Andrea's Adventures in Binkyland

Data Junkie

I have a problem.

An addiction.

No, I haven't been hitting the bottle. No sneaking late-night cigarettes in the back yard for me. And although I do love a good piece of pastry, I don't have a problem with carbohydrates, either.

I am an information junkie.

For my birthday, Matt has given me a very fancy and exciting heart rate monitor. Heart rate monitors are supposed to be phenomenal, and change the way you exercise. You can more carefully monitor your performance and progress, resulting in a more concrete idea of how you are improving (or not) and how healthy you are. No more off days! No more wondering if you're working as hard as you should be!

Well, my heart rate monitor is changing the way I exercise, but not in the typical way.

As I've said, I'm a data junkie. I fiend for news. I obsessively research topics ranging from baby development and breastfeeding to types of diseases found in tropical fish aquariums. If I don't have a topic to be researching, no data to be analyzing, I truly feel cast adrift.

So now I have a heart rate monitor. How has it changed me, you ask? Well, now I actively try to find opportunities to exercise. Not so I can have buttocks you can bounce a quarter off of, no. Not so I will achieve washboard abs, or supernaturally low levels of triglycerides and cholesterol. Not even so I can eat all of the doughtnuts and guacamole my heart desires. No motivation as pedestrian as that has ever so firmly grasped my imagination. I look forward to exercising so that I can have a new set of data points.

I have created a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet keeps track of my weight and measurements, my body fat percentage, moving averages of aforementioned weight and body fat, hours of sleep a night, exercise sessions, average and max heart rates, time spent in my target heart rate zone, if I'm running, my pace and distance, and before too long, probably another half a dozen statistics I have not yet thought up.

Before much longer, I will have enough data to start really having a good time. I will generate charts and graphs. I will monitor my heart rate versus how much sleep I am getting, my body fat versus my max heart rate, my weight versus how much total exercise I have recorded. My spine tingles and toes curl at the prospect of all of this exciting data and the fascinating insights I can mine out of it. No, I am not joking.

Of course, if I become skinny and smoking hot as a result of all of this geeky joy, I won't exactly be upset about that, either.

My kitchen is: A bit sloppy, but the cleaners come tomorrow, anyhow. And now that I've run for tonight, there is a Pepperidge Farms apple turnover calling my name...

Posted by andrea at July 21, 2003 10:58 PM