Getting Back in Shape with the Help of My Computer
Thursday, September 7th, 2006Since my summer class ended over a month ago, I haven’t workout out for a minute. A friend of mine has been training for a triathlon all summer so who feels guilty? Last night while having a pot of coffee at Linda’s Place, we got on the topic. I went to bed eventually and had a dream I was running (for sport). SO when I woke up this morning I said to myself, “I’m going running today.”
More important than running, to me, is getting back in shape. Being the nerd I am, I look to the internet for help and found tons of it. So here are the sites I am using to help get back in shape.
First I needed a site to help track my goals. Traineo is a great site to keep track of your diet, workout and weight-loss. Its also community oriented so you can find others in your area or mindset, to help motivate each other.
Now, my workout of choice is running. There are two things I need when running: music and a course. PODRUNNER is a weekly 1 hour podcast with high energy workout music mixed by the host, DJ Steveboy. He keeps it all at a consistent BPM, so you can pace yourself off his beat. RunningMap.com is a great tool that uses Yahoo Maps to overlay a course. It will show you the distance at each marked point.
That takes care of my workout data on Traineo, but theres still the diet. I’m sure I could find some fancy site to keep track of all the food and drink I consume, but at the end of the day, all I really want is my total calorie intake. Where better to find how many calories are in a sliced of pizza than the people who administer the nutrition facts? The USDA Food Database is the best way to find how many calories each meal was. I simply tally it all in a notepad and enter my total in Traineo. If you just want to guesstimate, traineo has a way to just rate your diet from Great to Poor and it will assume the rest.
