Hello all! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and that you get a more relaxed week this week to enjoy family and friends!

I had an amazing Christmas! My husband and son are techies. One of their favourite things is to find me some new techno-gadget for Christmas, and this year was no exception.

The first gadget thing was a pair of incredibly warm gloves that allow me to use my iPhone/iPod without needing to take them off. In our cold Calgary winters, this is a real plus. They’re soft, unbulky, and while it sometimes takes a little more effort, they do a great job of communicating with my iPhone. These are going to be very useful for the next few months!

The other unbelievably cool thing I got was an “UP Bracelet” which I wear 24/7 to track my eating habits, activity levels, and sleep patterns. I can create and/or join challenges, create a photo food diary, and just generally keep track of how I’m doing health-wise. It’s very easy to use, and has graphs and charts that make tracking-at-a-glance really easy. I’ve just started to use it, and am still learning the ins and outs, but so far, it’s a riot. It’s comfortable to wear, waterproof, has a long battery life, and works together with an iPhone/iPod app to keep track of everything.

Ahh, nothing like a new gadget to help me get off my butt and get going!

How about you – did you get any fitness gadgets this Christmas? If so, share below! I’d love to hear about it!

Happy Walking!

Darlene

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Who is Darlene Hull? Click here: www.darlenehull.com to find out!

Getting healthy should be a journey, not a destination.  We should be constantly checking and tweaking our lifestyles to get the most benefit out of our diets and exercise program.

However, we don’t need to obsess.  Just keep some “healthy attention” on what’s going on, and try to get maximum benefit from minimum effort.  That’s my goal, anyway.

One way to do this is to keep track of your steps and constantly come up with creative (though not necessarily ridiculous) ways to increase them.

This can get tedious, though, so I like to use tools and different prompts to help me along.  Here are some of my favourite:

For tracking my steps I use the iStepLog app for my iPod Touch.  This connects to the very cool 10,000 steps website that encourages you to sign up for different challenges, like “The Camino de Santiago” that you can walk virtually.  You also get cool certificates that let you know when you’ve reached 1,000,000 steps.  Lots of fun!

About.com has a cool forum where you can post the number of steps walked to reach a group goal, or the number of walks you take each day and such.  It’s also fun, and there’s lots of interaction between members.

On the right hand side of this blog you’ll also see a sign-up form to get a free e-book with 45 ways to increase your steps.  Take a look!

Do you have any ideas for increasing your steps and/or keeping track?  If so, post them below in the comments so everyone can benefit.

And if you found this post helpful, I’d be grateful if you click the “like” button below:

This post is part of our ongoing “N.A.V.Y. Challenge” on Facebook. Why not pop over and take a look? If you like what you see, join us, and invite your friends along as well! We’d love to have you!

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Who is Darlene Hull? Click here: www.darlenehull.com to find out!

Here’s this week’s graph for my weight loss efforts.  Considering it was my birthday this week, and I there fore ate more “bad stuff” than I would have otherwise eaten, I’m very pleased:

Get your own graph at skinnyr

On the weekend I did a stupid thing and walked for 3.5 hours with a sore hip that is costing me at least two days of training – why, oh why, don’t I listen to my own advice?

Anyway, it’s healing nicely now, and I think I’ll be back up to speed by tomorrow. Taking it really easy, though, because my half-marathon is coming up in less than two weeks, and I want to be in great shape for it!

Happy walking!

Darlene

Be A Star! Post your comments below and join in the conversation (or get it started!) and then share this post with your friends using the different share buttons on the blog. I'd sure appreciate it! Thanks!

Who is Darlene Hull? Click here: www.darlenehull.com to find out!

Do you know what you really should weigh?

Your ideal weight is not some magic number pulled from the air, or some hopeful number that works best for your beautiful best friend.

Your ideal body weight is your lean body mass plus your “ideal body fat” percentage based on your age. You need a certain amount of body fat to be healthy, and women need a little more than men.

So, here’s how you do the calculations:

1. Discover your “Lean Body Mass” here: How to Calculate Lean Body Mass
2. Add the ideal body fat percentage (take the average number from the range shown according to your age)

And there you have it!

