Midnight Rehab Run & Walk

Jul. 25, 2022

I ran and walked tonight. It felt awesome. 

There is a park 4 K from home. There are monkey bars there where I can do chin ups and pull ups. I aimed there on foot. 

I walked thought a woods where you can see beetles enjoying having sap from a kind of oak tree called 'kunugi'. There were plenty tonight. It reminds of my childhood. I would collect a whole bunch of them every summer, and enjoyed keeping them as pets. Now all I need is see them be. 

A 50-minute walk got me to the park. I did some eccentric pull-ups to fire up my upper body.  

I ran back home at a very slow pace. I don't want to risk another injury. I ran carefully as I probed how my recovering knee would react to various landing impacts. A slight iffiness remained, but not to the extent where I had to stop running completely. It's a feeling that I could cope with. 

Toward the end of the run there was a moment when everything just seemed to flow. It was a great feeling, something that had been long forgotten...

Walk 4.01 K: 52:35.68

Run 3.53 K: 22:18.59

Total 7.54 K: 1:14:56

Breathing is Super Important

We can survive for weeks without food, and days without water. But we can only live for minutes without oxygen. Breathing is super important.

Two factors have been identified that negatively affect the quality of our breathing.

One is food, to be specific, sugar. Too much sugar intake stimulates your sympathetic nervous system and increases your blood pressure. As a result, your breathing becomes shallow and fast, thus lowering your ability to take in oxygen fully.

Sugar, by the way, is one of cancer cells' most favorite foods, according to many prominent doctors.

The other is posture. Mouth-breathing and slouching are things to watch out for. Mouth-breathing biases our nervous system toward a sympathetic state (=more excited than calm). Slouching simply decreases the amount of oxygen reaching your lungs per breath.

<Conclusion>

I recommend you to breathe through your nose, not to slouch, and limit your sugar consumption to a sensible level.

As a closing remark, let me share with you something I learned recently. Seventy percent of detoxification is enabled by breathing. Our cells are made clean by virtue of breathing well. However, there is one type of cell in our body that does not require much oxygen for its survival. Can you guess what that is? Cancer cells. They are anaerobic (嫌気性) whereas all the other healthy cells are aerobic (好気性). In other words, when you make the quality of your breathing bad with excessive sugar intake as well as bad postures, you are inadvertently making the potential cancer cells in your body very, very "happy".

Waiving Entrance Fees

Jul. 13, 2022

I read an article about national parks in the US. According to the article, the U.S. National Park Service that is responsible for the management of all national parks in the country has decided to waive the admission fee for five days. 

The article reportedly says that the nation has more than 400 national parks and among them are such popular sites as Yesemite in California and Yellowstone in Wyoming. 

The agency expects the fee waiver will likely boost attendance at national parks, which already saw record numbers of visitors during last year's pandemic. One word of caution, though. The waiving of the fee does not apply to charges for camping and guides.

The article reminded me of the trip to Yellowstone I took with my host father late Marshall Sullivan who was a teacher at Broadus Public High School in Broadus, Montana. I was 16 back then. An over 5-hour drive through first dusty straight roads in Montana and then foresty winding mountain roads in Wyoming took us to the breath-takingly beautiful nature park where that famous Old Faithful Geyser is. I saw a moose for the first time in my life. Wasn't lucky enough to see a wild buffalo, but soaked in the atomosphere fully at every stop we made during the journey. 

The host father passed away years ago. I was too young to realize back then, but years later as I grew more mature, I couldn't help but think what a rare act of generosity it was for him to travel in such a beautiful place with a young boy from a country with which his own had once fought a bloodshedding war.

As I look back on that trip, I cannot help but think that there is something about nature that quiets us and makes us humble about how much we can or should change it. Its beauty is enough to make me stop before trying to change even a small part of it to satisfy my selfish need. 

 

Improved Approach to Learning by Ms. Karimata

 Jul. 12, 2022

This morning I saw a very interesting program on TV about an instructor who teaches junior high school students about one of the fiercest battles between Japan and the US during the second world war--the battle in Okinawa. 

Ms. Karimata is not a public school teacher. She is an outside speaker. She is invited to school and teach a lesson. Before she was invited, local war survivors would tell students stories of the battle. But with each passing year the numbe of story-tellers has been decreasing as one passed away after another as time went on.

Local school teachers were not able to come up with a good alternative to story-telling when Ms. Karimata offered an helping hand. 

Ms. Karimata (24) is an instructor who teaches about the battel in Okinawa. She uses active-learning skills to junior high and senior high students. She asks questions, gets learners to think, and makes them work in pairs and groups to exchange opinions. This allows them to learn a topic at deeper levels. She uses quizes to make it intereting, too.

