It Ain't About Gym Class

If figuratively beating a dead horse actually counted as exercise I'd likely be one of the fittest guys in the world.

Here's yet another story on gym class and how the school based energy-out component of pediatric obesity is not in fact particularly important.

The story's about Dr. Kevin Harris, a pediatric resident at B.C. Children's Hospital who presented his findings on gym class' ability to change BMI. Dr. Harris and his fellow researchers looked at 13 trials of 6 months to 3 years duration involving over 10,000 children.

His quote says it all:

"Phys-ed and physical activity are tremendously important but this research shows phys-ed doesn't change BMI. So while the overall health benefits are established, phys-ed shouldn't be looked at as a central component of any obesity strategy"

Hmmm, if energy-out interventions don't help, what else could we try?

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, it's time to look at the energy-in?

Montreal to get Public Bike System

Though calories burned through exercise aren't usually much to write home about, exercise as a determinant of health is tremendously important.

One of the most challenging things about exercising in this day and age is that we all lead such incredibly hectic lives - that's why I'm such a strong proponent of what I'd call functional exercise whereupon it's exercise that doesn't feel like exercise. Things like gardening, biking to work, family walks etc. all fit into that category and interventions like the one proposed for Montreal can help - a public bike system whereby for a small fee you can simply rent a bike, bike to your destination and then drop the bike off at one of their other locations.

This type of system is hugely popular in Europe including Paris and hopefully will be rolled out (no pun intended) to more Canadian cities.

Hike to Help the Bruce Trail!

When I was growing up, my father would take me hiking on the Bruce Trail - Canada's oldest and longest public footpath that runs in Ontario from Tobermory all the way down to Niagara Falls. That photo up above is me and my dad on the trail circa 1983.

The first time I saw Niagara Falls was after I had walked there.

Now I didn't walk the full 850km in one go, but rather we whittled away at it, weekend by weekend until I became hiker #1139 to complete it.

It was my weekends on the Bruce that likely made hiking a passion for me and since then I've put my boots down all over the world, even hiking the Alpine Pass Route in Switzerland, from Lichtenstein to France clear across the Alps (some of my toenails fell off during the course of that one).

The Bruce Trail Conservancy has been working actively to try to purchase all of the land the trail runs on so as to protect it for future generations and while they've purchased over half of it, there's still a long way to go.

This summer you've got a unique opportunity. Almost simply by hiking you can help the Bruce Trail Club raise up to $50,000 for land purchasing.

How? As part of their "Boots on the Bruce" campaign bootmaker Keen has agreed to donate $5 to the Bruce Trail Conservancy for every pair of boots or shoes photographed on the Trail (any make'll do - they don't have to be Keen).

So really all you've got to do to help is head over to the Bruce Trail Conservancy site and figure out a hike (clicking here gets you to a page with 40 of the most beautiful hikes). Hike. Take a picture of your boots and upload that photo to Keen's Boots on the Bruce page, and suddenly, you've helped future generations enjoy one of North America's most beautiful hiking paths.

[Hat tip, thanks and love to my Dad whose bootsteps I'll try to follow with my own children]

Congratulations to the Try-a-Tri'ers!

This past Saturday was the 4th annual Somersault Events' Dr. Freedhoff Try-a-Tri challenge.

Terry from Somersault changed the name after hearing about the "challenge".

The challenge was pretty simple - if my office inspires more than "x" people a year to try a triathlon then I have to run one too.

Every year we raise the number of people in the challenge and believe it or not, this year the number for me to run was 60!

I wanted to post my sincere congratulations to everyone who came out and competed. Seeing folks who never thought they'd ever run triathlons finish is yet another reason why I've got one of the best jobs ever.

For proof that I was there and ran, here's a video of me finishing. I'm posting it more for the reaction of the videographer (our fitness director Rob) who quite clearly demonstrates the appropriate response to hearing the adjective "famous" used to describe me.

Walking Clear Across Canada (Virtually)

Canada's a big place.

Walking across it might take some time.

I don't have much in the way of time.

Doesn't mean I can't do it.

Thanks to the Trans Canada Trail new website feature, by entering my steps daily, I can do it from the comfort of my own province and still walk the roughly 18,000km of trail (11,184 miles).

Want to walk across Canada too?

Simply sign up for a free account here and log your steps daily.

Last one to the East coast's a rotten egg.

[Hat tip to our fitness director Rob]

Flintstones Style Human Powered Car On Its Way!

