running – Geeky Girl Engineer

Run the Chesapeake Bay Bridge 10K

Posted on November 11, 2014 by geek

View of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge near the start of the race

On November 9, 2014, I ran the inaugural Across the Bay 10k Chesapeake Bay Bridge Run. The point to point course includes 4.35 miles across the bridge, which reaches 186 feet at its peak. The run across the bridge provided amazing views of Chesapeake Bay. As an engineer, I really loved being able to examine the bridge up close at a slower pace than when driving across it. I wore a GoPro Hero 3+ on my head during the race to make a video of the run. I have edited the video to only include the start, bridge portion of the run, and the finish, and I have also sped up the video. My official run time was 1:16:24, and nobody wants to watch a video that long of me running across the bridge. I removed the sound due to a weird noise that was created when I sped up the video. Also, I took a few photos with my iPhone and made a few photos from freeze frames from the GoPro video.

View of the bay from the bridge

View of both bridges

In the truss section of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge

They also gave us a pretty cool medal for completing the race.

Completion medal

38th Marine Corp Marathon

Posted on October 28, 2013 by geek

Yesterday, I watched the Marine Corp Marathon from a couple of different spots and cheered on the runners. Absolutely everyone of them has my respect. They inspired me to increase my Sunday long run from eight to nine miles. There is no way I can run a marathon, or at least not yet, but they inspired me to up my game. Below are a few of my photos that I took. Some runners are dressed in costume. Some military members are dressed in military gear including backpack. Some carried flags. One guy jump roped. One guy ran while juggling three footballs and dressed as Robert Griffith III because evidently running is just not a challenge (check out his photo below, as the best part is the look on the face of female runner next to him). At the end of this post is all the photos that I took on the extremely off chance that someone who reads this blog post knows someone in or was in the marathon and I by chance got their photo. If so, leave me a comment, and I will be happy to send you a copy.

Fitness and the Fitbit

Posted on July 7, 2013 by geek

I’ve had a Fitbit for about nine months now, and I get asked enough questions about my thoughts on it that I thought it would be most efficient just to write a blog post on it. Let me say clearly, this is not a sales pitch for Fitbit. There are other personal activity trackers out there, and here is a good summary and review of them. I have never tried any other one, but if you decide you want a personal activity tracker, research all the different ones.

First, for those who don’t know what a Fitbit is, it is essentially a really high tech pedometer. It keeps track of the number of steps you take and how quickly you take them, so it can tell the difference between when you slowly walking, walking briskly, or running. I have a Fitbit One, which can also determine how many flights of stairs I have climbed with a very tiny, sensitive altimeter. It calculates how many total calories you have burned by how active you have been, your basal metabolic rate, and your weight. The Fitbit has a simple display that shows that days total steps, stairs, miles, and calories burned. It is its ability to sync to the Fitbit system via your computer or smart phone app that really makes it high tech though.

On the website and to a certain extent on the smart phone app, you can see not only the stats that the Fitbit displays but also much more detail. It has a graph showing you how active you have been throughout the day. You can see all your data ever collected. For example, I can see how active I was six months ago and at what time of day. If you enter your weight manually or you use their Aria scale, then you can see all your weight data. You can log activities like yoga, running, gardening, etc. The activity logging helps to better calculate calorie burning as Fitbit will not know how much you are using your arms or other activities than walking or running. I exercise regularly on my elliptical machine, and it doesn’t really record my movement on it all that well, and it also can’t tell what kind of resistance I am using. I use the activity timer on the Fitbit to record the time I am on the elliptical machine, and then I use that information to log the activity on the website. Fitbit has a large database of various activities and how many calories on average you burn doing them. It uses the information you log to calculate the calories burned during that activity and overrides what it had originally calculated based on your movements it recorded. The activity timer is also nice when you are running or walking because it will use it to calculate your pace for that time period.

The Fitbit website and smart phone app also lets you record everything you eat and drink to calculate the calories you have consumed. It has a large database of food and their nutritional information. It has information on raw ingredients like apples or skinless chicken breast, and it also has information on processed or prepared food from big name brands and large food chains. You can also enter information based on nutrition labels.

