Duncan.co

Category: fitness

  • The marathon is easy. There are no lions.

    These Maasai warriors ran the London Marathon wearing sandals made from car tires and carrying traditional spears and shields! They raised over £60 000 pounds in an effort to bring clean drinking water to their village. These guys are amazing! They journal their experience leaving Tanzania for the first time here.

    [Maasai Marathon blog | Post race news]

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  • Walk Score – How walkable is your hood?

    Walk Score
    My current residence scores a 90% w00t!

    What is Walk Score?

    We help homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what’s nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment.

    [Walk Score | via Duncan Davidson | via swissmiss]

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  • Vancouver Marathon 2007

    A while back I was told by some therapists that I had a clinical depression. For some reason they we’re all quick to suggest I start taking medication. I’m kind of against that type of thing so I thought that was a terrible idea. Of course a few months later I found myself medicating with food. I was eating an entire jug of ice cream every day. Yuk! Long story short I went about fixing the problem the old school way, by eating properly and exercising.

    On January 1st of this year I stopped medicating myself with junk food and started getting active. I started running with my friend Rick. At first we we’re running for the exercise. Eventually we decided to set a goal of running the half marathon together. We registered for the race and started training. We’d go out rain or shine every second day. At first I couldn’t run for more than about 15-20 minutes at a time even at a slow pace. With Rick’s help I got stronger and faster and the depression bullshit slowly faded away.

    Fast forward to today. Rick and I just finished our first half marathon! W00t! We had a great time at the race. Who knew that running with 6000 people could be so fun?! Unfortunately Rick had crazy stomach problems during the race so he didn’t do as well as he would have liked. He was running for his life to find a toilet several times during the race… As a result Rick’s time doesn’t reflect his mad running skillz.

    Rick came 1092 out of 5834 people and had a time of 1h 51m 29s. I came in 1111 out of 5834 people and had a time of 1h 51m 42s.

    Here are some photos my sister shot during the event.

    Rick and I are going to do the full marathon next year…

    Thanks for the support Rick!

    [more videos here | see also fitness 2.0]

    Vancouver Half Marathon 2007 Full Results
    Vancouver Marathon 2007 Full Results

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  • Fitness 2.0

    Garmin 305

    As many of you know I’m on a health and fitness kick. I’ve tried to get back in shape (meaning healthy not chiseled abdominals heh) several times in the past and I’ve consistently failed miserably. More often than not its because going to the gym is super boring. This time I’m making the process of getting healthy again into a personal video game. The idea is that if I’m always trying to beat my high score i’ll have more fun than just doing exercise for the sake of it.

    Weapons of choice for nerding out my workouts:

  • Garmin Forerunner 305 (watch GPS / heart rate monitor etc)
  • Motionbased (upload and view all your GPS tracks/elevation/speed/heart rate etc)
  • Google Earth (look at tracks from space)
  • Traineo (graph progress set goals learn from other fitness geeks)

    • Fitness 2.0 Tracks

    I do this mainly by using my GPS when I do outdoor activities like running, cycling, and snowboarding. When I get back home from the outings I then upload my metrics into Motionbased. After that I can see speeds, elevation, heart rate etc. I can even look at my tracks on Google Earth and Google Maps. The image above is a screenshot of run I did the other day as seen on Google Earth.

    Its much more fun to doing these activities knowing that you can look at how fast you went, how far you ran, or how hard you worked. Over time I’ve been able to see my heart rate go down while my speeds and distances increase. You might think this is a fairly expensive undertaking but I consider it an investment in my health. What could be more important to you than your own health? Of course gym memberships are pricey as well. If you’re not into the geeky bits you could always just use a stop watch, a map and check your pulse but then wheres the fun in that?!

    Mathew Honan has an article in Wired along these same lines in the February 2007 issue.

    Update: Here are some more tracks/examples etc.

    Update 2: FYI – spell checking and proof reading your blog posts is always advisable when you post something late at night. Sorry about that original post.

    Update 3: I guess this is my version of fatblogging ;)

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