Monday, March 18, 2013

Mille Vingt-neuf Jours a Sceaux (1029 days in Sceaux)

Well, I know I said I was going to be better at blogging, or at least more regular, but that has not happened. I have slipped into the mundane everyday life, which does not inspire much blogging about life here in the Ile-de-France.  My days are numbered here in France.  I gave notice that I wanted to be back in Houston by the end of 2013.  Perhaps this is motivation enough to blog-out the last days of this hitch.  I do not know when the move will happen, and will take advantage of the time remaining.

Like I said, I have become ensnared in the numbness of the mundane.  Yet, as I look back to my last post, a few things have since transpired, and I share them below:

Google+ got Communities.  In the running community, I hooked up with a bunch of people struggling like myself to understand Low Heart Rate Running using Maffetone's equation of 180 minus your age.  It turns out that Dr. Maffetone's equation is really only valid for people under 40.  I did some research and found Tanaka's study and work on the relationship between HRmax and age.  The Fox-Haskell equation (220 - your age) and Maffetone's equation both assume a slope of 1.0.  Tanaka's work, which involved pushing a rather large number of people ranging in ages from 16 to 92 to their HRmax with at least five persons in each age group.  Tanaka's equation is 207 - 0.7*your age.  This means that Fox-Haskell and Maffetone probably underestimates HRmax for people over 40, and overestimates it for people under 40.  When I "age corrected" the Maffetone number for myself -- which was 130 -- it jumped up to 135 bpm -- a number I previously thought correct but had no way of justifying.

In December of 2012, I finally received my French driver's license, after waiting almost 2 years for what was supposed to be "reciprocated" swap.  The best thing about getting the French DL is that it is good for life, and it enabled be to sign up for Auto-Lib (https://www.autolib.eu/).  Auto-Lib lets me pickup one of their electric cars (their stations and kiosks are generally close to RER stations and bus stops.  I pick the car up, drive to wherever in the metro area I want, drop it off at a station, and I am done with it!  This has enabled shopping at the mall near here, and sometimes in Paris -- anytime I have more than I wish to schlep on the mass-transit options.

I finally got the blood test results back from my leg injury (see previous blog), and it indicated I was low in vitamin D -- the lack of sunshine here is a real problem, folks.  I also felt I was not getting enough fresh vegetables and their benefits.  I took up creating my own salads, and expanding my cooking repertoire, all of which I posted on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/markpuckett01/mark-s-recipes/

The cold and dreariness does adversely affect me -- it seems to go on and on.  My tolerance for cold weather has weakened considerably since being here.  I know my days here are numbered, though, and there is more I wish to see before I leave.

A bientot, and thanks for coming along.

Mark