Fittingly it's called the "Human Car" and for only $15,000 you and three of your fittest friends can go cruising, gas-free, and make lots of new friends on your way.

The chassis is designed to travel at "unlimited speed", and while going downhill in the video looks like great fun, I imagine climbing it may be less so.

Good news is that the production model will be a "Human-Electric" hybrid so the ups won't be quite so bad.

Preorders are being collected on their website, though I'm guessing demand won't outstrip supply too quickly.

Exercise - the Videogame?

This one's for the Nintendo Wii and it's called Wii Fit and currently it is the number two selling video game in Japan (it's not available in North America yet). For those of you who don't know, the Nintendo Wii is a video game console whose controllers have motion sensors and so games on the Wii are played more actively.

With Wii Fit we see the addition of a balance board sensor.

While I can certainly envision its use in areas like stroke rehabilitation, Wii Fit just doesn't do it for me. I'm a gamer (at least I used to be before having children) and these really don't look like games to me.

My advice? If you want exercise, go outside and play. If you want to play video games, play video games. Please don't waste your money on a product that will do little for you in the way of exercise and as far as fun quotient goes....well, I don't want be seen as a stick in the mud, so here is Sarcastic Gamer's overdubbed parody of the original Wii Fit trailer.

Go outside!

Maybe You Didn't Earn that Latte

Yesterday was another fine day at the Obesity Society conference with so many fascinating abstracts presented.

I'm going to fill you folks in on the work of a very dynamic speaker and clearly talented researcher, Dr. Tim Church.

Tim's gang wanted to explore whether or not exercise led patients to "overcompensate" with food - meaning they wanted to see whether or not we rewarded our exercise with more food than we earned.

It was truly an elegant experiment.

Firstly individuals had to sign an informed consent paper that explicitly stated that the study being conducted was not in fact a weight loss study, but rather a study on the effects of exercise on blood pressure and fitness. The authors simply didn't want people influenced by the thought that they were involved in a weight loss study.

For 6 months, 464 post-menopausal women were randomly assigned to a control group of no supervised exercise, 72 minutes, 136 minutes or 192 minutes per week of exercise. The exercise was kept at moderate intensity and it involved using a treadmill or an exercise bike and all of the exercise was supervised exercise so that they would not have to rely on unreliable self-reported amounts.

Retention for the study was great with 94%, 87% and 93% retention in the treatment arms.

Fitness showed a non-surprising and beautiful dose dependent response with more exercise leading to greater improvement.

Weight however was a different story.

The 72mins per week group lost on average 1.3kg over the 6 months.

The 136mins per week group lost on average 1.9kg over the 6 months.

And the 192mins group, did they lose 2.5kg?

Nope, they only lost 1.3kg.

It gets more interesting.

When they looked at the actual data points what they saw was that weight loss progressed well during the first 10 weeks of the 192mins per week group, but that was during their so-called, "ramping up" period whereby they couldn't have simply started these folks at 192mins per week, so they were ramping them up to 192mins. Almost as soon as they did reach their 192mins mark, weight loss slowed down to a crawl.

Now remember, I mentioned this was an elegant study. The authors, anticipating the skeptics, wanted to eliminate an obvious confounding question. Did the folks who were exercising the most simply do less the rest of the week because they were either too tired from exercise, or felt that they didn't need to worry about day-to-day activity because they were good at getting their pump on? Nope. Tim and his buddies had subjects wear pedometers daily to ensure that the exercise didn't have an effect on non-exercise activity and steps across the board were in fact the same.

So what can we conclude?

It's got to be an intake thing again. Whether the increased exercise led to an actual increase in hunger or whether it simply made folks falsely confident of what they were allowed to eat (the calories they earned through exercise) isn't clear, but what is clear - more exercise led to disproportionate increases in intake.

Maybe you didn't earn that extra Latte.

Don't Blame the Escalator

Today kicks off a week from NAASO (The Obesity Society) as I'm writing from New Orleans where they're having their annual scientific assembly. Every year I come to this conference I'm amazed at the incredible amounts of brains and passion that are being poured into obesity research worldwide. The conference is enormous and boasts over 2,000 attendees from the four corners of the world.

This week I'm going to try to highlight some of what I feel are among the conferences most interesting presentations and studies.

