Health and Fitness – Page 2 – Geeky Girl Engineer

First Time Blood Donor

Posted on September 4, 2013 by geek

Today I donated blood for the first time. Fifteen years ago doing that would be ridiculous because I had such an awful fear of needles. Then I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and I had to have my blood taken every six weeks for a year or so until we found the right thyroid medication level. I had to learn to deal with my needle phobia, which I learned today is trypanophobia. I also learned that it makes a huge difference who puts the needle in you. Medical doctors, with the exception of surgeons, are not allowed to touch me with a needle. Only nurses who insert needles on a regular basis may touch me with a needle. If I am having a needle inserted into a vein, I demand a phlebotomist. The other problem I have though is the needle sitting in my vein. It is not the pain. It is the idea of a needle just sitting in my vein that makes me nervous. I had extremely minor outpatient surgery about ten years ago. The nurse anesthetist who inserted my IV was wonderful. I barely felt it, but looking at the IV taped to my hand still made me nervous. Of course in that instance it did not help that the saline bags were kept refrigerated, and since I was dehydrated due to the dictated not drinking after midnight, I had ice cold saline gushing through that IV into my veins. That was the most horrible part of the entire procedure.

Anyway, there was a blood drive at my office today, so I decided to finally conquer my nerves and donate blood. Someone today asked me why I decided to become a donor. Is altruism to strong a word for something like this? Besides being incredibly nervous and a little bit of uncomfortableness, I potentially am saving someone’s life with no harm or risk to myself. So why not? I, or someone I love may, or probably will, need someone’s donated blood someday. Pay it forward, right? In fact someone on Twitter thanked me as a recipient of an anonymous blood donation last year. That made the experience that much better. I donated blood. I am still alive. I didn’t even faint or get woozy. I’m pretty proud of myself.

Partially to keep myself distracted, I live tweeted my blood donation. Here is the Storify of the event.

Losing 50 lbs

Posted on September 2, 2013 by geek

I write this post wondering if I will ever publish it. I don’t really like to talk about my weight as it has been a struggle for my entire adult life. However, it is impossible to hide that struggle when the weight loss or gain is on the order of 50 pounds. People who see me everyday and thus might not notice a gain or loss of ten pounds have started noticing my weight loss. I am not exactly trying to hide it, but I am just scared of whether or not I can keep it off. I’ve been here before.

This current weight loss journey started when I moved to the DC area. I’ve written about how I changed my life from one based on getting around in a car to a mainly pedestrian life. I did that mainly so that I wouldn’t have to deal with DC traffic, but truthfully I am not one of those people who loves their car, and I am just as happy walking. In adopting this pedestrian life, I lost about 25 pounds over the course of about nine months. I wasn’t trying to lose weight, and the only reason I knew I was was that every time I saw my physician, she happily exclaimed that I had lost more weight. The only thing I had changed in my life during this time, besides the pedestrian lifestyle, was to stop bringing home sweets. I have a problem with sweets, so I decided for Lent last year that I would eat sweets guilt free outside the house, but I just wouldn’t bring them home. [I’m Episcopalian, and I always try to give up something for Lent.] I knew from experience that if I tried to give up sweets entirely, I would just want them more, and I would doom myself for certain failure.

After my physician’s visit nine months after the first time I had seen her and the realization that I had lost a total of about 25 pounds, I realized some of my clothes had seemed slightly looser. Obviously the weight loss was nice, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do. Sure, I wanted to keep doing what I was doing to either maintain that weight loss or perhaps slowly lose a bit more. For the past several decades I have made lifestyle changes that had aided that weight loss, but at this point in my life I had sworn off diets. There has been some research to show that yo-yo dieting is really not healthy, and I didn’t want to do it in any event. I have lost a significant amount of weight twice before. The first time I was in my 20’s and lost about 60 pounds on my own. I did it by a lot of exercise and what I now realize was rather unhealthy caloric restriction. The second time I lost about 40 pounds on Jenny Craig. I couldn’t get past 40 pounds even though I was following the diet fairly faithfully. The fact that I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism part of the way through my diet with them may have affected things. I also think that my calories may have been restricted too much. I exercised very often, and at least at the time, the prescribed Jenny Craig diet didn’t account for calories burned through activity. I know someone currently on Weight Watchers, and she said their plans now have you eat more food based on how much exercise you get. I have no idea if Jenny Craig now does this, but as I know from personal experience that I need to tailor my caloric intake based on my exercise or caloric output. Medical experts generally agree that losing more than a pound of so a week is not generally healthy, and if I were to restrict my calories to less than 1700 calories daily and exercise the way I do, in theory I would be losing at a rate that is not healthy.

So I was down 25 pounds without really trying, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I really loved the idea of losing more weight, but I hated the idea of losing more to only gain it back. Not too long after I started trying to decide if I wanted to try to lose more weight, I heard about Fitbit. I decided to get one and see just how active I was. I discovered that I was quite active compared to the average person, and with the Fitbit, I became even more active. I am a data geek, and I love collecting data on myself. It gave and still gives me encouragement to keep moving and be more active. About a month after getting the Fitbit, I purchased a scale to weigh myself and started using Fitbit’s system to keep track of what I was eating. By then, I had decided I would try to keep losing weight, but I was also not exactly going to diet. That is, I would try to limit my caloric intake by 500 calories a day (to lose a pound a week), but if I went over every once in while when out with friends or something, so be it. I had made enough lifestyle changes before that, once I started counting calories, I didn’t have to change that much anyway.