If you enter a weight loss goal, Fitbit will ask how fast you want to lose it or conversely what kind of weekly calorie deficit you would like to achieve it. That is, as most know, in theory, you will lose one pound of fat with a 3500-calorie burn to intake deficit. Thus, if you consume 3500 calories less than you burn each week or 500 calories a day, then you should lose a pound a week. I say “in theory” because as any dieter will tell you, it is really not that simple. If you gain muscle, you could lose fat but still gain weight. Also, there is water weight that comes and goes, and then there is simply the “I have no explanation why I haven’t lost weight or why I have lost weight.” As a chemical engineer, the seemingly laws-of-thermodynamics-defying energy balance on my body is very annoying. Anyway, back to Fitbit, if you set a weight loss goal, it uses the calorie burned data it calculates to let you know how many more calories you can eat that day if you also enter all the food you eat. This is updated each time it syncs with the Fitbit, so after you exercise, it will show you how many more extra calories you can eat with this new activity information. Conversely if you are incredibly sedentary one day, the how many more calorie you can eat information will continue to decrease through the day. For example, based on my weight, my desired weight loss rate, and presumably my average daily activity level, each morning it starts out tell me I can eat about 2100 calories that day. As the day continues, if I keep a normal activity rate, i.e. walking here and there, the 2100 calorie will hold steady. If I sit like a lump all day, or the data just hasn’t synced, it might go down to 1700 calories or so. If I am quite active and then workout on my elliptical machine, it might say I could have eaten 3300 calories that day.

That’s a summary of what Fitbit does, and I would guess what other personal activity trackers do, so after using it for nine months, here’s what I think about it. I love it. Seriously, I love it. Granted, I am an unabashed data geek, so I love the data it gives me on myself. I think it is fairly accurate. In terms of tracking steps, it seems to need you to take at least five steps or so before it starts recording them. I have paced back and forth in a room with less than that, and it didn’t record anything. I am not sure of the exact number of steps it needs. It records flights of stairs accurately for the most part. It is supposed to record one flight of stairs for every ten feet climbed. In my two-story house, it is accurate, and in my office building, it records either one or two flights of stairs for every flight I climb because the floors are more than ten feet apart but less than twenty feet. When I notice that it is not recording stairs properly, I clean the Fitbit with some canned air. In terms of accuracy for calories burned, I have no idea how accurate it is. Based on my weight loss, I would say that it is probably fairly accurate.

As for whether wearing it everyday has changed my behavior, it definitely has. It is a reminder of how active or inactive I am. One of the reasons I first bought it was as I mentioned in a previous post, after moving to the DC area, I lost about 20 pounds without really trying because I adopted a pedestrian lifestyle. I bought the Fitbit to understand just how much walking I was doing. According to Fitbit and some other sources, you should try to take 10,000 steps and climb ten flights of stairs everyday. When I first started wearing the Fitbit, I found that I walked almost that much on a normal day without even exercising. I exercise almost everyday, so it became much more clear why I was losing weight. It was rather an eye opener when I went to Houston for Christmas a couple of months after getting my Fitbit. Even accounting for the fact that it was vacation, in Houston you drive everywhere. I had to make a very concerted effort to go for a walk in a park everyday to try to get 10,000 steps. Thus, it became clear just how much walking I do in DC relative to other places I have lived.

The constant count from my Fitbit has helped motivate me to keep increasing my activity level. If you are a competitive person, then friending people who also use Fitbit via the website may also help to motivate you, as on the website and app, how you rank in steps is shown in relation to your friends. Fitbit’s website also awards you daily and lifetime achievement badges for your steps, stairs, and weight loss. Each 5000 steps in a day gets you a higher badge and similar for the steps. This somewhat silly little badge icon on the website has managed to turn me into a 5 year old wanting another gold star, and I once found myself walking up and down my house’s staircase two times for no reason but for the sole purpose to get a higher badge. There is probably a bit of insanity or addiction that hits those of us who really get into the Fitbit. However the lifetime badges are a nice reminder of how much you have done. Because I also have Fitbit’s Aria scale, I get a badge for every five pounds that I lose, which is a rather nice reminder also.