The first takes us to Nigeria - rural Nigeria in fact, where Lara Dugas and her colleagues went to study the effects of the energy expended in daily activity on weight gain. They followed 153 rural Nigerian women (over 20% of them subsistence farmers) and measured their total daily energy expenditures (the total calories they burned all day long), their resting daily energy expenditures (the calories they burn at rest) and then inferred the calories they burned through daily activity.

They then compared the data from rural Nigeria with the same data taken from a group of women from urban Chicago (where over 50% of them were unemployed).

They then followed these women for 3 years.

Some of the results were not surprising.

The Nigerians were much lighter - average weight was 128lbs and BMI of 23.1 vs. those from urban Chicago where average weight was 184lbs and BMI of 31.

Here's the surprising result.

Calories burned through daily activity did not differ between the skinny rural Nigerian subsistence farmers and the obese unemployed urban Chicagoans.

Come again? The subsistence farmers and the unemployed urbanites burned the same number of daily Calories in activity? Haven't we been blaming obesity at least partially on the poison fruits of development? Aren't dish washers, escalators, cars, and elevators stealing our Calories away from us? Shouldn't the skinny Nigerian farmers be burning far more Calories? Isn't that part of why they're so skinny?

I sure would have thought so - and from the reactions in the room, so did most other folks.

Second non-surprising result?

No measure of energy expenditure, not resting, total or that from activity, was associated with weight change in either group over the 3 years and in fact, the rate of change in body weight over the 3 years was virtually identical in Nigeria and Chicago.

Why isn't that surprising? What that result says is that the Calories you burn don't dictate your weight and that instead what dictates your weight are the Calories you consume. The only surprise here is the fact that rate of weight gain is the same in rural Nigeria vs. urban Chicago where one might have thought greater access to high Calorie foods would have led to a dramatically more rapid gain in Chicago (though I should note, the Chicagoans had higher total energy expenditures as a consequence of their higher weights and consequently for them to gain weight at the same rate as the Nigerians does in fact necessitate eating more, just not tons more).

So if you take these results as valid (and it really was a very well designed study), they basically conclude that the environment as it pertains to activity, doesn't matter, that you can't blame the escalators, and shocker of all shockers (there's the sarcasm), energy intake matters far more than energy output in the establishment of obesity.

Set your Treadmill Free

For those of us living in the Northern parts of the world, life is starting to get colder and for many of us, that means that the inspiration to exercise is starting to become more difficult as getting yourself out the door for a walk or run in the cold is definitely more challenging.

You see the thing is that people when it comes right down to it, are consumers of time. If we're lucky we might each find, interspersed throughout our days, a few precious blocks of time where we're not working, where we're not at our children's beck and call, where we're not eating, not on the telephone and not sleeping.

Those of us trying to include exercise in our lives then hope that somehow, during those fleeting free moments we can inspire our selves to use them to do intentional exercise.

Recognizing that these free moments vary in time and duration many of us have decided you know what, we might not have the time (or desire) to pack it up during those moments and head out to a gym, so instead we went and brought the gym home by going out and buying treadmills and exercise equipment.

And what did we do with our great intentions and our new equipment? We banished them to our basements - out of sight, in a part of our homes that often is less welcoming, beside the kitty litter and the boxes, atop the cold unfinished concrete floor.

We might have used them for a few weeks after that. You see the money spent on them was fresh in our minds and consequently it raised the value of time spent with the equipment - by using it we didn't feel like we had wasted our money. But as our memory of money spent dwindles, too often so too does our use of the equipment.

If you want to actually use your home exercise equipment, you need to find new ways to increase the value of the time you spend with it and one of the easiest ways is to put it back in your line of sight. Seeing it may remind you you've got it and potentially even of the money and good intentions that brought it into your home. Put it somewhere where you can see it, and ideally somewhere you think might be enjoyable to use it - staring out a window, at a television, whatever.

If you choose to put it in front of a television, consider "conscripting" your favourite shows whereby you create a rule that only allows you to watch them while on the treadmill (never mind the speed, just get on it). Alternatively you could set up a reward system whereby if you log enough time, you get a specific reward.

Bottom line, unless you create an environment that includes some measure of enjoyment in your exercise, an environment that increases rather than decreases the value of the time you spend doing it, well guess what, you're probably not going to be doing much of it for long.

Set your treadmills free!

Performance Chocolate Bars?

So apparently now Hershey's is marketing OhHenry! bars as performance enhancing.

Their new bar, OhHenry! Pro is being promoted for both its protein content and its consequent great fit as a sports enhancement.

