Santa Delivered and Heartbeats

As my title indicates, Santa really delivered this year. I got a new pair of Brooks Cascadia 4's (the silver and red ones because the yellow were sold out, due to making room for the new 5's coming out in January). Santa also got me a heart rate monitor which is a great gift considering my funny heart issues. Vye has always been so keen on what I am into and always gets me the gifts I really want. I remember our first Christmas together she got me a rock hammer and several books on rocks and minerals. I knew that I had scored an amazing girl who paid attention to me and understood me. Year after year she has always bought the best possible gift I could hope for. Thanks again Vye!

I had to try out the new shoes and HR monitor so I took them out for about an hour run this evening. At 4:30 the southwestern sky was lit up with pinks and reds from the setting sun and it was very dramatic and spectacular. As the night rolled on the colors faded and dusk settled on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. The new shoes felt amazing. It is hard to notice that your old shoes are shot until you have a new pair to compare them with. My last pairs of brooks had just over 900 kilometers on them and they were toast. In the last 20 months I have gone through 7 pairs of shoes. Wow, that is the one drawback to being a high mileage runner is that your money spent on shoes can really pile up. After about 15 minutes I had to run over to my lab and pore out some lava I had cooking in the furnace so I cruised up to my lab on the fourth floor decked out in my running gear. I put on my lab coat and shaded goggles, fire proof gloves, and grabbed my tongs and realized I looked pretty ridiculous with the juxtaposition of running gear and lab PPE. I took care of my experiments and ran for another 45 minutes. The heart rate monitor worked great. I measured my resting pulse before I ran (about 55 BPM) and then after my warm-up (about 133 BPM) and finally at my hardest run I was at about 158 BPM. I could also watch how quickly my heart rate dropped after stopping and watch for it to show signs of sick sinus syndrome. My heart rate returned to a lower pace slowly and so I was great. It is nice to know what the old heart is doing and it will be great to monitor my Heart Rate over my training this year and see how it changes with my training. What a great Christmas!

While running today a song popped up that was appropriate to honor my awesome Christmas gifts from the best wife in the world. The song is Heart Beats by the Swedish group "The Knife". I think this was a good song to play while checking my HR on my new HR monitor. I have loved this song for several years now and I like the cover by Jose Gonzalez almost as much but in a different way. Here are some Videos of various versions of the song and videos. I hope you enjoy as much as me.

There are easily 20 other mixes and mashups on youtube including a mashup with Grizzly Bear. There are other mixes by Solarcube etc. to just name a few. I like them all!