My behavior has changed in very specific ways since I first got my Fitbit. About a month or so ago, I started going for walks during my lunch break at work. I actually really enjoy my walks now for various reasons, but it also gives me an extra half hour of brisk walking to add to my daily step count. At work, I also now regularly use the restroom on another floor to get a few extra steps and a flight of stairs. I now average about 18,000 steps per day, and I regularly climb over 25 flights of stairs per day. My pedestrian lifestyle has continued and increased. I enter everything I eat into the website, so it can tell me how many more calories I can consume. I have continued to lose weight.

Besides a continual reminder of your activity level, I think one way a personal activity tracker can help a person increase their fitness, is that it can help you figure out how you can achieve your goals whatever they are. There have been days when I have been pleasantly surprised that I have already accomplished quite a bit of steps, yet I haven’t gone for a walk or exercised. However, I was moving almost non-stop around the house doing housework, or I did several errands and parked at the back of the parking lots. Thus, the Fitbit helps me realize how small changes in behavior like parking at the far end of a parking lot can help to increase my fitness. Is that small action in itself going to cause me to lose a pound? No, but every little bit of lifestyle change can help.

A Fitbit is not a miracle cure for being overweight or a sedentary lifestyle. If you don’t care how inactive you are, then a constant reminder of your inactivity is not going to help. If you would like to become more active or figure out how much you can eat based on how active you are, then it can really help. It is a really nice tool, and like all tools, the usefulness and effectiveness of it, entirely depends on the user.

My First 5K Race

Posted on May 19, 2013 by geek

I ran my first 5K race yesterday. This was not the first time I have a 5K before, just the first time in an actual race. I have actually run more than a 5K non-stop. Thus far my maximum length running nonstop has been about 3.6 miles. My official time for this 5K was 40:51.3. There were many people walking or walking and running in the race, so I was not last. I was definitely one of the last nonstop runners though. I really don’t care how slow I was. Sure, I’d like to be faster, but running over three miles nonstop is a major personal achievement for me. I’m 40 years old, and for the first time in my life, I can run three miles nonstop. I have never been in good enough shape to do that. I exercise on my elliptical machine almost everyday for an hour. I’ve been exercising on my elliptical machine for years, although I have been getting more and more diligent about intensity and how often I exercise in recent years. However, road running is different from running on an elliptical machine. One of the reasons I like my elliptical machine is there is no impact. There is definitely impact with road running, and I have to be careful to not injure myself, especially my knees. However, for numerous reasons, a month or so ago, I realized I needed to increase and diversify my exercise routine, so I started road running once or twice a week. I started with short lengths: first a little over a mile, then next week, two miles, then the next week three miles. Since then I’ve been increasing it incrementally by adding a couple of tenths of mile. What was strange to me when I first started road running was realizing that my heart and lungs were perfectly fine during the run. Exercising on my elliptical machine had prepared my heart and lungs just fine for road running. It used to be that I could only run for short lengths before getting out of breath and have to switch to walking. Now as I have started running more what slows me down and to a certain extent hurts me is my legs not liking this whole impact thing. Therefore, I run slow, steadily, and within my capabilities. I run to improve my fitness, and I am slowly getting better at road running as I do it more.

I decided to enter a 5K race to have a goal and see how I compare with other runners. I also first decided to enter a 5K because it was Run or Dye, and it looks like a blast. That race is not until June though. Later I signed up for the race I ran yesterday, Arlington’s Turtle Trot, because it was within walking distance of my house, and it raises money for my local wildlife center’s turtle rehabilitation program. I had no delusions that I would win this or even be competitive. Again, I’m slow, and I am fine with that. What I learned today is that I am really slow, but I am slow and steady as I knew I was, and I am improving. I also learned that some runners and walkers have absolutely no knowledge of outdoor running etiquette.

