Training myself to run farther with Strava's API and an IoT dog feeder of M&Ms
mayer.cool
mayer.cool
Related but if you're wanting to get into running (and have the environment for it) - I HIGHLY recommend favoring trail running over running streets/sidewalks. It's far better for your joints, it'll make you work harder since it'll absorb some of your energy, and it'll improve your proprioception.
CrossFit did the community part really well, and then messed up the entire "train safely" part.
Or you could borrow someone's labrador retriever and have the dog pull you. They like to go real far and real fast... and you get to practice hard turns.
> I HIGHLY recommend favoring trail running over running streets/sidewalks
As a triathlete - I would add something: for me it's more a case of running on soil, over a hard surface. Trail running may take you to a stony path, which is as bad as pavement/concrete.
But in the end it's training your running form to be the best it can be for running, that matters. Running uphill helps to naturally train a good form, even if it's significantly harder.
You only need to be concerned about hard turns if the dog is untrained, afterwards, they're the best running partners you could ask for. Come visit us at https://www.reddit.com/r/RunningWithDogs/. Lots of suggestions for harnesses for the dog (mandatory, IMO) and waist leashes for the human (highly recommended).
If you own the dog, they can be a great source of encouragement, too. They'll bounce with excitement any time there's a possibility of going for a run, and look at you with big, sad eyes when you instead sit on your phone.
My old girl and I put in 20+ miles a week, 50 weeks a year, for a little over 8 years, or a little over 8,000 miles. That's a lot of M&Ms!
Job.
But also, running in forests messes with my pace and focus somehow.
Tangent - My definition of "adult" that I came up with as an early teen:
"When I realize I'm looking in the _driver's seat_ of passing cars hoping to see pretty girls, that will mean I'm `an adult`.".
Years later I had a palpable shock moment in which I glanced in a car and remembered coming up with the definition. "OH CRAP I'm an adult!"
Felt like a "hoist by my own petard" moment.
For me the definition has always been "an adult owns up to their own mistakes".
Which is the shorter version of "A child doesn't care about their mistakes, a teenager expects others to fix them and an adults own up to them".
This allows me to categorise older people who I feel like don't act like adults.
There is definitely a difference though between defining an adult from the inside vs outside
I am now very happy with my full spice rack.
There are so many ways to interpret that.
Being an adult is all about ambiguity!
Younger folk get their couches on any day and usually from facebook/craigslist/local classifieds
- copy the m&m design (though I don’t like m&m’s)
- do the same thing with beef jerky/trail mix/hummus/steak/treats like that
- do the same thing, but use a good restaurant/coffee shop/board game/friend/TV show/hot tub/other experience
Here's [0] 5000 words by Gwern. I don't know whether I agree with his conclusions, but they're likely to be well researched and objectively thought out.
By far the most effective thing to motivate me to exercise, and run in particular, is the "VO2 Max" section of the Apple health app. It's a rough indication of your cardiovascular endurance, and the higher, the better. The real key is that, though, is that it basically works like an XP bar in a game: if you "grind" running, it goes up. If you don't, it doesn't. It's incredibly addicting to check the number every time you finish a run and see if it's ticked up slightly. It's also great because in some sense it is "real". If it goes up, I have an easier time on hikes, runs (obviously), playing sports, etc.
The second thing that really got me into running is that I found that the most effective way to get VO2 Max to go up is to run in heart rate zone 4, also tracked on the Apple watch. Zone 4 is 80 - 90% of your maximum heart rate. It's not an all out sprint, but you'll be moving pretty fast.
The reason it's so effective is best illustrated by contrast. In the past, I've tried tracking a number of metrics on my run: total miles, average speed, calories burned, whatever. But I found it psychologically draining to continuously try to top my fastest speed, and I inevitably had off days (or weeks or months) when the score I was measuring wouldn't go up. Obviously as you get faster, this happens more and more, and it gets easy to start wondering if you're even progressing. Heart rate is a much better measure, because in some sense this is compensated for. You don't have to continue to beat yourself every day (or fret that you're not) to get to 80% of your max heart rate, and on days when you're more exhausted, you'll hit a higher heart rate faster, so the effort is roughly the same.
Also, Zone 4 is a great place to be. You're pushing yourself, but it's a sustainable sort of push. I often found that when I ran sprints I wanted to die. They were so psychologically demotivating that I would do anything to avoid them. Zone 4 is not like this. It's very manageable, and I wake up excited to do it!
At this point, I want to run every day - I'm at the point where I have to force myself to stop sometimes because it's healthy to take rest days!
Usual disclaimers apply, BTW. Don't do all your running in Zone 4, don't immediately go from no running to an hour of zone 4 every day, do a reasonable ramp up over a long period of time, etc etc.
