The Fit Nation

https://ift.tt/TBWO7bk Spina farms is a local farm in the Coyote Valley that has a farm stand for customers. Every year they put on an extravagant display for Halloween, and my Tuesday group visited this for our “Pumpkin Patch Ride”. We had a beautiful fall day for the ride. It was cold when I started out but had gotten warmer by the time we got to Spina. The Santa Cruz Mountains in the background with the beautiful fields of flowers in the foreground This year was dinosaur-themed, with various animated Jurassic critters. Kids love this event, they are riding one of the trains here The “South County Old Ladies and Gents” pose a Spina Farm’s Pumpkin Pyramid

https://ift.tt/rRKWc7Z Fall shows up a little late in our area, but makes up for it by lasting longer, sometimes even into January. So it was more summer-like here in September and early October, but now it’s really starting to feel like autumn, a delightful time to be outdoors. We did a long group ride to the hills East of Gilroy with my group on Tuesday, then the next day I did a long ride out and back on the Coyote Creek trail northwest of Morgan Hill, as well as doing my upper body strength workouts. These are all staying within my safe intensity limits for my leaky heart valve, and felt fine. Yesterday was a recovery day so I just did a short ramble around town for an hour. Visiting my Alpaca buddy in San Martin. He (or she) gets so excited and runs to the fence making cute noises. But the owners have a sign asking not to feed the critters so I just talk to him and move on The Santa Cruz mountains were beautiful on Wednesday from the Coyote Creek trail

https://ift.tt/yCqXRKB Specialized Bicycles has its headquarters in Morgan Hill and has a nice museum on-site. My Tuesday riding group had visited it before in spring 2020, right before the Covid pandemic took off. We went again last Tuesday, and this time our guide was Robert Egger, who has been their creative director for years. He designs their concept bikes, a lot of which are in the museum, and also guides future directions of the product lines. He is also a good and funny guy and a great storyteller. It was fun to hear him tell the story of how Mike Sinyard, the CEO, founded Specialized Bicycle Imports, which grew into the current company. I told that story here , but we got some new tidbits from Robert. The next fun anecdote was how Robert got involved with the company. He had graduated with a degree in industrial design, and was working for a bike dealer in Los Gatos in the early 80s. A customer came in that Robert didn’t recognize and was asking questions about a lot of prod...

https://ift.tt/SkbNUOP http://www.Amazon.com/books I enjoyed this book by David Ryan. He lives in New Mexico and does volunteer work finding archaeological sites for the US Bureau of Land Management. So it is not surprising the book starts out with tales of his wanderings in his local area, finding important sites and artifacts including a Folsom Man arrowhead dating back 10,000 years. By the end of the chapter I was convinced his ideas about wandering would be great in a fascinating area like this. But what about a more urban area? He answers that in the next chapter by describing a trip to Los Angeles, more famous for freeways than wandering on foot. But on a visit there he finds a theme. Back before cars were king, The LA area was served by an interurban transit system with the nickname “the big red cars”. It turns out a lot of stairways were put in in hilly areas to give access to transit stops. The transit system is gone, a lot of the lines buried under city streets. But man...

https://ift.tt/gBPGHAm I’ve been enjoying multiple long easy rides. After some more research I realized that a long ride is good for my heart as long as the pace is not hard, because it lowers diastolic blood pressure a bit compared to resting. Diastolic, the lower number on a reading like 120/80, is the more important for leaky aortic valves because that is the number when the valve is closed. I was doing one long ride a week (my group ride) and short rides on other days, but last week I threw in some more longer rides. It felt great, I did not have any of the symptoms my heart would have if it were straining because of the valve leaking excessively. A few days ago we had our “Taco Tuesday” ride, including an enjoyable stretch on the Coyote Creek Trail. On Sunday I had a brisk ride through the Coyote Valley on Santa Teresa Boulevard, including some short intervals and some on-bike strength work. I also did my upper body strength work before the ride. All of this is well-tolerated if ...

https://ift.tt/TKUHFOv Clarence Bass has been a role model for me for healthy aging for about 25 years now. Recently some pictures of Clarence at 87 were posted on his website which are exciting because he certainly defies the stereotype of a frail elderly person. Like me, Clarence has worked around the limitations of aging, despite two hip replacements. He also has back issues which make dead-lifts a bad idea but just figured out a different way to get equivalent benefits. From the pictures it is clear he still works out with high intensity. Clarence walks and does mobility exercises everyday, and does one hard strength workout per week, and one hard cardio workout. He also eats a very good diet. Obviously this routine works out well for him. Clarence at 87 https://www.cbass.com/clarencebass87.htm

https://ift.tt/wxOr4u3 My last strength workout went really well, I was able to go pretty hard without pushing my heart rate excessively. But afterwards it occurred to me that monitoring heart rate might not be enough. Strength training can cause a temporary spike in blood pressure which is probably not a good idea. I figured there must be a lot of research on this, because there are a lot of older people with cardiac limitations besides mine which is relatively rare (including heart-attack survivors, angina sufferers, and those with valve regurgitation). And they are still encouraged to do strength training to prevent sarcopenia. So I asked Gemini deep research about it and it produced this fascinating report . It points out that a resistance training session, properly performed, is beneficial to the heart because while it temporarily raises blood pressure, there is “a phenomenon known as post-exercise hypotension, where blood pressure remains below pre-exercise resting levels for se...