It’s a little complicated to figure out the first time around, but with the help of a calculator and a brainy teenager you should be able to figure it out. By aiming for that number you’re keeping your goals realistic, and you won’t risk damaging your health.

Have fun!

Darlene

I’ve been participating regularly in the “10,000 Steps” community over the past couple of months. They have some fun and motivating ways to keep you walking, one if which is the “Million Steps Challenge”. Every Time you log 1,000,000 steps they send you a certificate. I got mine on the 16th. My next one is due in December.

It’s kind of fun! Check them out :”10,000 Steps“

Darlene

On Friday I came across this excellent article that talks about the importance of balance: “Overtraining: A Good Thing Gone Bad”

When I was in training for my marathon last October I learned first hand about the joys of overtraining, and it was during that time that I learned about the “Maffetone Method”. This method of training pretty much guarantees you’re not going to over do things, and it’s the system I’m using this time around. What I like about it is that Dr. Maffetone (a world recognized endurance trainer) says it’s important to listen to your body, and if you’re not up to par, stay home.

This past week I felt stressed, tired and frustrated for no real reason – perhaps the cloudy days, I don’t do well under overcast skies – and so I took a couple of days off of training (I even took the week off of posting my blog). I got back on the road on Friday, but the results shown to me on my heart rate monitor proved that I was still not in a great place for training. After a week of struggling to get my heart rate high enough last week due to very quick improvement, I found myself on Friday barely able to get it below my maximum. Every hill pushed my heart beyond my ideal training point.

Most training programs encourage you to push through those kinds of days, but I know that I have been pushing pretty hard in other areas of my life these past couple of weeks, and so my heart already gets a workout just dealing with that. It’s important to give the body what it needs to be fit AND healthy!

You don’t want to abuse this system with laziness and lack of motivation, but you do have to know your body well enough to know when to say stop.

I did manage a slow 3 hr walk on Saturday with minimal stress, and I also did a one-hour on Sunday and a 1.5 hour walk today.

Darlene

I wasn’t always a big fan of technology.  Mostly it overwhelmed me, and I seemed to be doing fine without it.  Then I married a techie.  For our first Christmas I got a beautiful Canon SLR camera.  Pocket Instamatics overwhelmed me, so this was a pretty big jump.

_	One day Tom came home with an early model of an MP3 Player. It was the size of a standard portable CD player, with about 1 gig of memory. I had no idea what to do with it. Over time I learned to use it, and it became a best friend. Then it broke. So Tom bought me a new iPod nano – the skinny one, with 2 gigs of memory. I was in love. Shortly after I got this little nano I began walking regularly. I learned to create playlists, and started to really enjoy this form of exercise. I thought it would be fun to get a pedometer and see how many steps I took a day.
I saw that Nike had this little sports tracker thing called a Nike+ iPod , and asked if it would work as a pedometer. I was told it would, so I bought it. It doesn’t. It did a great job of tracking my walks and telling me how far I’d gone and how fast I went. It also had nice people like Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong and Jenny Hadfield telling me I did a great job, exceeding my last personal best at something. Kinda cool. I was hooked.
	But it wasn’t a pedometer, so I also got a pedometer: The Omron HJ-720ITC Pocket Pedometer with Advanced Omron Health Management Software, which I adore, because it uploads everything onto my computer and keeps track of my steps, if I remember to put it on! I have, unfortunately, lost the program CD for it, so I can’t upload the info onto my new laptop, I have to keep turning on my old computer and uploading the info there. If I don’t do it regularly, the pedometer stops working.
Then I got out of the car one day after a workout at the gym and my iPod fell out of the car onto the driveway, and I stepped on it, breaking the screen. My best beloved husband then bought me a new square pink nano for Valentine’s day. I realized that I could also put my calendar, contacts, notes, and training schedule on this new iPod. I was in heaven! However, the written stuff didn’t always work. Sometimes I’d get up in the morning ready to head out, check my iPod for the day’s workout, and found I couldn’t access it. Sometimes it took as much as 4 hours of fiddling to get the text stuff to work, only to find that the next time I wanted it, it had disappeared again. The Nike stuff was still perfect, though, so I put up with the frustration of the text stuff and found ways to work around it.
	Shortly after this I got a Sports Instruments PRO 9 Heart Rate Monitor as I’d been reading in Phil Maffetone’s books about training with one for the fastest improvement and the greatest endurance for long races. I thought this would be a good thing, as I was planning on walking a marathon. I found it incredibly complicated to understand how to use the thing, so it sat on a shelf for a long time, and I walked the marathon without it.
My best beloved got frustrated with my frustration and got me an iPod touch as it had all the functionality I wanted, and the Nike tool was built in. For about 2 months I was in heaven. I hadn’t figured out the HR monitor yet, but the Nike+iPod was working like a dream. Very fun. All my training was at my fingertips, and I was a happy camper.

