozy.com for backups. So, I try to restore. The tool just hangs. I contact support and they say I need to do a web restore. Ok — I schedule it, and it takes a couple of days for the files to be ready for download. All 200Gb of them. I start downloading them, 88 files total, and finally finish the next day. I noticed many were named restore-blah.dmg, so I look at those, and they’re all my user directory. Sweet. I extract them like this: rsync -av /Volumes/resotre*.dmg/ /Users/codemonkey/Restore Another few hours pass, and I have all my data. I move it back to my user directory, and everythign just acts strange.

My documents seem to be there, but all the settings don’t work. Then I tried to open a document — and it doesn’t work. After some searching, I realize I need to decrypt all the files. Grr . . So, I start back over, mounting the 60 or so restore files, redo the rsync, and run the mozy decrypt.

Finally, I’m back up. But, I do seem to have lost a bit of data . . just the most recent.

So, total casualties: Recent work on iMac: So far, my mavis rankings and Amy’s Caveman movie.

And, work to be done:
On server:

• Move OS disk to permanent mount place.
• Add two 1Tb disks
• Lots of LVM work to get 1Tb disks happy.
• Possibly remove existing 1Tb Disk, or add it to the LVM as well — not sure yet.  (And, this assumes I find that stinkin bracket.

On iMac

• Add Time Machine drive to it, so that restores like this don’t take the better part of a week.
• Try to find newer backup from mozy

Maybe then things will be slightly back to normal . . .

As anyone I’m friends with, tweet with, or facebook acquaintances with knows, I’ve been a bit obsessed about losing weight lately.  I know plenty of you are annoyed by it.  But, honestly, I don’t care.  I’m working toward a goal, and, I’ve hit a brick . . . urm . . . plateau.

I then started going through the five stages of grief (Kübler-Ross is rolling over right now), where I considered things like Low-Carb shocks to the system, etc.  I have gotten many suggestions, from personal training to going raw.  I’ve gotten re-evaluated at my Gym (They want me to start personal training — go figure!), and I’ve read WAY too much.

The evaluation at the gym did point out many things that I need. They noted my horrible flexibility and recommended yoga 2x a week, instead of one. They also said that I needed to stop splitting upper and lower body, and focus on the whole body, especially my core. And, they mentioned eating raw. I’ve heard that many times this week.

To make my decision, I thought it would be best to list out all the possibilities, and then try to pick my best path.

So — what next? I really don’t want to pay for personal training. I’m sure Tammy would agree — vehemently. I really like the idea of raw. And, I liked the workout today with the trainer. I’m leaning toward the following, but I don’t know how disruptive it would be to my family, and my routine:

• Go raw. Drop Diet Cokes and suppliments other than my multivitamin & fish oil. Only eat from the outside of the grocery store. Basically Yogurt (only processed item), Meats, Vegetables, Fruits, and whole grains. The impact to the family would be that I would have to make dinner, and I’d have to fine a shortcut for lunch. I’m thinking tuna salad or chicken salad for lunches. I’ll use protein shakes and fruits for snacks and sometimes for breakfasts.
• Start doing running routine. IIRC, it was a 30 minute / day plan, so, I could do that at the gym, ON TOP OF other, strength oriented routines.
• Try to do yoga twice a week — this is tough. It’s only offered in the morning once a week. And on Saturday.
• Add core to strength workout — not sure how to do this. And, I’d need it twice a week. This is going to require a lot more research on my part, to find routines (circuits).
• Somehow keep heavy workouts as well. While it does not burn fat, it is important to me.

Ideas? Comments? Am I destined to fail?

I just noticed that my friend, Gary, had way too much free time.  (Well, not really, but who can avoid the chance to mock someone permanently on the intar-web).

And, it got me thinking . . . I have no free time, but, many people still think I goof off too much.  So, I thought I’d list the things that keep me away from the TV.  Note: I am not trying to judge the importance of these tasks . . . they simply are.

