Happy Friday! What's good? I am doing a bit better than last week, thanks for asking, although I haven't written anything and, more shockingly perhaps, haven't run all week. This is the first time since I started running (in 2022) that I have missed
Happy Friday. What's good? Not me. I am not good. Indeed, I almost wrote to you this morning to tell you there'd be no newsletter today or Monday. I'm having a very hard time with everything right now – that collision a few weeks ago
Welcome to part 3 of my look at heart rate monitors — the history, the practices, the science, and the marketing of this aspect of fitness tracking. I decided to see a physical therapist last week as, a week after my "fall," I was still in pain. I wanted
Happy Friday! What’s good? My training, I will say, has been very good lately; I’m balancing the preparations for my spring half marathon with my powerlifting — something that, in the past, I’ve found quite hard to do. When I ramp up the running, my ability to add
There are, of course, hundreds of apps that you can use to track your exercises. Perhaps your coach uses one of these to assign you your workouts. Perhaps you use an app that generates workouts for you. Perhaps you use an app that’s linked to your fitness tracker, and
Last weekend was my first race of the year — a 10K on the same course where, back in August, I ran my first race in New York City. That race went so poorly — my worst race, and not just because I ran it slower than the half marathon I’d
Part 2 of my "Adventures in Heart Rate Monitoring." (You can find Part 1 here.) Thanks for reading and supporting my work. Although fitness-related wearables like the Apple Watch or the FitBit are now marketed to everyone (along with the promise, of course, that the data they gather
Happy Friday! What’s good? During my long run this past weekend, I finished listening to the audiobook of Richard E. Grant’s recent memoir, A Pocketful of Happiness. Memoir is one of my favorite genres — I am fascinated by the narration of self — and I read a lot of
Welcome to Episode 3 of the Second Breakfast podcast. In today’s episode, I talk to Sherri Spelic, who is an educator — a PE teacher! — a coach, a former middle-distance runner, an ex-pat, a writer (the author of the book Care at the Core, which explores ideas around digital identity
Happy Friday! What's good? "We are living in a golden age of fitness," Yasmin Tayag writes in The Atlantic. "With workouts to accommodate every skill level, interest, time commitment, and social capacity, it should be easier than ever for novices to find one and get
Nikki slid the heart rate monitor onto my arm and fastened it around my bicep, then handed me a laminated piece of paper with a large, colorful bar graph. "During your workout," she said, "the monitor is going to tell you which 'zone' you'
Happy Friday! What's good? We've had the first substantial snowfall of the season here in NYC this week — indeed, the first accumulation of snow in the city in over 700 days. It's been bitterly cold as well, and while I know many of you