roadskater.net

Twenty years ago you may have seen the book with the catchy title "Dieting Makes You Fat", by Geoffrey Cannon and Hetty Einzig. Even though I was a skinny child and have never been morbidly obese, or even just obese, I have subjected myself and my loved ones to dieting hell.

I received the following information in an email and since we are all about staying healthy and skating/biking faster, I thought I would share it with the group:

Location

I received an email today from Stacey White, part of GT speed team, who is sponsoring the Marathon through the gardens in GA next month. They are involved in a fundraiser to help out Joshua Zalunardo, who was diagnosed with Brain Stem Glioma, a life threatening for of cancer. I know a lot of people on this site support many worthwhile causes and thought I would pass this on. Our money and time goes to help someone and we get to have fun doing it.

I have pasted the contents of her email with all the pertinant info...

Check this out! Meredith Cohn of the Baltimore Sun gets credit for a piece with a subtitle you can't beat:

Hopkins study finds that kids who skateboard or Rollerblade stay fit longer that those who play organized sports

You go, loosely organized but not by adults skaters...

Reports this week from the BBC, the Washington Post, and the Telegraph, among others tell of a promising result in an early trial of BHT-3009.

I don't know much about the subject here, but this article caught my eye as a significant find in the search for the genes contributing to Multiple Sclerosis. [We skate Greensboro's Tour to Tanglewood to help raise money for MS research and treatment.] A quick explanation from the article helps explain MS briefly:

The disease is one in which the body's immune system mistakenly attacks the electrical insulation of nerve fibers. The cause is part genetic and part environmental,...

Whilst snooping around the personal finance and get-out-of-debt blogs, I tapped into the personal weight-loss blogs. In following the ADHD links to the maze of other such webpages, I found some funny blog titles, like "Over 40, in debt and overweight". Yes, in 2007 there are countless people still struggling in vain to lose excess weight. They all seem to believe that food deprivation and other people's idea of exercise are the only solutions. Will this hopelessly cruel and debilitating cycle ever end?

I hesitate to use the four-letter word 'diet' here, as that connotates restriction, sacrifice and misery. I also hesitate to call myself an athlete! However, in this bodyweight equation and given the unusually high number of skate-training hours, let the athlete = EB.

Here's a report from www.thisislondon.co.uk about yet another fatality from hyponatremia. This one is in relation to last weekend's London Marathon, where temps were in the mid-70s. Sad and very preventable - not by not entering the event, but by having an abundance of Gatorade and salt! If an event can't afford truckloads of Gatorade, they should at least be able to afford some salt!

 I've been knocking these rather trivial, large-scale thoughts around my head for some years now and wanted to write something about them. Last night, whilst watching 20/20, was the final straw! This post might complement KJG's questions in Monotony of Training.

I am not pregnant, nor have I been, nor do I expect to be, but I found this information interesting. OK I feel pregnant after the winter! I don't know if this info is all accurate but I think it is a nice start at thinking about getting some exercise. The article contains more, but here's the part that mentions skating:

From The Recumbent Blog:

There is growing evidence that the new crop of hyper-ventilated helmets that are so popular these days are potentially less safe than traditional smooth-shelled designs. These "racing" helmets may pass the current Consumer Product Safety Commission drop tests, but recent accident reports suggest their squared-off edges and aerodynamic "tail" can grab the road, increasing the possibility of rotational brain damage, neck injuries, and helmet dislodgment.

Links from that post point to several articles on helmets.org, website of the independent and non-profit Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute.

Oy! I enjoyed reading this account of a couple from Leeds doing a ride across the US of America, cancer survivor Jane on the bike and husband, Mike, in support, for charity (see http://www.janesappeal.com).

This post is partly for people out there on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) who want to find out more about getting sufficient and efficient carbs for marathon, or extremely long-distance training and events. This means no sugar, wheat, gluten, grains, corn, or potatoes. I put "marathon" in the title for the benefit of any SCD runners who might stumble across this. Obviously what I'm gearing up for, the 87 mile Athens to Atlanta Roadskate, is three and one third times marathon distance. A Google search didn't turn up anything useful for marathon training and SCD. So I thought I'd put my experience out there for anybody else searching.

I've added Current Air Quality to the left sidebar of Roadskater.net as a test of usefulness. There are two graphics, which represent the current Ozone and Particulate Matter 2.5 readings for the USA.

Okay, so I recently mentioned ozone as a potential health risk in a response to this blog entry... Well, I thought some more about it and decided I really needed to educate myself.

Some might find this interesting...  Our story begins inthe spring of 2004...

I had gone in for a normal run-of-the-mill annual physical.  I felt fine, it had just been a couple years since I had a checkup...  No big deal.  Well, I got a phone call from my doctor's office a few days later saying my white blood cell count was a little low, and I should go see a specialist about it.  Now, at the time I felt absolutely fine, so I figured the blood test was just a fluke and the person on the phone didn't seem terribly concerned, so I just let it go...