• Digging ditches.  I need to dig (or have dug) about 100-150 feet of earth, 18-24″ wide, and 12″ deep.  I also need to bury two 6″ drain pipes.
• Asterisk: I want to set up asterisk at home, connecting to Vonage over POTS, Vonage over my soft phone line, and Google Voice, over gizmo, probably.  Now that I have GV, I’m much less concerned with my Voip provider.
• TV Downstairs: Need to decide whether or not to use an AV receiver, and re-cable everything before the remodel happens.  (Before, during, and after)
• WoW: My new mage is 48, and on his way to being über.  Yes, this is better spent time than TV, imho.
• Work: Way too much work to do — need more hours in the day to do office stuffage.
• House IT work: Need backups.  Need to clean out iTunes stuff, and make it more generic.  Want to use Songbird + rockbox on my ipod, & itunes + iphone on my phone.  (Assuming songbird won’t work w/ my phone).  Also want to get my e-books organized with Calibre, but, this may be on an “As it’s being read” basis.
• Guitar / Banjo: I have 1-2 months of free lessons from my anniversary present (from feb).  But, I refuse to take Guitar lessons, till I practice back up to where I was . . . no enough hours in the day
• Piano: Bored with Moonlight Sonata . . playing with Original Entertainer now — much harder than the “Easy” versions.
• Dvorak: I want to learn to type Dvorak.  Looks like Mavis Beacon doesn’t do that any more.  Wonder if it will still be useful?
• Updating facebook status / blogging . . .

Today I tried my new Workout.  I know I said I was going to wait till next week to start, but I got a bit excited

Here’s what I did.  Full log on Daily Burn.

• Shoulder Press (Machine) 70#/10, 80#/10, HIIT
• Preacher Curl (Machine) 65#/10, 80#/10, 80#/10, HIIT
• Incline Press (Machine) 50#/10, 50#/10, 50#/7, HIIT
• Chest Machine (Flys) 50#/10, 50#/10, 50#/10, HIIT
• Bar Dips – 2-3, then immediate failure.  Decided arms were toast.
• 15ish minutes on elliptical machine for some aerobics (130-135 bpm heart rate)

Notes on HIIT – I was glad I used machines.  I had to drastically reduce weight.  Arms were at complete failure.  Final (4th) HIIT set was sometimes 20#.  I don’t think I’m doing HIIT right yet, since I’m just getting back to heavy.  I don’t think I’ll have to drop weight so much in a week or two.

So, my initial Workout, was a bit unrealistic. And, its successor also has issues.  What I have been doing is:

Monday: Yoga
Tuesday: Heavy Lower Body
Wednesday: Heavy Upper Body
Thursday: Spin Class
Friday: Heavy Shoulders, Biceps, and anything else missing.

Friday is usually blown off.  So, it’s a four day schedule, where almost everything gets worked out.  But, there is one major problem.  If I miss any day, then that workout does not happen.  Which means, if I miss a Tuesday, then it is two weeks in between upper body workouts.  Since I travel, usually last minute, this is happening more often than not, and I am not making progress.

So, I asked the meat heads (pronounced like “Personal Trainers”) at the gym, and they suggested a couple of things:

1. Do full body workouts, instead of splitting things up.  Of course, this means I can’t do a heavy Tuesday and a heavy Wednesday.
2. Do a full body workout Friday, which gives everything double coverage.

I don’t like either solution.  Since I’m likely to blow Friday off (it is Friday ), we’re still at single day coverage.  So, I’m thinking of revising to this:

Monday: yoga
Tuesday: Heavy Upper Body
Wednesday: Heavy Lower Body
Thursday: Heavy Upper Body, Secondary
Friday: Heavy Lower Body, Secondary

So, while the Heavy Upper Body is still Dumbbell Press, Flys and Pullups, the Secondary Upper Body will be all the secondary muscles, pulled out:  Curls, Triceps, Shoulders, incline press, decline press, etc.  Similarly, the Secondary Lower Body will be things not done in the primary, i.e. Lunges, Dead Lift, etc.  And, if I blow off Friday, I blow off the least important workout (to me).

Also, I’ve started adding 20 minutes of aerobic activity at the end of my workout.  I use a target HR of about 130-135, which is at the top of my fat burning zone, before I get into cardio.

With this change, I do lose all cardio (spin class).  So, eventually, I will have to revisit this again.  But, for right now, fat loss + strength is my goal, so my VO2 max will have to wait a bit to be addressed.

Feel free to comment.  I know I’m full of @*#&^, and I’m sure I’ve made errors.