So now it’s 20 months since I first started losing weight, and nine months since I really started to try to lose weight. I weigh myself everyday, which while some say is not beneficial, I do because I’m a data geek. The more data the better, and I’ve become fascinated with the daily changes of up then down. I’ve also noticed that I tend to be stagnant in weight loss for a week or two, then drop three pounds overnight. While this definitely occurs with my hormonal cycle, it also appears to happen at unrelated times. From what I’ve found searching the internet, this is fairly common. One person has proposed that it is related to water replacing triglycerides in fat cells temporarily, but he readily admits, he has no proof of it. Whatever the reason, it seems to happen to me.

I exercise almost everyday, and I try to walk as much as possible. I log all my food to count the calories. I’m sure to some people this would be beyond tedious, but I feel like I am running an observational science study on myself. I still don’t exactly consider myself to be dieting. If I weren’t trying to lose weight, I might eat a bit more bread or something, but I also realize that if I have any chance of keeping this weight off forever, then how I live my life now is for the most part how I am going to have to live it forever. I will never be one of those people who can eat whatever they want and never exercise and not gain weight. I am fairly sure if I ever stop exercising on a regular basis, i.e. several times a week, I will gain weight. Also, when I say exercise, I am not talking a brisk walk a couple of times a week. I exercise on my elliptical machine for an hour several times a week. I started running several months ago, and I try to go for one or two 3 mile runs plus a long run, which at this time is 5 miles, each week. I do resistance training with free weights and resistance bands. I also walk everywhere and try to go for a walk at lunch every work day.

Now, I’ve lost over 50 pounds total. It’s 55 pounds according to the scale this morning, but I easily go up and down a couple of pounds each week. I suppose I should be happy and proud of myself. I am, but I am also terrified. As I said, I’ve lost lots of weight before. Losing weight, or at least the initial weight loss is easy. Keeping the weight off and losing more is incredibly hard. I am not sure how much more I need to lose. My guess is that I need to lose another 20 to 30 pounds. I’ve dropped three or four dress sizes. I haven’t bought that many new clothes though. The tops are just loose on me. However, I have had to buy some new pants because I can cinch them with a belt because otherwise they would just fall off me, but some I have to cinch so much they look clownish on me. Several people have asked why I don’t buy more new clothes. My answer is two-fold. I hope to lose more weight, and thus I don’t want to buy clothes that won’t fit me in several months. Two, but just as importantly, I am scared that I can’t keep the weight off. I have a huge stack of clothes in my closet that don’t fit me anymore. I can’t bring myself to donate them yet because I am just too scared of my ability to keep the weight off.

I suppose the good thing is that I realize this is not a diet. This has to be a lifestyle change to last my life. To a certain extent, I feel like an addict in recovery. My addiction is food, so I can’t go cold turkey (no pun intended). I have to eat. I just have to always eat smart, and I always have to get a lot of exercise. However, I like what I eat right now. I eat lots of fruits and vegetables. I eat lean meats. I never have been a fan of fried food or many other really fattening food. What I eat now I am entirely happy to eat for the rest of my life. This as opposed to when I was on Jenny Craig. I am not trying to slam Jenny Craig, but at some point, even if I had been completely successful with that diet, I would have had to transition to “real” food. I fix healthy meals and enjoy eating them. I don’t eat disgusting low calorie food just because it is low calorie. I eat healthy, nutritious, delicious food that I happen to make low calorie.

So if you know me personally, that is what is going on with me. That is why some of my clothes are falling off me. Perhaps now, you also understand why I am not screaming from the rooftop that I have lost over 50 pounds because it will just be all the more embarrassing if I gain it back. If you compliment me, know that I appreciate it. I really do. I just don’t have enough confidence in myself to fully be happy and proud of myself. I’ve been here before.

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 Pedestrian Life

Posted on July 1, 2013 by geek

Over two years ago, I moved to the Washington, DC area, specifically Arlington, VA. I bought a house very close to many bus lines so that I wouldn’t have to use my car at all to get to work. I happily take public transportation, even if it takes a little longer, if it means I can avoid driving, especially during rush hour, especially in an area with awful traffic like Washington. In particular, I didn’t want to have to worry about driving in the snow that Washington sometimes gets. Four years of college in Colorado taught me that as a born and bred Southern, I don’t and shouldn’t drive in the snow. [To everyone in the Washington, DC metropolitan area: you’re welcome.]