Television commercials have folks eating OhHenry! Pro bars suddenly gaining great strength and agility and of course are aimed at teens with their music and content (skateboarding and cycling).

So what is in this rocket propelled chocolate bar?

320 Calories, 21grams of fat (6grams saturated), 5 teaspoons of sugar and 12 grams of protein.

Or to put it differently, pretty much exactly the same stuff as is in a regular Oh Henry! bar just with double the protein.

Wanna know some secrets?

Protein won't make you fast.

Calories will eventually make you slow.

Hershey's marketers apparently lack scruples.

[Hat tip to Rob our fitness director for bringing me a bar]

Do-it-yourself Gatorade

Can't take the credit for this one - it's from a guy whose got a blog named "Yaniverse" but unfortunately he's apparently locked his blog to registered users only.

Ages ago I bookmarked a do-it-yourself recipe that he posted for a Gatorade/Energy Drink substitute. Thanks to the magic of the internet, even though my recipe link no longer worked, I was able to find it online in someone's Google notebook.

First I'll give you his recipe (makes roughly 2L) and then some brief comments:

2 Tea Bags
6 level teaspoon sugar (24 grams)
A pinch of salt (0.5 grams)
2 oz lemon juice (about 55 grams)
30 oz boiling water

Contains:
100 calories
200 mg Sodium
60mg of Potassium (from the lemon juice)
Caffeine varies, est 100mg-200mg caffeine (depending on the tea used and infusion duration)

Estimated Cost:
Lemon juice: $0.10
2 Tea Bags: $0.06
Sugar, Salt, water, etc: negligible

I know, my first reaction was, "Isn't that just tea?", and frankly it is, but the thing is, you don't need to buy fancy calorie laden energy drinks to help with sports hydration just like you don't have to buy fancy energy bars either - a whole wheat tortilla, smeared with some peanut butter and wrapped around a banana's a cheap and delicious alternative to a Powerbar anyday.

If I remember correctly from Yani's readers' comments (before he locked his blog), obviously the type of tea matters dramatically in regards to taste and according to Yani, you can double the lemon juice if you want. I would suspect that if it's not sweet enough, you can either increase the sugar or add some Splenda - if your activity is longer than 45 minutes straight it may be worth adding more sugar as your body will need the fuel.

Yani, if you're reading, I'd love to link and credit you more formally, but I couldn't figure out how to find you through Blogger.

Update: Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Robert who calculated that 0.5grams of salt would contain roughly 200mg of sodium. Have changed the above to reflect same.

You Know you're Hardcore When....

You know I like exercise.

A few weekends ago we had 64 patients run the Dr. Freedhoff Challenge triathlon through Somersault. Two weekends ago we had 4 patients run the National Capital Marathon, 2 run half-marathons and a whole bunch run a 10km run.

One of my fondest exercise memories is hiking from Lichtenstein to France across the Swiss Alps (a route called the Alpine Pass Route - absolutely breathtakingly fabulous hiking). I decided to hike it because it was billed as one of the 3 most difficult hikes in Europe that didn't require specialized equipment.

During that hike I remember it being a positive thing when a few of my toenails decided to fall off in protest of the beating they were taking.

People have said I'm crazy for having that sentiment, but I'll tell you, I'm not nearly as crazy as someone named Jan Ryerse. Jan is an ultrarunner - someone who likes running over 100 miles at a stretch. He also kind of designs jewelery.....made from toenails.

Like I said, you know you're hardcore when.

Click the picture above, I dare ya.

Bad News for American Runners

USA Track and Field has recently banned racers from wearing headphones at any of their sanctioned events.

Rule 144.3b, sure to dramatically decrease participation in American casual running events, reads as follows,

"The visible possession or use by athletes of video or audio cassette recorders or players, TV's, CD or DVD players, radio transmitters or receivers, mobile phones, computers, or any similar devices in the competition area shall not be permitted"

I've never run a marathon and it's definitely on my to-do list one day and at one point I entertained the idea of making the New York marathon my first - not any more.

I just can't imagine running for 4 hours, fighting a body that doesn't really want to be doing what it's doing, and not have the benefit of a playlist.

They state it's for safety reasons - I'd love to see the stats as to the injuries due to running with headphones on a course where there's no vehicular traffic.

Revo - an Engine for your Bike

What weighs 15lbs, gets 200 miles per gallon, and drives at 20 mph?

The Revo Wheel.