It's much more sustainable than Zone 4 (supposedly anyone can maintain Zone 2 for hours) and brings with it a bunch of metabolic and health benefits. I found the book "80/20 Running" to have excellent running schedules for how to mix in a small but appropriate amount of fast Zone 4 running into a schedule that's predominantly Zone 2. It has a good mix of intervals, tempo runs and hill runs that build you up to run 5k, 10s, halfs and full marathons in beginner, intermediate and advanced pace goals.
The intent of the slow Zone 2 is to build the cardiovascular base that gives you better aerobic endurance without stressing your body out too much. Zone 4 is what makes you faster.
The user you replied to has convinced me to get a smart watch as 1. I've had awful stamina since age 10 or birth 2. Stupid "number going up" gimmick generally works well at motivating me. But I'm not about to switch to iPhone, so getting an Apple watch isn't going to work.
A step down but still great is the Forerunner 265. The feature they all have and I think has been the most useful is the Training Readiness. It looks at a bunch of different metrics, both current (your HRV, last workout performance, sleep, stress) and chronic (your weekly and monthly total exercise amount, types of running, etc) and advises you on how hard you should train and suggests a running activity for the day. It is basically a digital running coach/personal trainer that makes sure you are getting a good mix between tempo runs, long runs, easy runs, etc. and makes sure you aren’t overtraining or if a bad day means to switch to a light workout. I normally use it loosely to inform my choices but I’ve tried using its daily training plans exclusively and it was very good at keeping me progressing.
Hopefully this helps.
In some sense less data might be better to make it clearer which number to focus on, so sounds like the Forerunner may be the right fit. The Training Readiness does sound a bit intidimating for someone who's starting from zero (or really, minus), but I can always strategically ignore that ;)
Thank you.
I totally understand, however, I would say that is exactly where it is most useful. You don't need to actually know or understand any data, since Garmin crunches all those things in the background for you and distills it down to concrete advice on where you are and what to do next. You can really do well with just two metrics (the daily suggested workout and Training Status). You could just follow the workout of the day "Easy run, heart rate range x-y, 31 mins" or "Tempo run, warm up 10 mins, run 15 mins heart rate range x-y, cool down 10 mins" etc. And look at what your Training status is currently, which is things like “Productive”, “Overreaching”, “Maintaining”, etc.
You don’t need to understand about lactic threshold and what types of runs improve it or how high aerobic, low aerobic, and anaerobic runs affect different aspects of improving your fitness or how many rest days are enough. You don’t need to have the experience to know how to balance recovery and training and which factors to even look at. Was your status “Productive” most of the week? Awesome, you know you are improving. What is the next workout? Done.
I hope it works out for you and you enjoy running as a healthy hobby.
Right, but to us monkey-brained seeing a boolean "productive" isn't a great motivator, we need to see a number that can go up, making it much more addictive. That's why I was so convinced by the Apple Watch user giving that one number that they look at - that will definitely work for me as it's super effective on the reward-related parts of my brain. A boolean, or having a hundred numbers - not as much. If you're someone who doesn't need that, I'm sure the training readiness is much more actually useful for improving, but we're not necessarily looking for that - our hope is to one day get to a point where we may start looking for that :)
I've noticed it myself even when doing projects. So much easier to stay motivated when you have this one number, e.g. page views or active users that updates every day (not "enterprise contracts" which may change once every month), to focus on, purely for monkey-brain reasons.
Turns out it was unnecessary but I like the idea of actively looking for the worst of something.
Also, having just recently set a repeating reminder to rotate the mattress, yes:
>I now know that what being an adult really means is that most of your time is taken up by an ever-growing list of compulsory maintenance tasks that constitute the meager amount of control you exert over your own life.
Truer words have never been said. It's absurd how much bureaucracy adults have to engage with just to exist.
To make everything really simple I scraped my public profile directly from esp8266 controller (so there's no need for extra steps of setting up Strava app to gain access to the API). Worked relatively well.
When I joined my current job, I used M&M's as reward when learning the names and faces of the people there using memory cards. Also worked!
Fortunately I've found that Belegarth fighting is so much fun that I need no extra carrot.
I too have struggled to find something that worked for me for consistent exercise (surprisingly, prepaying for training helped more than I expected), and now I don't want to lose momentum. Make no mistake though; I had a LOT of help from friends and family as well.
Bonus points for Mord Fustang.
It does make me think: what else can you use Tuya devices & Python libraries to do? I've got exercise and food portions under control, but I'm interested in other applications.
https://youtu.be/HWceX64ZC8w?si=a-mm-DP4EKMmGhXy
Similar idea with origami ninja stars.
I got my butt to the gym pretty quick in the day because I was hungry
> If you wanted to have this thing completely isolated though, you could have a no-outbound-internet subnet with this device on it so long as the device you are going to run the script on has line-of-sight.
> You can do this because Tuya devices have a local-only protocol that tinytuya supports, so you can send commands just within your LAN.
I want a device which I can put on my network and which will not try to dial out to the world. This device is not that.