I’m currently loving this song
Original:
The cover by Walk Off The Earth is also brilliant, both because of the coolness of 5 people playing one guitar (gimmick, but cool) and the quality of the cover:
Gotye has done some great songs. It’s the first album I’m actually going to buy
A lot of the reading I’ve been doing lately has been around diet and health, and how a lot of “Conventional Wisdom” about diet is fundamentally flawed. For instance, the idea that saturated fat causes heart disease appears to be…flat out wrong (I can provide citations).
I don’t have time to blog about it much, ohers do a much better job of it. I was fairly astonished to read (after having been shown the article, I’m not a regular reader) in Woman’s Weekly, a piece about various things that you think you know which are now being reversed.
A scan (well, photo) of the article is here.
A quick update to say that I have set up a static page about this pullups malarky, and also a Just Giving page for taking donations:
What with all my research into barefooting and minimal shoes, it’s bothered me that many of the shoes that Oscar wears are kind of clunky and inflexible, or have a heel.
We know about Soft Star Shoes in the US, but there isn’t anywhere in the UK that does anything like that for adults that I’m aware of. Terra Plana do some nice shoes, but are on the pricy side.
Recently Hannah found out about Daisy Roots, who make the sort of footwear you see on toddlers, but do it up to a size suitable for 3-4 year olds. We ordered a couple of pairs, and they arrived today.
I put a pair on Oscar when he got back and he immediately wanted to get out of the car and try them out. Here’s a video of him:
He literally just ran in circles, laughing and shouted “Daddy, I love this!”. They might be a bit big, as he’s scuffing a bit as he runs but the next size down seemed a little too small.
We got two pairs:
All in all, highly recommended if unfortunately limited in the long-term. The largest size will be fine for quite a while, giving us a chance to find an alternative longer term.
Tags:daisy roots, oscar, running, shoesOver the weekend, I quietly reached a little milestone.
That’s right, I’ve done over 1000 pullups. 5% of the way towards my goal. There are an awful lot more to do, but it feels good to have made that milestone. Especially since my shoulder was giving me some real gyp (cue ratholing into etymology of that term, I stand by it despite mild issues with racial slurs) and I was worried I was going to have to take real rest or give up.
Instead, I have been able to overcome the problem. I have taken great care with my form, and rested when I felt it was necessary. On good days, I’ve far exceeded my target so that I can rest on other days. My barefoot running has taught me well in this area. My barefoot running peers are always harping on about “listening to your body” and it seems to work in more general practice. I have so far failed to find the best resource for learning “good form”, but instead have just paid attention to what feels right, but avoids imbalances (like a limp, but in the shoulder).
I’m not much further forward with sponsorship. I contacted the Cardiac Care Unit at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, and I am awaiting some information from them. There is no dedicated charity for the specific area I want to raise money, but there is “The Cardiac Fund” which may be a registered charity. I may then need to convince them to sign up with NotJustGiving (i.e. somebody who won’t fleece them out of an annual fee IN ADDITION TO a 5% cut of the monies raised. grump
Possiblities so far:
Over the last few days, my right shoulder has been feeling a bit dodgy. I don’t want to stop or cut back the pullups too much yet, but I did think a bit of rest could help.
Yesterday, I did all my pullups before breakfast, and today I waited until late evening, giving myself about 36 hours “off”. Also, this evening, I focussed almost entirely on chinups, as they seem to stress the shoulder less. They’ll also give me bulging biceps (did I mention I already noticed a difference there?).
Still no answer on how to actually collect sponsorship for the Royal Berks Cardiac Care Unit, but I’ll call them tomorrow and see if I can get anywhere.
Tags:20000 pullupsFor the last couple of days, my right shoulder has been grumbling. I think it’s from doing the Pullups “fully-extended” so I’ve been taking care on form and keeping the sets small; something helped by the fact that they’re really hard!
I’ll have to read up on correct form and shoulder anatomy. “Rotation Cuff” seems to come to mind, probably from misspent youth reading Men’s Health.
Tags:20000 pullupsAs you will see from the graph on my original post I’ve been doing pretty well with the pullups. Possibly a little too well. After it was apparent that I could do more than I need to to match my current daily targets, I focussed more on quality.
Ouch. The bar is at such a height (being in a doorway) that I can easily reach it from standing. So if I start the pullup from there, my arms are already somewhat bent. Starting from arms outstretched, by bending my knees until I’m basically dangling to start, makes it SO much harder.
Secondly, I have decided on the cause to help drive my motivation. I have been agonising about it. Stroke Association to match Carl and PabloCheesecake, or the British Heart Foundation. I struggle with the BHF because I don’t particularly agree with the direction they’re taking. Dietary advice and such seem to be off the mark where much current research is heading. Whole grains and avoiding cholesterol appears to be wrong (time for another post or 50, I think).
