Continued from the previous BLOG post....
The development of Within is important, as is the search for a corporate sponsor(s). But, the most important aspect of this project to me at least, is KidPower. With the KidPower school speaking program, I have a rare opportunity to make a difference and that is one of the main reasons why I am doing this. It is these crazy cool projects like the 24 hour HPV record, this Pedal The Ocean expedition and the 24 hour HPB record attempt scheduled for this summer, that allow me to take the stage and speak out about what I believe to be a very serious problem in our modern society - in my opinion, second only to global warming.
It's called the obesity epidemic, and if the statistic that 60% of North Americans are overweight is correct, then there is a very good chance that YOU are one of them. That's the most difficult part of this whole quest of mine - I end up speaking to people who don't really want to hear my message. No body likes to be called fat and out of shape. in fact, I think most people don't really even view themselves as being fat and out of shape. This is due mostly to averages - if everyone in our society were super-model skinny, and you were 10 pounds overweight, you would feel fat. In reality, the average person is probably 20 to 40 pounds over weight and if you are only 10 pounds over, you might think that you are doing pretty good. It's this comparison to the status-quo that is the most dangerous aspect of this epidemic. it is happening to almost everyone, and we can't even see it.
1.4 million people in the US died of heart disease last year accounting for nearly 40% of all annual deaths. This compares to less than 50,000 who died from car accidents. You wouldn't even think about driving your car without a seat belt, yet many don't think twice about digging into the chocolate donut or hitting Mickie D's for a Quarter Pounder at lunch. Frankly, I am less concerned about what and how much we are eating and more concerned about our active pursuit of inactivity.
Anthropologists believe that early man used to walk the equivalent of a full marathon (that's 40 km or 26.2 miles) every single day of his/her life. Now the average North American walks the equivalent of 200 meters per day (that's 1/5 of a single kilometer or about a quarter mile). Think about that for a second. Three million years of evolution has produced an animal that required a certain minimum of activity each day just to function normally. Our activity levels have been dropping drastically for less than a hundred years - a mere .003 % on the big time line. Our bodies can't adjust to this drastic change in our environment, and as a result we are getting sick and we are dying of a variety of diseases associated to our new found sedentary environment.
I was watching a show on 60 minutes last night where Rick Berman was speaking out about how we have become a 'nanny state' where we are treated like children by our government who regulates most of what we can do and can't do and what's good for us and what's not. Mr. Berman suggests that the obesity epidemic is not an epidemic at all. He says that an epidemic is a virus that we have no control over. Becoming obese is a choice, he says. Well, I don't agree. In a way, obesity is like any other modern day disease, in that we 'create' the disease by our own doing as a society.
One of the reasons the North American natives were overrun by Europeans, according to the book Guns, Germs and Steel, was because they brought diseases with them that they were immune to. The natives weren't, and most died as a result of these diseases, not as a result of warfare like most people think. The origin of these diseases resulted from the European domestication of animals - viruses passed from the animals to people and over hundreds of thousands of years, the European people slowly became immune to these germs. In a sense, our diseases evolved WITH the Europeans and were a result of their progress as a society. When the Europeans arrived in North American with their germs, the native American people were immediately infected and died.
Over the last fifty to seventy five years, modern day society has strived to mechanize most of what we used to have to do by hand, or foot. Transportation, machines, factories, etc. This has resulted in a fairly sedentary environment where at times, it is difficult if not impossible to accomplish things the old fashioned way - using physical effort. For example many new neighborhoods aren't even being designed with sidewalks! You can't even go for a walk!!!!
During a recent school presentation I did, I discussed the possibility of walking or riding bikes to school. After the presentation some of the teachers were concerned that this would present a danger, since in some cases, there were no low-traffic routes that were safe for travel.
What I am getting at here, is that becoming over weight has become a situation which is almost out of our control - we can't help it. We are constantly bombarded with television advertising convincing us that we need to make a trip to the fridge and teaching us about the new meal between breakfast and lunch called "Leakfast" and how the "snack" is now a mandatory meal between lunch and dinner. Fast food and junk food is cheap and it has been designed by scientists to make it taste about as good as it can get. How can we not become influenced by this? Just to be normal in today's society means that we will probably end up getting fat. We can't help it. This is a disease WE are creating - just like those we created that killed off the native Americans.
The first step in dealing with the problem is letting ourselves off the hook on a personal level. It's not really our fault - but it's ALL of our faults. We need to recognize that some serious changes are required AS A SOCIETY or the obesity virus will continue to spread and grow. And this starts by ridding ourselves of the guilt that so many of us feel about our weight and state of fitness. You don't feel guilty when you catch a cold, but you do everything in your power to cure yourself. We need to treat the obesity epidemic the same way - it's not your fault, but you should still do everything in your power to cure yourself.
And unlike the common cold, a cure for our expanding waste lines is readily available! This problem CAN be overcome, and it does NOT require medicine or modern technology. Just a return to what our bodies are craving - some activity!
If any of you need a little motivation or some advice on becoming more active in your lives, I am here to help. Send me an email, and I offer what ever I can.
