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Since returning from Hawaii I’ve only been able to get one in 5k training run on June 6. Nothing much to talk about, the pace was just a little slower than my usual 7 minutes per kilometer. However, my left knee was hurting for several days after the run. I’m pretty sure that the cause was simply a matter of not easing back into it rather than bad form or over use.

We went to Puerto Vallarta from the 9th through the 20th. There’s a good community athletic park there complete with a nicely surfaced track but the heat and humidity was too much to try it out.

Today we’re going on a car trip to Northern California to take a Dr. McDougall cooking workshop. This doctor believes that most health problems, including my high cholesterol, can be solved with diet.

Of course the key to good health is a balance of diet, exercise and happiness. I’m certainly happy not having to report to work every day but I’ll be back at work on July 1. Hopefully I’ll be able to return to a regular exercise routine soon but for June it looks like 5k for the whole month is about it.

Well the first week was quite active. I walked several miles every day between the set where Rosie was working to the hotel in Honolulu. The next week base station was a boat off of Makaha and I spent the week reading and not moving very much. Any little pain that I had from exercising is gone and being replaced by aches from lack of exercise.

So here I am in Waikiki Beach. Thursday was the travel day and Friday I spent mostly walking to and from the Hotel Ilikai to the set at Queen’s Beach where Rosie is working. I even made a trip to the local WalMart to pick up some sun screen they needed on the set. Although it might seem like a lazy day it turned out that I walked about 15 miles, much of it barefoot on the sand, so you could call it exercise, work or simply an active lifestyle day. If every day was like that there would not really be any need to take the time to exercise because there’s enough activity in the day to keep fit. Hum–give up a life of driving the car to work and sit in front of a computer for 10 hours? Sounds good to me.

There is a lagoon right next to the hotel and it looks like lots of people jog around it for exercise so I went down and did 5 kilometers this morning.

.               HR             Pace                Cadence    Distance

Saturday    -   157   6:57 min/km  11:11 min/mi    85         5.0 km

Why a daily run distance on the weekend? Rosie is working today, Saturday, so it feels like a weekday today–Toto I don’t think we’re in Jerusalem anymore! Besides yesterday was sort of a long day for me and I’m getting plenty of exercise just walking on the beach. I also got a swim mask and snorkel and have been checking out the local marine life. Now I’ve only got to rent a bicycle and I’d be doing a tri-vacation!

In all the flurry of activity getting ready to go to Hawaii to be with Rosie for a few weeks while she is working on a movie there I just realized that I reached a milestone today–50 kilometers and the week is only half over. Well, OK I cheated. Monday I rode my bicycle to and from work so it doesn’t really count!

In any case I did put in a couple of 5 k runs and wanted to note them down before taking off. Interesting, same cadence but different pace, I must have been taking longer strides on Tuesday. Yesterday I was feeling a little tired so I took it easy. I didn’t do the daily run this morning.

.              HR            Pace                Cadence     Distance

Tuesday    -   161   6:53 min/km  11:04 min/mi    84         5.0 km

Wednesday  -   157   7:19 min/km  11:46 min/mi    84         5.0 km

I’ll try to put in some runs while in Hawaii but I’m not sure if I’ll keep up my training blog.

Well, since this is bike to work week and I’m working–I did it! I took the long way around the hill through Silverlake to get from my home in West Hollywood to DreamWorks Animation. It went quiet smoothly, though I got a little lost around Los Feliz going to work and it seemed like every light turned red on me when I came back via Melrose. The best part is that I did it on my 10+ year old cheapie bicycle. It was in pretty good shape because it sat in the garage all these years. All I did was clean it up a bit before the ride.

I’m only working Monday for this week. Would I have tried biking to work the whole week? How about biking to work every day? That’s something I’m going to have to consider once I get back to work! One thing that I’m thinking about is adding an electric assist to make going over that hill a little easier and not having to arrive at work all sweaty.

The ride to work took me 1 1/2 hours. That’s a little longer than I anticipated but considering that I got lost and hit some unexpected hills it wasn’t too bad. I don’t have a way to measure speed or distance on the bike but according to the mapped route it should have been 14 miles.

On the return trip I decided to come back the same route that I usually drive. Over the weekend I bought a head and tail light for the ride home and I confess that the ride home had me a bit worried. I thought I would have to walk over the Cahuenga pass and when I got there I saw a couple of other cyclists walking their bikes but I dropped it down to the lowest gear and climbed the hill just fine. Coming down the other side was exhilarating to say the least. The trip took just over an hour–about the same as it usually takes to drive home!

One thing that I wasn’t expecting was that it felt very cold riding the bicycle. I’m used to getting warmed up when running but I never got warmed up on the bike. Part of the reason was that it was an unseasonably cold day, I was taking it easy for the most part and the speed I was riding generated quite a bit of wind chill.