This wheel is an engineering marvel that is meant to replace the front wheel in your bike, basically turning your bike into a slow moped.

Pedaling is for suckers I guess.

The thing is, while certainly lightish, at 15lbs that's going to make actually pedaling your bike a whole lot more difficult which of course for most, will make pedaling a rarity.

$599US is the price you'll have to pay to turn your trusty bike, a source of health and fitness, into a sweat free, zero-Calorie moped.

Please don't buy one.

Nike +ipod Sport Kit Hands-on Review

With May closing fast and with over 50 patients running their first triathlon, and with one of the great Somersault events actually named the, "Dr. Freedhoff try-a-tri Challenge", it's time for me to get my butt in gear and start training more seriously.

One of my favourite training tools is the Nike +ipod Sport Kit. It consists of a small transmitter that fits on your shoe and then a small receiver that plugs into the base of your ipod Nano (it only works with the Nano). The transmitter houses at least one accelerometer and consequently what it does is track your speed and distance and then transmits them to your ipod.

It's what the ipod does with that information that's great. As with most products Apple, it's incredibly easy to use. A human sounding voice speaks over your music telling you your elapsed time and distance along with your pace every time you briefly press the ipod's centre button. You can set the interface up to follow your time, distance or Calories burned and then at intervals the voice comes on automatically to tell you how far you've come and how far you've got left.

At any point during your run you can push and hold the center button and your own preselected "power song" will immediately begin to play. It's like a nitro boost for your run.

When you get back home and sync your ipod you'll also be given the option of syncing with the Nike +ipod website where you can track your progress, set multiple goals and join running teams.

The best part - this thing is cheap! In the US, Amazon is selling it for $26.99 and in Canada you can get it on the Apple Canada website for $39.00

Downsides to the product are few. The most obvious one is the fact that it only works with the Ipod Nano. The second is the fact that by trying to tie it in with Nike shoes (the Nike shoes have a little embedded crypt for the transmitter) if you want to run with your own shoes you have to either jerry-rig an attachment to your shoe yourself or buy a third party device for attachment.

I bought the Switcheasy Runaway for $7.99 online. It's pictured below, works great and is very easy to use.

I give the Nike +Ipod Sport Kit an A-.

Does Walkability Matter?

In November 2005, I attended a Think Tank on obesity and public policy in Toronto.

I was surprised that obesity and the built environment was one of the main areas of discussion.

I was surprised for two reasons. Firstly while certainly improving the built environment might encourage people to walk and exercise more, as readers of this blog are aware, walking and exercise, while integral to health, don't really do it for obesity.

Last week Prevention Magazine named Madison, Wisconsin the United States' most walkable city in a study sponsored by the American Podiatric Medical Association.

Here's their list of the most walkable cities in the US:

1. Madison, Wisconsin
2. Austin, Texas
3. San Francisco, California
4. Charlotte, North Carolina
5. Seattle, Washington
6. Henderson, Nevada
7. San Diego, California
8. San Jose, California
9. Chandler, Arizona
10. Virginia Beach, Virginia

Let's compare this list with the list drawn up by Men's Fitness magazine (no, not the most reputable source in the world) who put together a top 25 fittest and fattest cities in America - certainly if walkability was a major factor in obesity treatment or prevention, you'd expect that the top 10 most walkable cities ought to at least be in the top 25 fittest.

Austin, Texas - the 2nd most walkable city in the US, was also ranked their 21st fittest city.

San Francisco, California - the 3rd most walkable city in the US, was also ranked their 7th fittest city.

Charlotte, North Carolina - the 4th most walkable city in the US, was also ranked their 23rd fittest city.

Seattle, Washington - the 5th most walkable city in the US, was also ranked their 2nd fittest city.

Virginia Beach, Virginia - the 10th most walkable city in the US, was also ranked their 15th fittest city.

Looks good right? The more walkable cities are fitter right?

Where's Madison? Where are the other five top 10 cities?

Exceptions are bad for rules right?

Bad news.

San Diego, California - the 7th most walkable city in the US, was also ranked their 21st fattest city.

San Jose, California - the 8th most walkable city in the US, was also ranked their 10th fattest city.

For me exercise and fitness are crucial determinants of health; are integral in maintaining weight loss, but are generally not in and of themselves sufficient to dramatically impact upon weight.