Very best regards,
Greg Kolodziejzyk
Labels: soapbox
It's been a while since I've written about anything aside from building Within, so I thought that I would take this moment to share whats on my mind right now.Ironman is exactly 1 week from today, Sunday, April 15. If you want, you can watch it live at Ironman Live. . I'm into my taper* now, so I'm happy that I don't have the pressure of squeezing 20 hours of winter INDOOR training in anymore. That really gets to be a drag - even a bit depressing actually.
I'm into day 3 of my fat loading diet. I primarily eat fats for 7 days leading up to an important race, then 2 days of carbs. The high fat content trains your body to better utilize fat as an energy source, thereby conserving precious carbohydrates. There is a surprising amount of energy in fat. The average lean athlete has enough fat do complete 10 back-to back Ironman distance events on his skimpy fat stores alone. That's in theory - he would run out of carbohydrates well before his fat stores ran dry. Fat burns in a carbohydrate flame - you need carbs stored as glycogen in your muscle cells to efficiently burn fat - it's a combination of both. At Ironman, or 24 hour cycling record attempt intensities, you are burning far more fat than carbs. According to some research, this high fat diet translates to better efficiency during the endurance event - assuming that the athlete loaded up with carbs prior for a day or two to the event. It's worked for me in the past and has become a bit of a tradition for me during my taper.
I don't like it. Because of the lack of carbs, I feel lethargic and slow and have slight carb depletion head-aches. A fatty meal fills you up in that it satiates your appetite, but always leaves you craving something more - like something sweet or bready!!! I try to eat a lot of the good fats - nuts, avocados, canola oil, olive oil, a fatty salmon, but inevitably end up combining the good with the bad fat in meat and dairy.
I ALWAYS lose weight on the fat diet. And also, so did ALL of the test subjects in all of the studies I have read. And, no, it is not due to the loss of carbohydrate stores and water like you would immediately think. After the carb stores and hydration levels have been adjusted for, the fat loading subjects still lost an average of 2 to 4 pounds over the 10 day study. The researchers do not know why.
I think one reason the fat load diet works for me is because I get a psychological boost in the two days leading up to Ironman. I get to gorge on CARBS!!!! Also, this fat load diet acts like an old fashioned carb load diet in that you starve yourself of carbs for 7 days, then when you load on carbs, your body stores MORE carbs than normal because it over compensates thinking that you may be facing another carb starvation period in the future. During the two days leading up to Ironman, this carb overload makes me feel totally pumped and energetic and ready for race day! Perhaps this is one reason why a high fat diet results in some fat loss - your body overcompensating by ridding itself of body fat because it assumes a continuation of fat calories with be forthcoming.
* The taper is defined by Roch Frey as "The basic principles for all tapers are the same. In pursue of that great race after all the consistent and race specific training you need to taper off your workouts allowing you to rest and recover both physically and mentally."
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On the expedition front, things are progressing quite nicely. The most important task right now is the development of Within. That is one of the reasons I hired Pat Brothers from RaceRecon Expedition Management to deal with some of the planing and the very important sponsor hunt. Trying to find a sponsor can be very difficult, and very time consuming. The way I looked at it was I could spend all of my time making sure we had the technology right in the form of a human powered boat that would demonstrate something of value to the world watching and spend no time looking for a sponsor which would mean the expedition would not happen, OR, I could delegate some of the other aspects of this project that I might not be ideally suited to. Pat has experience with corporations and we see eye to eye regarding the professionalism that this expedition needs to convey and it's importance in attracting a good corporate partner.
If you have any suggestions for possible corporations who might benefit from an association to this project, please email me your ideas.
That leaves me free to work on Within and do some basic planing - like more delegating. I would like you to meet my official team as it stands now:
PedalTheOcean.com team
Getting Within into the water and confirming our speed estimates is VERY important right now. Equally important is discovering how Within is going to ride in the water - and in big waves. We're not 100% sure what is going to happen there. We will probably need ballast, but not sure how much - and we may even require ballast in the form of a keel, but again, we're not 100% sure what the speed cost of that weight immersed deep into the water will be. In reading Pete Brays book "Kayak Across the Atlantic", he noted that they had designed a ballasted keel on his partially enclosed kayak (much like Within), but found that when they were on the sea, that going without a ballasted keel was more stable.
Another example of how planning sometimes does not completely resemble reality is Lot41. This kayak (similar to Pete Brays, but tandem and a big bigger) was designed to cross the Tasman sea from Tasmania to NewZealand. Crossing The Ditch expedition, James Castrission and Justin Jones discovered that their live-aboard kayak Lot41 was very tippy and sluggish when they got it into the water for the first time. During very windy conditions, the wind would catch the large cabin and making forward progress was difficult, and maneuvering the kayak was very challenging. As a result, they have postponed their departure for about a year to allow them time to make necessary modifications.
Every boat is different, and design can only go so far. You can never predict exactly how anything performs once it makes the jump from drawing paper to the real world. I am anxious to get into some serious testing with Within to see exactly how it will behave during various ocean conditions. This is one of the main reasons why I decided to start with a prototype boat, and then feed the results gained from experience with the prototype into a brand new design that an experienced boat builder can build.
Stay tuned for 'thinking part 2' later...
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Labels: expedition