I wore the Polar running watch and although I didn’t have the GPS to measure distance on the bike, once I entered the total distance on the ProTrainer 5 software, it gave me information about pace. The hill looks much more challenging on the graph–since it is measuring time and not distance, the trip home compressed the downhill to make it look like I was going down a ski jump!

In keeping with my exercise log-blog, here are the statistics:

.                        HR               Pace              Distance

Home to DreamWorks   -   134    3:58 min/km  6:23 min/mi    22.5 km

DreamWorks to Home   -   120    3:24 min/km  5:28 min/mi    19.3 km

I guess that in bicycling you don’t really measure pace in minutes per kilometer or mile but in kilometers or miles per hour. My average was about 10 miles per hour or 16 kilometers per hour.

A lot has happened since my last post. First of all, I’m home! Through a series of events that happened at my job in Jerusalem I had an opportunity to move my departure date up by a month so I took it. That last week of April was crazy for me, trying to pack up and scheduling working at my old job at DreamWorks Animation the following week. Needless to say, once again work got in the way of my workouts, though my sore left ankle would have put me down for the week anyway.

I immediately started working out at my old familiar course in West Hollywood. Monday Rosie and I took the dog out for a stroll but I strapped on the heart rate monitor and made it count–the pace was very slow because of all the pee breaks the dog took. Tuesday was one lap around the block to test my ankle. Wednesday Rosie was getting ready to leave for a month long job in Hawaii so I skipped the run–wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I get home she leaves, but the good news is that I’ll be following her to Hawaii soon. Thursday I started extending the distance and Friday I finally got around to doing a 5 kilometer daily run. My course at home is much flatter than the hilly Jerusalem course so it wasn’t that hard to get to 5K.

However, my ankle is still a bit sore so I’m going to give it a couple of days rest and skip the long run.

.              HR           Pace                Cadence     Distance

Monday    -   95    12:30 min/km  20:07 min/mi    54         1.7 km

Tuesday   -   164    6:27 min/km  10:22 min/mi    87         1.9 km

Wednesday -   off

Thursday  -   164    6:40 min/km  10:43 min/mi    86         3.7 km

Friday    -   164    6:49 min/km  10:58 min/mi    87         5.0 km

I am just filling in for someone at DreamWorks. It was only supposed to be for a week but he isn’t returning until Tuesday so I’m also going to work on Monday. Since May 12-16 is “Ride your Bike to Work Week” I dusted off the old bicycle and am planning on riding to work and back on Monday. At 12 to 14 miles one-way, depending on which route I take.

It seems that these past few weeks things aren’t going as I had hoped. I was planning on running 3k daily, Monday through Friday and a long run on Saturday–but that was not to be. I’ve got a pain in my left ankle, last time it was my right ankle and it took several weeks to heal. However, this time I’m pretty sure that the problem was caused not by running, but when I accidentally hit my foot on the bed frame on Monday evening. Trying to be a hero and running too hard on Tuesday only made it worse.

Three kilometers per day, total distance this week: 12k. About average for this month.

.              HR           Pace                Cadence

Monday    -   157    6:50 min/km  11:00 min/mi    84

Tuesday   -   160    6:37 min/km  10:39 min/mi    88

Wednesday -   156    7:29 min/km  12:03 min/mi    85

Thursday  -   151    8:05 min/km  13:01 min/mi    80

I took it easy on Wednesday. The pain subsided after about a kilometer warm up and I almost talked myself into training through it instead of taking any rest days. Perhaps stress has something to do with this injury because after a relaxing good phone conversation with my wife on Thursday morning I really felt pretty good, though I took it extra easy to prevent making things worse.

Since Friday was a day off work I decided to wait until later in the day to do the run, but after walking to the market I realized that I’d better take the day off and forget about doing a long run on Saturday.

So this shouldn’t be as bad as when my right ankle hurt last month and I don’t think it is a running injury this time, but I’m going to back off on my workouts–just a bit because I don’t want to just stop and rest. One strategy that might work is to run every other day and see if things get better or worse.

An interesting observation is that the Polar RS800sd measured all of the runs this week 2.9k instead of 3k. Not a big deal, but I’m running the same course so to keep things consistent I’m calculating my times for 3k.

I guess that in the big picture it doesn’t really matter too much if my training distance is off my 0.1k as long as I’m getting in a good workout. I’m currently not preparing for a race, unless you consider getting my cholesterol count down a sort of a race. What is starting to bother me though is that I’m running around in circles every morning in order to stay healthy enough to sit in front of a computer in a dark room the rest of the day.

Five weeks to go on this job and I’ll be home.

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The most practical alternate form of transportation that will get me to and from work seems to be an electric assisted bicycle. Nothing fancy or very progressive–I’ve already got a bicycle that can be easily modified. There’s lots of information and videos about electric hybrid bicycles, this news report pretty much covers the basics.

