Feeling good versus feeling young

A friend of mine posted to her Facebook page recently criticizing a whole category of ageist comments along the lines of “You’re only as old as you feel.”

It caught my interest in particular because I’d been mentally composing a post about how I just turned 58, but I’m not suffering the aches and pains that supposedly go along with getting old. My friend’s post reminded me that referring to this as “feeling young” is problematic. And yet, I find that I come down on the other side of this issue. Sure, there is a certain irrefutable accuracy to say that your age is the current year minus your birth year, but age is many things besides a mathematical calculation—at a minimum it’s a social construction, and also perhaps a collection of biological circumstances.

It’s true that what I mean—and what perhaps I should say—is I feel good. Better, in fact, than I’ve felt in years. I’m stronger, more flexible, and more agile than I’ve been in longer than I can remember. I move with more ease, more power, and more control. I have more endurance. I’m certainly more comfortable in my own skin.

A lot of this is just good luck, of course—good genes, avoiding serious injuries and serious illnesses so far.

Beyond good luck I credit my movement practice for most of the rest. Taiji. Walking and hiking. Running (merely an adjunct, but one I enjoy in particular). After years of lifting with machines to little noticeable effect I now do almost all my strength training with bodyweight exercises and am having much more success. (The main exception to pure bodyweight exercise is doing kettlebell swings for my high-intensity interval training, which I ought to write about because it seems to be doing some good, and is also quick and fun.) Push hands I wrote about recently. Animal movement ditto. So new I haven’t had a chance to write much about it yet, I did yoga for the first time last week.

But to bring this back full circle, I’m not so sure that it’s wrong to talk about “feeling young.” My friend is right—growing old is a privilege not everyone enjoys. It is indeed better than the alternative: dying young. But just as I can see her objections to denying age (as if refusing to acknowledge it meant something), I object to denying one’s felt experience. If someone says that they “feel young,” does an appeal to mere arithmetic justify correcting them?

Certainly I am not the only person to feel this way. There are always people trying to express health and fitness in terms of age. There are websites that will suggest a guess as to your physiological age vaguely based on your weight and your activity level. Various practitioners of various disciplines will measure specific things ranging from your maximum heart rate to the length of your telomeres and use the results to calculate a biological age.

They’re all pretty dubious, but I find that I do not object in principle to thinking and talking about concepts like health, fitness, and vitality in terms of age. Even though there are many unhealthy young people and many old people who are fit and vital, I think the notion resonates in a useful way.

As for me, I feel good. I also feel younger than I’ve felt in years.

Hyannis notes | Srikanth Perinkulam

That previous post was an attempt to “like” this post using IndieWeb Press This. I’d used the tool successfully earlier, but this time I didn’t see the “Liked:” prefix on the post (and I don’t see the “Reply:” prefix on this one).

An early morning drive to Hyannis (almost) and back. Just that Miss Me did not hop on the ferry and decided to head home with me. She was to volunteer at the Nantucket Yoga festival which she attended last year and had a real good time. Today morning she just didn’t ‘feel’ like being there […]Also on: Twitter

Source: Hyannis notes | Srikanth Perinkulam

Heart rate training and this morning’s run

Another quick experiment with WP-GPX-Maps, but also a quick report of using my heart rate in my running training.

First, here’s this morning’s run:

Total distance: 2.83 mi
Total Time: 00:37:44

Roughly the same route as last time, except that instead of running back past the woods the same way I ran out I ran back on a path through the woods itself, and then I added another out-and-back through the prairie, out on the path we call the Low Road and then back on the Middle Way, adding a half mile or so.

(By the way, my heart rate ought to be showing up and isn’t. Part of the reason it’s not there is that it’s not being included in the GPX file that I’m getting from Polar. I was able to get a GPX file that included the heart rate, by exporting a TCX file from Polar and then converting it using TCX Converter, but that still didn’t work. The result was actually worse, in that it lost the altitude data as well. The map above is generated from the straight GPX file from Polar.)

I’m trying to train at my MAF heart rate, which I calculate at 127.

The theory here is that training at this intensity is best for improving your ability burn fat (rather than glucose) for energy. At higher heart rates you end up using a great deal of glucose, so you end up glycogen depleted and then have to eat carbs to replenish your stores. At this lower intensity your consumption of glucose is modest and easily replenished with even a low-carb diet.

With regular training, you gradually get faster at this low intensity (for a while, anyway), which means that you’re automatically training for both speed and endurance at the same time.

I have a heart rate monitor from Polar which works great, except that (incomprehensibly) the Polar app doesn’t have alerts to let you know when you go outside your target range. I’ve been trying to learn through trial and error to feel the intensity level that gets me to the target HR.

This time I got it just about exactly right.

Polar has its own idea of target range, and the closest they have to the zone I want (which is 117 to 127 according to MAF) is what Polar calls Zone 3 and pegs (for me) at 115 to 131. I did 92% of this run in that zone. And, judging from eyeballing the graph, a lot of it was just under 127, right where I want it.