I also don’t much like raising money for large charities, there’s little sense of making specific change, and I always worry a bit about how the money’s being spent. Hannah suggested I simply raise money for the Cardiac Care Unit at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. A much better idea. They can use the money for something tangible, local and effective. They’re the ones that saved Hannah’s life and cared for her so well.
Problem solved. Except that I don’t think they’re a registered charity, they certainly don’t have a presence on justgiving.com so I need to find out how to get money from people to them effectively.
Hold that thought, I’ll be bugging you for money soon :-)
Tags:20000 pullupsCarl and @PabloCheesecake are two fat blokes who have set themselves the target of doing 20,000 situps (each) by the end of the year. M. Cheesecake set himself the target of cycling 500 miles in 2010 and achieved it, and by some fat-gentleman’s agreement they have set themselves a situp target. To help motivate and keep on track, they are raising money for the Stroke Association. I encourage you to go and donate.
I hate situps. I’m not very good at them, and I think they’re a bad exercise. I’d rather strengthen my core by doing compound exercises which force me to keep good core stability. Barefoot running is surprisingly good for this. I would, however, like to be better and pullups.
Therefore, I’ve set myself a goal, too. I randomly bought a pullup bar in Tesco the other night (one which doesn’t need screwing into the door frame, and is fairly portable):
I had a think about it, and think that 16 per day is reasonable to start with. Say, 8 in the morning and evening, broken into sets of 3 or 4.
The problem then was to work out a reasonable target to be able to do by the end of the year. I’m expecting to regret this, but I want to be able to do 100 pullups in one day by the 31st December 2011. I could have got all fancy and dredged up some actual maths, but instead I just plotted it on a graph and worked out what I need to increase by each day to hit 100 by then.
Then, add them all up. It Comes to 20,432. That’s not a very nice number, so I’ll round it down to 20,000. I think that’s quite ambitious enough, and allows me to not hit my targets and/or have recovery/sick days occasionally.
I’m tracking my progress in a spreadsheet on Google Docs, embedded here by magic (or something), target in blue, progress in red:
Running total:
I haven’t quite decided what I should do about sponsorship. It would certainly help motivate, but I’m torn between The Stroke Association and The British Heart Foundation. Any ideas?
Tags:20000 pullupsTo update Hannah’s progress somewhat…
The Cardiac Care Unit (CCU) at Royal Berks were great at taking care of Hannah during the 8 days she was in the hospital. Work were excellent at giving me time off to deal with it all and family rallied around to help us out.
The first consultant did a bubble echo and found evidence of a PFO. This is a defect between the atria, which could explain how a blood clot got in the main branch of her coronary artery. The consultant decided to put her on Warfarin to prevent another clot from occurring (we don’t know why she got a big clot in the first place) and to schedule a Transoesophageal Echocardiogram (TOE) to try to get a clearer idea of how big the PFO is. Interestingly, there may be a link between PFOs and migraines.
Unfortunately, the senior consultant decided against the TOE, as he felt that there was a risk involved and there was little compelling evidence that she would experience any benefits from closing the PFO. We argued the toss, but in the end we couldn’t force him. So she stays on Warfarin, probably lifelong, and is seeing a haematologist to try to find out why she got the clot in the first place (and to make sure it doesn’t happen again).
However, we saw her GP and asked for a referral to a different consultant for a second opinion. Long story short, she went to the London Heart Hospital yesterday and the story’s changed quite a bit.
They did another Bubble Echo and the result was startling.
Essentially, they inject saline bubbles into the bloodstream and then watch where they go. In a normal heart with no problems, one side of the heart goes from black to white on the image as blood is displaced with bubbles. Indeed, this is what happened for Hannah’s heart. However, the nature of the PFO is that it mostly appears in certain conditions, which can be replicated with a Valsalva Manouevre. This creates the same sort of effect as coughing, straining on the toilet or giving birth, and creates a pressure change, drawing the bubbles across the PFO (if there is one).
In a Grade I PFO, you would expect to see maybe a handful of bubbles move across to the other atrium.
In a Grade II PFO, you would see more bubbles.
In a Grade III PFO, you would see a stream of bubble.
When Hannah performed her Valsalva Manouevre, first there was a stream of bubbles, and then the whole atrium turned white. The consultant said it was the largest PFO she’d seen, and a Professor came to see her.
In short, there’s no question that they want to close it. Hopefully they’ll do it before christmas. Hannah will have to be in hospital for a couple of days at least so they can do the procedure and monitor her afterwards. She’ll have to come off the Warfarin and start injecting herself with Heparin. The procedure involves placing a device to occlude the defect. It is relatively low risk, in that it does not involve open heart surgery, but does carry risks.
We still don’t know why she had the clot, she’s tested negative for everything so far so she’s going to Bart’s next week for another appointment with a haematologist.
In herself, she still tires easily and is far from fully recovered but she soldiers on.
[UPDATE: I'm not desperately happy about the cardiologist at Royal Berks, but the London Heart Hospital are sending him the information and were clearly not happy. Will decide whether to make a complaint or not.]