Before I came to Israel to work, I was about to buy a tandem recumbent bicycle so that my wife and I could exercise together. My first choice was this Easy Racer tandem.

The problem with this was how to transport it. We weren’t ready to sell the car and use this as our main source of transportation so we wanted something we could haul to the beach on a standard bicycle rack with a minimum of hassle.

Then I found this Columbia Tandem from Barcroft.

And it fits on a rack without folding or disassembly.

I was all set to order one of these tandems when I got called away to work in a far away land. So, now that I’ll be returning home should I pick up where I left off?

Since I’ve been gone the price of gasoline has skyrocketed so bicycle commuting to work is an option that I’ve got to consider. No need to car pool with a bicycle so the tandem will have to wait for now.

So, what are my commuting options? I’ve got a cheap hybrid bicycle that I was thinking about adding an electrical assist in order to get over the hill between my house and where I work. However, there is this site called veloroutes.org and I was able to map a route that avoided the hill and the heaviest traffic. Here’s a route that looks promising.

This got me thinking, could I combine my exercise and commute? When I’m at home I have to get up and hour early to exercise then drive about 45 minutes to work. I should be able to do this 14 mile commute via bicycle in about an hour. Returning from work by car usually takes about an hour because of traffic, sometimes more, much more. However with a bicycle it should take an hour or maybe less because it is mostly downhill and I won’t be concerned about building up a sweat and having to stew in my juices the whole work day. The downside is that it is usually dark when I get off work and of course there is the possibility of rain. No big deal, I’ve exercised in the rain and in the dark, I can deal with it.

So how about a little fun and instead of spending on an electric assist I get a new bicycle? I’m fond of recumbents so a nice fast one would make the commute more enjoyable, like this sleek Bacchetta.

I’ve been very interested in the front wheel drive Cruzbike and adding an electric assist on this bike is an intriguing option.

Of course if I’m really serious about exercise fixed gear is the way to go. Sure it may be the latest fad, but it is also great exercise (no coasting)–and I don’t have to pay gym membership to enroll in a spinning class. I’d probably be a bit of a prude to add a front break, but better safe than road kill. The coolest thing about this choice is that I could get an old frame, convert it to fixed gear myself and have a very hip rig without spending a fortune.

Of course if money is no object, there are lots of carbon fiber tri, trials, road, track, beauties like this Superbike from Bike Technologies Australia.

Last week I was congratulating myself for exercising all through crunch time at work. This week–well, not so much.

Sunday was a scheduled day off, Monday I put in a 3K run, Tuesday I didn’t make up my mind if I would alternate between 2K and 3K each day so on the second lap I thought I’d check my time and oops–forgot to start my watch, so 2K it was.

Tuesday started bad but ended worse. The DVD we made for the screening didn’t work at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and we ended up working late into the night trying to make one that would work. As it turned out the DVD was fine but there was some sort of a technical problem at the Cinematheque that caused the right speaker to kick out about 20 minutes into the movie.

Anyway, Wednesday morning I was toast and even though nobody seemed to mind the right speaker going out for about 5 minutes during the screening, I of course stressed out. Thursday I had a back ache, sore ankles, wobbly knees, and other physical signs of stress so I took that day off from running. On Friday, which is a non-work day like Saturday is in the U.S., I spent most of the day laying on the couch hoping that would get my back back in shape–ugh!

That brings me up to today. I decided to run, though I started a little later than usual and the weather is starting to warm up a little earlier than it used to. My back, ankles, knees and head felt better so I decided to get back on track and put in 5K on the hilly neighborhood course. On the 2nd lap I was weighing my options, should I bail out at 3K and save the 5K for tomorrow? Without thinking about it I started to speed up but at the end of the 3rd lap I convinced myself that a 5K would be better than a 3K for today.

No crunch time next week, 3K workouts Monday through Friday and time to think about doing something longer than 5K for the Saturday LSD run.

.                HR           Pace                Cadence

Sunday       -   Rest Day

Monday  3K   -   161    6:50 min/km  10:59 min/mi    87

Tuesday  2K  -   Forgot to start running watch

Wednesday    -   Zip

Thursday     -   Nada

Friday       -   Even less than yesterday

Saturday 5K  -   164    7:18 min/km  11:45 min/mi    83

Total for the week, 10K. That’s a setback to my goal of slowly increasing weekly distance, last week I did 15K so it isn’t really all that bad.

Finally, on today’s chart I put the cursor on the 2K mark just to see how fast I was moving at that point–5:45 min/km 9:16 min/mi. Somehow everything must have fallen in place at that point because I didn’t feel like I was going that fast and I had to force myself to slow down knowing that I wouldn’t make it through 5K at that speed. Well, at least not on the hills in the heat, not yet–but maybe some day?