I also squeezed in a 20 minute lifting session after my run. The HR data from that is also kind of interesting, but also doesn’t display with the WP-GPX-Maps plugin.

Open workout tracking

I really like to gather and play with data from my workouts, but I dislike the way the tools I use to gather it tie me to their own websites for analysis and display—and in particular the way they always want to spin up their own scripts on my website when I want to display the data here. So, via Srikanth Perinkulam, I’m experimenting with WP-GPX-Maps as a way to display a workout with less use of closed software. This is a test:

Total distance: 2.32 mi
Total Time: 00:28:34

That’s my run from Thursday, along my most common route for a short run: Out on sidewalks along Curtis Road and First Street (around “The Place), and then the rest of the way on trails back through the Lake Park Prairie (along what we call the High Road—on top of the berm along the north edge of the prairie), over the weir across the creek that feeds into the Embarras River, past the little pond and down along the west and south sides of the Lake Park Woods, and back again across the weir.

If you’re a reader of this blog, your opinion is earnestly sought: Is that better than the workout sessions I used to share via Endomondo? Or did you never object to the closed tools in the first place? If you simply have no interest in my workout tracking data, that’s okay too.

Here’s one more test, the hike Jackie and I took at Forest Glen on June 11th:

Total distance: 5.56 mi
Total Time: 02:36:31

Handy MTD annexation

The Carle Clinic I use will be in the bus district, hopefully in time for the new bus schedules set to come out sometime in mid-August. Very handy for me.

More than 460 acres of land in southwest Champaign officially will become part of the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District, perhaps as soon as today, the transit district’s board decided Wednesday.

Source: MTD board unanimously approves annexing swath of southwest Champaign

The Ultimate Army Field Guide to Wild Edible Plants | The Art of Manliness

If you’re interested in foraging, your best source of information is going to be a local forager who knows what’s available in your area at different times of year. You next best would be a book by a local forager. Third best, but better than nothing, would be FM 21-76 the (not copyrighted, because it’s a U.S. government publication) Army Field Guide to Wild Edible Plants.

Replied to:Expanding my movement practice: Animal movements | Srikanth Perinkulam

I just took my own first yoga class!

I’d meant for years to study yoga and hadn’t managed to make it happen, but this week the stars aligned: one of my neighbors is a yoga instructor and is starting an outdoor class right here on the lawn at Winfield Village.

This sounds pretty interesting, Philip. Something I should consider adding to my workout regimen. I’ve always had a tough time coordinating my limbs and following flow sequences. Several years back after a failed attempt at learning Kalaripayettu , I was heavily demoralized. My flexibility seemed to be abysmally low and I had a real tough […]

Source: Replied to:Expanding my movement practice: Animal movements | Srikanth Perinkulam

Expanding my movement practice: Animal movements

My most recent addition to my movement practice, just started, is animal movements.

These are basically just ground exercises where the shapes are inspired by animal movements: Bear and Crab crawls, Ape and Duck walks, transitions from one to another.

Playing on a fallen log at the Nature Playscape at Homer Lake

My hope is that doing them will help me connect some of my mobility practice with movement (as opposed to static stretches). My hip mobility and my toe and ankle dorsiflection are limited enough that I can’t do certain things that I’d like to do—in particular a deep squat, but also a particular kneeling-to-standing transition. Probably other things I can’t think of at the moment.

For three years I’ve been working on these aspects of flexibility/mobility and I’m making progress, but I’m not there yet. I’m not sure what it will take to get there, but one possibility that comes to mind is that I haven’t tried to connect these things with other movements. I’ve done isolated stretches, and I’ve done assisted/bolstered versions of the movements, but I haven’t tried to use the movements as part of a sequence of other movements. Very possibly my difficulty is not merely my muscles being “too tight,” but rather springs from a the lack of a proper mind-body connection linking these moves and other moves I do.

My hope is that the animal forms, by giving me an opportunity to pass through these postures (rather than merely trying to hold them as static stretches) may help make the mind-body connection in a way that lets me relax into the postures quicker than just more stretching would do.

In any case, I’ve been meaning for a long time to increase the amount of ground exercises I do and not getting around to it, and animal movements—by giving me a framework for that—have finally gotten me started.

I don’t think I’m going to stick with the animal forms for long. There are plenty of natural human ground movements which are largely similar, but some of the animal forms modify them to justify the name, and although that can be fun, my own affinity is always going to be for natural human movement.

Still, tolerating the silliness can lead to impressive results in terms of power and control. Check out for example, this video of movement guru Mike Fitch demonstrating what an animal movement practice he calls Animal Flow looks like:

Once I’ve established the habit I’ll look to transition away from animal forms and just do combos of human-style crawling, rolling, sitting, squatting, kneeling—and the transitions between them.