The Turtle Trot was a very family friendly, small, community type race. There were many children running the race along with adults. There were some adults running with children in strollers and running with their also running children. There were adults running in a competitive manner and adults like me just running to say they did it. The race was on the Washington & Old Dominion (W&OD) trail, a very popular paved hike and bike trail that varies from about six to eight feet in width. This is where the problems arose (in my opinion). Participants just gathered at the start with little sorting. The people who were trying to be competitive did seem to gather more at the start, but the people who were planning to walk did not do that much sorting to stay at the back. I stood near the middle. I was trying to avoid the crush of real runners at the front. As the race started, I walked to the start line letting the pack get going first, and as the race was chip timed, it really didn’t matter that I was delayed in crossing the start line. For the first tenth of a mile or so, I tried to let real runners behind me easily pass, and I tried to quickly pass the walkers in front of me. Then after a few tenths of a mile as racers were still sorting themselves out, the race route went from Four Mile Run trail to the much more popular W&OD trail. As with any Saturday morning, the W&OD is populated with bikers, runners, walkers, and their dogs. This made for an even more crowded race route, and this is where my (and I would wager other participants’) problems really began.

On the W&OD, you need to be courteous and allow others to pass you when they are faster, stick to the right if possible especially when you are slow, and politely and quickly pass others being cognizant that someone else may want to pass you as you pass others. I walk (with and without my dog), run, and bike on the W&OD often. I’m used to these rules of shared space courtesy and happily accept it because I enjoy using this trail. Some of the participants in the Turtle Trot either do not accept these rules of common courtesy or are really obtuse. There were some participants and some people simply using the trail who made it difficult to pass them, especially some who were participating in groups of more than two and thus taking up the entire side and then some of the trail. There were two female participants who absolutely drove me crazy for the first half of the race. They were walking/running along side each other. They would run faster than me for a bit and pass me. Then they would walk, and I would have to pass them. As they were taking up the entire right side of the trail, I would have to pass them on the left side, which often meant waiting until it was free from opposing cyclist/pedestrian traffic. Then shortly after I pass them, evidently because I was running so slow, they would start running again, pass me, then start walking again. This nonsense went on every five or ten minutes or so, for almost the entire first half of the race, until finally, thankfully, they either stopped their running sprints or I as a steady, slow runner had gotten far enough ahead of them to avoid them. To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with walkers who do running sprints. I used to exercise like this before I was able to run nonstop. I think it is a great way to get your heart rate up while walking if you can’t yet run for extended periods. I wouldn’t even have a problem with them doing this in the race if they were not walking along side each other and had courtesy of others around them. If they were walking single file, it would have been much easier to pass them. There were others who did similar type things, which also got annoying, but they seem to pass me less, or it was one person not in a group, who could thus then pass me or allow me to pass him/her more easily. There were also children in the race, some not running alongside adults. Many of them were also walking then sprinting with some of them doing this in an unpredictable manner such that it became difficult to know if a child was going simply stop right in front of me causing me to have to quickly swerve around them. Some of the children also passed on the right or left in groups and just plain ran in unpredictable ways. I can forgive the children a lot easier. They’re children; they may not know better, and well, they were acting like children. All of this made for some serious frustrations during the race. I’m sure it doesn’t sound like it, but I actually like the diversity of people in the race. I like that there were children, walkers, and noncompetitive runners. Exercise is so important, and I think it’s great that people of all ages are out there exercising. Also, having other people in the race who had no anticipation of winning the race gives me as a slow runner encouragement to enter races to improve my personal time and to have fun, as fun runs should be.

Overall I enjoyed my first 5K. I am glad I did it, and I hope many turtles will be helped by my entry fee. I hope to keep improving in my fitness and running and perhaps run a few more races in the future simply as a goal to improve my time, especially when the entry fees help a cause I support. I just hope my future race organizers will better communicate to participants about race courtesy and most importantly that my future fellow participants will practice race and shared space courtesy.