The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Test Run Kilo

After a long slow-burn walk this afternoon to get coffee and other things, I decided to head for the track again to see if the beats in my iPod drove me faster than normal or if the speed from last time was a fluke. Not, mind you, that I was fast — just faster than I was before.

I threw the beats on and off I went, trying to stay under 3 minute laps. I just started breathing somewhat to the beat of the mix that was in my Shuffle and stomped it out. With the music playing, I couldn’t hear the beeping of the heart rate monitor, so I kept pushing. When I was nearing the first mile, I noticed my heart rate at 195 bpm, so I stopped after Mile 1 and let myself cool down to 150. The second mile was nearly as fast as the first. Here are the splits:

2:22, 4:40, 7:00, 9:12, 11:35, 13:58, 16:20, 18:39

That’s all eight laps! Two miles in 18:39. Nine seconds faster than my August goal. I have done it, over 50 points on the APFT.

• Distance: 2.00 miles (3.22 km)
• Time: 18:39 (9:19 / mile – 6.42 mph avg)
• Heart Rate Max: 195 bpm (106%)
• Heart Rate Avg: 180 bpm (98%)
• APFT Score for run: 52 (required to pass: 60 – 17:42)
• Goal for August: 50 – 18:48 (complete)
• Energy burned: 334 kCal (15% fat) => 50 kCal fat

In total, I burned 1465 calories today, of which 664 calories were fat. Nice! Speaking of fat, let’s weigh in.

Apollo’s Statistics

Height: 70 inches (1.778 m)

Weight: 188.0 lb (85.26 kg) [-8.0 lb]

BMI: 26.98 (-1.14) [Overweight]

Goal Weight: 165 lb (74.84 kg) [23.67 BMI]

Nice work! I have a tendency to get bored with exercising, mostly because of boredom with the music I’m listening to. What’s on your iPod for running and working out? If I could find some fast, awesome clubby stuff, I’d be alot more motivated, I think..

I have a number of mixes from Fleep loaded onto my iPod. It’s deep funky house music. While I prefer listening to jazz at work (and a staggering majority of the music on my last.fm profile show this to be true), the house stuff isn’t too slow, it isn’t too fast, and it doesn’t make my brain analyze the chords or try to make sense of the harmony. This is the kind of stuff that I dance to when I go out. And, when I’m on the track, it’s up loud enough that I can’t hear my heart rate monitor beeping at me to slow down.