Her lesson begins with a choice between leaving the island of Okinawa and staying there when America's landing was imminent. One student was asked which choice he would choose. He says, "Leave." Ms. Karimata asks, "Why?" He says, "'Cause I don't want to die." "Fair enough," Ms. Karimata responds. Immediately after this exchange, a short lecture was introduced to the students about the "Tsushima-maru Incident," in which a large evacuation boat named Tsushima-maru was sunken with　 a torpedo from a US submarine. One thousand four hundred eighty-four people lost their lives, 800 of which were children. The boy who had answered "Leave" a minute before dropped his jaw and remained speechless for a moment...

It's just a number of questions Ms. Karimata asks the participants to stimulate their imagination and get them to "think" in order to survive the harshest of situations.

Her lesson ends with a statement that there is no one correct answer that works for everyone, and that each one of us must think hard on what to do to survive.

Local public teachers were all highly impressed with the way Ms. Karimata had their students voluntarily engage in activities and they also looked tremendously inspired to see the young learners actively exchange their opinions and be inspired by their fellow classmantes' opinions.   

It is a new educational approach to learning about important topics that should be shared among many whose mission is transmission of valuable information. 

Renewing My Driving License & Donating Blood

Jul. 5, 2022

I went to the License Bureau in Makuhari this morning. My driving license was up for renewal. I woke up at 7:30 am. way earlier than I usually do. I left home around a quarter past 8 on my Kawasaki Vulcan S into heavy morning traffic. A 45-minute ride took me to the Bureau. There were already long queues at 9:00 am. in the Bureau waiting for a series of procedures required before listening to a mandatory lecture on traffic safety.

It was 10:15 when I finally showed into a lecture room. An instructor played a DVD. It started with an interview of a mother who lost her beloved son in a traffic accident. After his death the mother found seeds of morning glory hidden inside fake 'kagami-mochi', offertory rice cakes in the altar. The mother took the seeds to the principal of her late son's school, and asked him to sow the seeds and grow the morning glories as a symbol for traffic safety. 

The instructor then shared some traffic data. According to him more than 60% of traffic-related deaths in Chiba involve elderly people. He mentioned some unpredictable nature of elderly behavior which was interesting to me.  For example, in one accident, a man was driving down a quiet lane when an elderly woman suddenly came out from between two cars standing on the opposite lane, and she was hit by the car to death.

The instructor also mentioned drunken driving and pedestrian crossing. At a pedestrian crossing with no traffic lights pedestrians have the right of way. Drivers, motorcyclists, and even bicyclists, must stop and let her go when they see a pedestrian trying to walk on the crossing. So often do we tend to ignore them when we see pedestrians trying to walk on a crossing. From now on, I'll always stop and let the pedestrian go first when I see one waiting to walk on a crossing. 

At 10:45 I received my new license. I was hungry because I had nothing but a few spoonfuls of yogurt before I leflt home, so I want to a rather shabby convenience store inside the Bureau to buy a cup of instand noodles for a quick bite. I had to eat something soon, because I was going to give blood at the Red Cross across from the License Bureau. They sometimes won't let you give blood when you have not eaten for a while before blood donation. 

It was my 54th donation. I need to give myself 3 months before I give another donation. So my next soonest timing is September. Should I give blood then, my number of blood donations will be only 1 short of my age, which will have been 56 by September. My short-term goal is to make the number of donations the same as my age. If I donate blood twice more this year, I can achieve that goal. We'll see.

Midnight 10 K Jog

 Jul. 1, 2022

It was sizzling hot today. I waited until late at night for the temperature to come down to a level that's good for a run. But at some point I gave up 'cause the temperaure stayed rather high till around midnight. So, I just went ahead and hit the road while it's still hot and humid. 

I tried a new route to discover a new regular training course. I had a few conditions on my mind. One is I don't want to go too far from home. Two is I'm always close enough to a public toilet and tap water. Three is it's rich in undulation. In other words, it's not boreingly flat. 

As a result, I found out the out and return course shown in the map above. The farthest point from home is 3 K out, and it's still 2 K to the nearest convenient store. So, it's not too far. Much of the time I run around home. So, if I don't feel right, or nature calls, I can easily go home and take care of myself. I like the new course!

I am still in rehab mode, so I took short strides and ran very slowly, paying careful attention to my running form, especially to the alignment of the legs. My left foot tends to land slightly inward rather than straigntly downward. When that happens, the medial meniscus receives greater pressure than when the foot lands perpendicularly from the hip joint. So I kept that in check while running.   

Overall, the session was good. I felt exhausted toward the end though the pace was pathetically slow. But there is no shame in that. It's only natural. I've been away from running for so long. What I lost over a long period of time, I need to recover by spending exactly the same amount of time for it to be lost. I'm going to go slow.