Fitness Electronics and Me

Two quick notes (both of which are, at root, pathetically self-congratulatory):

(1) On Saturday I followed in the footsteps of Paula Radcliffe, running a 15k "race" on a treadmill. In theory, I like the idea -- you train at your race pace without the annoyance of constantly checking a Garmin (which I do not own), and without having to worry about whether you're running too fast or too slow until you hit the next mile marker. So I set the incline at 1%, set the pace at 7:53, and ran the fastest 9.3 miles of my life. But . . . And it hurts me to admit this, Paula . . . Running on a treadmill for nine-plus miles is, well, kind of, umm, boring. I was listening to an audiobook, which helped some, but by the end of the run I had cataloged every roll of wrapping paper in our basement storage room. I had also categorized each extra blanket or quilt by color, fabric type, and family-of-origin, and created a mental list of the cassette tapes I thought were still in my circa-1992 Case Logic storage case (I was badly wrong on that last). Seriously, it was b-o-r-i-n-g boring.

(2) After partially tearing my Achilles tendon in January 2010 playing basketball, I finally had to come to terms with the whole "I run forty miles per week so I can eat anything I want" self-delusion. Having not seen the thin side of 200 (or, if I'm being honest, of 210) since around the time that my role model Bill Clinton was making his last runs from 1600 Pennsylvania to the local McDonalds, I decided to give the whole "eat less" part of "eat less, exercise more" a try. It worked remarkably well; I'm down to 186, a number I haven't seen since my senior year of high school. And I owe at least some of my success to a fancy-schmancy body fat monitor scale -- no matter how fit I thought I was, it kept telling me inconvenient truths about my body composition. And it was really cool over the past six months to watch as my "metabolic age" fell from my late 30s. Christmas was the best; according to the scale, I went into the holiday with a metabolic age of 18 (and without the acne. Double bonus!). But for a few weeks now, the scale has been reporting a metabolic age of 13. I'm proud, of course. But am I alone in not wanting to go back quite that far?