To walk a pound off a week would require you walk roughly 2 hours each day and I can't imagine there's anything we could do to our built environments that would lead to that (especially here in cold, snowy Canada). Moreover the likelihood is, in this Calorie blind environment that Health Canada has cultivated, folks who walk more will likely think they can eat more in compensation - likely a lot more. In fact I've often worried that if our government was successful at getting people more active without teaching about Calories that we'd actually see obesity rates rise faster as people ate what they felt they earned through exercise.

So while I'm all for improving on our built environments to encourage more activity, it concerns me that Think Tanks like the one I attended deal with built environment as potential tools to combat obesity. It's worrisome mainly because if obesity rates are used as a means to assess outcomes from these improvements, they'll likely stop recommending that we make them and frankly I think they're important in their own rite.

The Amazing Wovel - a Hands-On Review

So I've had my Wovel now for a complete winter season and I'm now ready to provide a comprehensive review.

For those of you who don't know what a Wovel is, it's basically a giant shovel attached to a wheel and its website reports that it

"clears snow with a fraction of the effort and (is) safer on your back"

Being a huge fan of functional exercise (exercise that doesn't feel like exercise - shoveling, playing with kids, push mowers, biking to work etc.), I of course immediately bought one.

First impressions were that it's very large - make sure you've got room in your garage. At our house I used two bicycle hooks to hang it off the garage wall and due to space constraints we have to park my wife's car beneath the hanging wheel.

Assembly was fairly straightforward and given my tool-based ineptitude, since I was able to put it together, I'd say anyone can do it.

The learning curve for woveling is not terribly steep and once you get going you'll find that indeed, it's much faster than a regular shovel and it's also much easier on the back.

The picture above came from a recent snowfall. I started our two car driveway after my neighbour with a standard shovel had already cleared off half of her one car driveway. I finished before she did, and in the end my back hurt more from clearing my walkway with a regular shovel than from clearing my entire driveway with the Wovel.

In terms of beefs, I've got a few.

Firstly the shovel is not made of the sturdiest plastic in the world. I've got a driveway with a few divots in it and over the course of only 4 or 5 uses, my shovel blade got pretty dinged up - so dinged up in fact that I ordered the stainless steel reinforcement bar for the bottom of the shovel. I wish I had ordered that from the get-go as it really made scraping down to the asphalt a breeze and definitely protects the soft blade. Only drawback to the reinforcement is the fact that it will stick in cracks so if you've got cracks in your driveway, or asphalt that's not smooth, I would imagine it would make woveling much more challenging.

Second beef is the giant wheel. Occasionally, after vigorous use, the wheel falls off mid-Wovel. It's designed for easy adjustability (depending on where you place the fulcrum you can either throw the snow higher or have an easier time with heavier loads) but I think the adjustability is a bit too easy given how often it falls off. I now tighten both pre-wovel and mid-wovel to ensure that this doesn't happen.

Lastly, while the price of the Wovel is quite reasonable, the price for the extra package (padded grips, "gravel wheels" and the steel reinforcement for the blade) seems a bit high for what you get.

If I were the Wovel folks, I'd make the stainless steel reinforcement part of the base model and then charge a fair bit less for the padded grips and gravel wheels. Grip wise I imagine handlebar tape would be a much cheaper and easier alternative though I've not used anything and have done just fine.

I'd give the Wovel an A- and would heartily recommend it to anyone with a large driveway or a trick back who wants to shovel on their own rather than hire a snow removal service or buy a big polluting snow blower.

If you're in the US, the Wovel website is having a 30% off sale ($83.97 USD) and while they do deliver to Canada, if you're in Canada you find the Wovel at Home Depot where it's on sale for 33% off ($99.95 CAD).

Exercise Inspiration

Have you ever run 300 miles straight?

Have you ever run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days in 50 contiguous States?

Dean Karnazes has.

Perhaps he can inspire you.

ParticipACTION's back

Amazingly ParticipACTION has been resurrected.

For non-Canadian readers ParticipACTION was a social marketing program that tried to promote exercise through television commercials and various other media sponsorships.

Now of course I'm not knocking exercise, it's one of our most important determinants of health, but ParticipACTION which was around during the relatively internet/XBOX free 70s and 80s did not stem the tide of childhood obesity, a fact not missed by the official and ironic press release,

"Over the past 25 years, the overweight/obesity rate among adolescents aged 12 to 17 has more than doubled, and the obesity rate has tripled."

ParticipACTION ran from 1972-2001.

Do you think you'll be motivated by a television commercial telling you exercise is good for you?