Then one day I lost my Nike sensor. I bought a new one that I couldn’t get to work. I replaced it with a second one, and then a third. Finally it was working.

I also got the HR monitor working, but the first day I used it “officially” I couldn’t get it to read my heart rate – making it somewhat less than useful.

Then I got the HR monitor working only to have the iPod stop speaking to me with it’s wonderfully encouraging voice feedback.

I got the voice feedback working, and now it won’t recognize my sensor.

The HR monitor is working like a charm.

I wonder if it’s worth it?

Maybe I should just go for a walk…

Darlene

Yesterday I did a 5k walking race for “Pace Kids” at South Glenmore Park in Calgary. The day was perfect – we’d had a couple of good storms the day before, and so it was cool, fresh, and a little damp, but sunny. The course itself was through the woods so it was absolutely lovely.

Now I can do a 5k without breaking a sweat, any time of the week. However, I took this race quite seriously and worked to set a personal best goal for speed. I’ve been working hard on my form and wanted to see if it paid off.

The first thing that happened is that my iPod fritzed and so it took almost a kilometer for it to start working properly (I ended up laying hands on it and telling it to work in Jesus’ name, and it hopped right to it! LOL! Gotta love the power of God in desperate situations!) I had set up a trio of tracks at different speeds – 167 beats per minute, 171 bpm, and 173 bpm (the actual track starts about 3 min. into that recording, if you want to see how fast I walk). I’ve NEVER consistently walked that fast before. I managed to complete most of the race at the 173 level. Pretty proud of myself.

I also very quickly passed all the walkers and a large part of the joggers. That was pretty encouraging!

Tom and Tina, who were faithfully waiting for me at the finish line, said I was the first walker through, which was pretty cool. Unfortunately, this particular race doesn’t track walkers and runner separately, so that wasn’t noted anywhere. I had fun though, and felt great that I could keep up that pace for almost 45 minutes.

My goal was to beat my personal best, which, according to my Nike+ iPod system is 35’11″, but I quickly found out that my iPod is almost 20% inaccurate when it comes to logging my pace. Sigh. What my iPod tracked as a 7’03″ minute kilometer, the race tracked as more like 8’30″ or something (still waiting to get the final results). That was disheartening, as I know I walked this 5k faster than I’ve ever walked one before. The 35’11″ pace obviously isn’t even close to being accurate. However, I am pleased with my efforts and now have a clearer idea of where to head in my future training (10Km training starts tomorrow for a race in October). And at the end Lance Armstrong announced (though the Nike program on my iPod) that I’d set a new personal best for the mile. That was encouraging.

The most amazing event was the family 1km which I walked with Tina afterward. We were in a crowd of kids that were pretty challenged as far as being able to do something as “simple” as walking. They were amazing. Sporting prostheses, braces, using walkers, crutches, and some just limping along, we all crossed the finish line together, and I was moved to thank God that not only did I have two strong, undamaged legs, but so did my kids and my husband. The kids and their parents in that race all deserved a medal, that’s for sure! Very impressive!

There’s still time to send in a donation if you like. These are worthy kids, struggling pretty hard to do stuff that we take for granted each and every day. Pretty cool watching them tackle that race with all the focus and energy it took me to walk the 5k. Click the button below to send a donation:

So, onward and upward, taking my iPod results with a HUGE grain of salt! LOL!

Darlene