Pete's Eats

Actually, that title is quite literal right now. For about 6 weeks I’ve been swimming, running, cycling, walking and working out. As I’ve mentioned so many times in the past, I *used* to be fairly fit prior to discovering my current line of work. For about 8 years now, my fitness has risen and fallen depending on my workload and my weight and general health has followed suit – this yo-yoing is far from ideal and potentially more damaging in the long-term than I’m happy admitting to. As the 6 weeks have progressed I’ve seen a nice-sized portion of weight drop off and, more importantly to me, my resting pulse rate fall by about 18% as well as my recovery heart rate increase significantly.

Thing is, despite my general appearance these days, one of the things I know quite a lot about is fitness training and now I’ve added the ability to track my progress electronically I’m pretty stoked. Using a combination of a Polar HRM for indoor work and a Garmin 301 for outdoor stuff I’ve managed to graph, track and plot every single session – this way, the slightest improvement or sticking point has been brilliantly illuminated. A list of the kit and resources I’m using is below for all you fitness/geeks out there to check out.

It’s taken me many years to find the desire to start exercising properly again. A succession of family issues, business successes and failures and illness has always made me put my health on the back burner. The desire to sort this situation out is immense now though, and as such I’m finding it seriously easy to find the time to fit it all in. This won’t be another yo-yo. Since I’ve started training I can honestly say that I’ve been more efficient and clear-thinking that I have been in a *long* time – the benefit is apparent to me in all aspects of my life right now and I’m very happy about that as you’d imagine. The best thing is, Autumn and Winter are my favourite seasons so I’m looking forward to a lot more outdoor activity in the next 7 months or so.

Here’s a list of the kit I’m using:

• Polar 625SX HRM (indoor work + occasional outdoor stuff where GPS won’t work)
• Garmin Forerunner 301 (Outdoor HRM with GPS built-in – review coming soon)
• iPod Shuffle 1GB (mainly for gym work – I find it stops all the airline stewardesses who go there from chatting me up – heh)

And, a list of the resources:

• iSmartTrain (Mac OSX training diary)
• Garmin Training Center (Windows only – which sucks)
• MotionBased (online activity diary/community/gps plotter)

So, anyway, my main goal for all of this (should my initial enthusiasm wane) is to have as decent a summer Alpine season as possible next year (photo is from my last Alpine climb in ’03). Pip will be 12 then, and some of the lesser mountaineering peaks in the Chamonix valley will be perfect for us – as well as some snowshoe touring – as well as some glacier walking – etc, etc.

It’ll be good to get high again, after so long being low..