The main goal was to not use my car to drive to work. My employer gives its employees a public transit subsidy, so not only do I save money not buying gas, but I also don’t have to pay the bus and subway fare. The buses run late enough that when I go to events in DC, I can just use public transit to get there and back. This is particularly nice as there is no parking in DC, and the streets are designed in some crazy way to confuse the British should they come invading again. Then as I started using public transportation, I found that it was just plain easier than dealing with driving and as importantly parking in the area. I started using public transportation on Sunday mornings as I explored churches. The church of which I am now a member is in DC and offers free valet parking. I still prefer public transit, even though it takes longer. Then I started using public transit more and more to do errands such as the grocery, especially when they could be done on my way home from work.

Funny thing happened as I used public transit more and more, my walking increased more and more. To a certain extent that should be obvious. Public transportation rarely drops you off at your exact destination or picks you up at your exact starting point so a little walking will be involved. However, I also started walking in lieu of public transportation. It is sometimes easier just to walk a certain distance than trying to figure out what bus will take you there, or particularly when the public transportation in question is Metro, it can be just plain faster to get there with your feet.

When I walk, I can explore. I can observe. When I drive, I can’t really explore anything other than the road. When I’m on the bus or the subway, I can explore a little bit but not to the degree when I am on foot. I am still new to the area, so exploration on foot helps me get to know the area. My office building is about 0.7 miles from my bus stop. There is a bus that runs between the two that I used to take. Sometime last year, I started walking the distance in the afternoon after work. Then I started walking it in the morning to the office also. Now I always walk it. There is no more exploring I can do on that route because I have walked it so many times, but now I people watch. As I try to arrive and leave work at the same time everyday, I have a regular time I normally walk to and from the office, and I have started to recognize other people who share some sort of routine during those same periods. Based on their uniforms, there is a uniformed federal police officer, a helicopter pilot, and another person, sometimes two, who have coffee together every morning in a fast food restaurant I pass. In the afternoon, there is a very serious looking federal agent in a suit (and his badge clipped to his belt) with a briefcase on wheels that I pass somewhere within a two block space if both of us are on schedule. I have fun finding people who have a routine and spotting them everyday. The area where I work has numerous military personal who work in nearby office buildings. I have started trying to learn what all the different insignia on their uniforms mean. This is even more complicated in this area as about once a week, I pass a non-US military person. Identifying their country and military branch is a challenge unto itself. Memorizing the uniform features so I can later try to identify it gives me a challenge to do on my walk.

Another really nice benefit of all my walking is it has made me a healthier person and caused me to lose weight. Last year by simply walking more and more and not bringing any more sweets home, I lost about 20 pounds. I didn’t change anything else, and I wasn’t really trying to lose weight. The weight loss was slow, over the course of about nine months. Don’t get me wrong, the weight loss was really nice, but every time I went to my physician, and she informed me I had lost more weight, it came as a nice surprise.

Now, I love my pedestrian life. I try to use my car as little as possible. I will always need it when I have to run an errand that is simply too inconvenient to walk or use public transit, or I need to transport something too big for either of those. However, whenever possible, I will try to go without it. Now it is like a challenge to see how I can gets things done without the car. A challenge that lets me explore and become a healthier person.

Run or Dye

Posted on June 8, 2013 by geek

I came. I ran. I dyed. [I did not die though.]

Today I ran in Run or Dye. It is the very definition of a fun run. After running two fun runs, I have come to the realization that I need some insane fun run clothes. I don’t know when tutus became a thing at fun runs, but many people were wearing them today and at the Turtle Trot. Some people are even more inventive. Most people wore some white because during and after the race, they throw dye on you, so the white really helps to show off the dye. On a side note, according the packets of dye, the dye is made of cornstarch, food dye, and flavoring. I unintentionally got some of the dye in my mouth, and I have to wonder if the flavoring is to make you NOT want to eat it, as opposed to for what flavoring is normally used. Also not that you want to know this, but probably like everyone, I inhaled some dye. I have being blowing out some extremely amusingly colored mucus.

I am not trying to be philosophical, but a common phrase people use goes something like “I don’t care if he is white, black, brown, purple, or green” or some variation of that. Generally it is used to indicate that the speaker or some program or whatever is not racially discriminatory. After the race, I was just observing all the people covered in varying degrees with all the bright dyes. It occurred to me that at that moment, for once there really was some purple and green people. Funny thing was, with many people, they really were pink, purple, green, or some other color. Some people were covered so thoroughly that it was really difficult to tell what their skin color was. I thought it was wonderful. It was just a bunch of happy, sweaty, insanely colored people having a marvelous time.

I have never seen this many fluorescent socks.

I have never seen so many fluorescent socks before.

Lined up, waiting to run. Look how clean everyone is. That will change.

The suspenders are holding up the hula skirt because how else are you going to keep a hula skirt on when you have no hips?

Tutus are now a thing at fun runs evidently.

I don’t know if they are actual medical professionals or if they just like to run in scrubs.

With a sailor’s hat, covered in dye

“I thought they said rum or dye”

Covered in dye and happy

Man in full body suit. I have no idea why.

I’m curious how the feathers stayed in while they ran

Some people really dressed for the occasion. The woman in the middle needs to up her game though. (It appeared to be a wedding dress.)

The dye party after the race with clouds of dye being thrown

The dye party after the race

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.