The rains came and went, along with a LOT of snow. Lake Christie is back and down-back while runnable is not to the point where I would like to run through to Tiffany right now.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been changing what I eat pretty significantly. Going to the Doctor and getting good feedback on how I am doing in my efforts to get healthy can be a humbling endeavor.

I have significantly cut down on the amount of refined carbs that I am eating. Candy, sweets, sweetened yogurt, chips and boxed cereal have all been put on the bad boy list. Plus I have really focused on cutting WAY back on bread/wheat products. It seems to have worked pretty good since I have gone from 163 pounds down to 156 in a couple of weeks. Plus I have felt pretty good too, the headaches and some of the usual aches/pains that I typically have seemed to have been reduced.

So last night was an experiment of sorts.

Friday nights are 1/2 homemade pizza (pepperoni, onion, garlic and red pepper) and beer night, then after we have a chocolate chip cookie whoopie pie. Automatic Insulin spike just thinking about it – right.

Well I did more than think about it.

I ate all of my share! Plus a small sandwich bag of Muddy Buddy mix.

Yeah, about a half hour after finishing off the Muddy Buddy mix, my stomach rebelled a little and I wasn’t feeling all that great. This morning when I woke up, I felt just like I used to when I had a hang-over. The mouth felt like an Army had marched through it, head was pounding and I had more than a few aches/pains back that hadn’t been around all week.

What did I learn from that experiment?

Sugar hangovers are a lot like alcohol hangovers – no fun.

That how I was eating was helping me feel better.

Cutting food with added sugar, chips, boxed cereal and most of the processed stuff is doing well by me. Eating a lower carb and/or more whole food diet seems to agree with me.

Enough about food.

Today’s run.

After yesterday’s rain storm, the snow has just about disappeared, but I am really attempting to do heart rate training and down-back was still a very tough run and going the other way would mean walking up the hill.

So I opted to go into Augusta and run on the Rail Trail.

Again the first part of the run it was very difficult to get the heart rate up to the range that I wanted and it took almost three quarters of a mile to get it above 125 bpm (the low end of the range). However, once I got there keeping it under the 135 bpm (high end) proved to be damn near impossible.

It wasn’t so much me or my heart rate, or even the speed I was running. I am pretty sure at some point the watch decided to pickup my cadence as my heart-rate. That is something I have read that wrist based heart-rate monitors can have happen. Which sucked because I kept slowing down the pace (which slows down my cadence), but couldn’t get the damn heart-rate to get back down to range.

Now I am pretty sure that I was not having a medical emergency and the stop point was where I had wait for traffic to cross the road, to go up to the other side of Hallowell section of the Rail Trail.

The temps were in the high 40’s and that seemed to effect my heart-rate, because it came down a little when I unzipped my jacket and took off my gloves. Plus I am still coughing up nasty crap from being sick and with the watch screwing up my frustration factor was showing through. With all that going on and not being able to even get close to my max heart-rate of 135 bpm…

Needless to say that I was rather frustrated and at 5.25 I decided to just run easy to finish up, so I sped up to my usual recovery run pace and my heart-rate went down???? Screwey huh.

Oh well, at that point I chuckled and slowed back down, but the heart-rate running stuff was totally skewed, so I just put this run off to a good learning experience. I am not going to get all worked up over the heart-rate stuff, the good thing is that I am learning what running slower is supposed to feel like and doing better at than I thought I would.

I will keep plugging away at this heart-rate training and do what I feel is the right thing for my needs – go slower grasshopper hehehe.