Monday, January 19, 2009

Doing the Stay At Home Dad Thing

Today I did the "Stay At Home Dad" thing.  I'm happy to report that both children are still alive and no one got hurt :-)

Both kids were off from school today and my wife took her mom for a medical procedure, so I had both kids from 8:30am to 4pm.  I had a bunch of things scheduled - including a run at the gym (luckily they have a great Childcare room for the kiddos).

Before my run, I saw the club manager and asked if I could have my body fat percentage checked.  They have a hand-held machine that I guess sends a current through your body to determine body fat...I believe this is a tad more accurate than the calipers they used to use (and were in use at the previous gym I belonged to).  My reading today was 15.9%.  I had no basis to know whether this was good, bad or indifferent - until I found a few sites this evening that shows I'm in pretty good shape.  One site has me in the "fitness" category (not quite an athlete), and two other sites show this as excellent based on my age (I'm now in the 35-39 range so anything under 16% is "excellent"!).

Either way, earlier this morning, I had stepped on the scale and it showed that I had gained a pound since last week's weigh in.  I definitely deserved it by the way I ate.  I'm sure the damage would have been worse if not for my 9 mile run yesterday morning.

Today I did a quick 3 miles on the treadmill.  I started out at 5.0 mph and bumped up the speed by 0.2 after each quarter mile.  My HR kept under 150 all the way up to 6.0 mph.  I ran there for most of the run and then bumped back down to 5.8 mph with half a mile to go.  Overall it was a 10:31/mile pace with and average HR of 148.  I'd really like to get the pace of my easy runs back into the 10:00/mile range with my HR in the mid 140s.  I'm sure as I start to bump the mileage up in a few weeks I'll get there.

2 comments:

Marcy said...

How about you? Did you manage to come out without being hurt? LOL

Mike Fox said...

Funny you ask...my 3 year old is still in the kicking/flailing/throw a tantrum if I don't get my way phase. I nearly had a potential injury incident regarding a juice box - he wanted the juice box and I gave him a sippy cup of water. It was ugly for a few minutes there but I eventually caved in. Which meant my 6 year old then whined for a juice box as well.