I’m a Moron
October 19th, 2008The good news is, I’m not going to die of a heart attack.
The bad news is, I don’t know how to count.
Specifically, I’ve been counting my heart rate wrong. This possibility was broached to me by my dad, who said that there’s no way my heart could be beating the rate I was reporting. In typical diplomatic fashion, I answered “I’m not an idiot, I know how to count.” I admitted that I could have counted wrong one day, but there’s no way I could have managed to count wrong six days in a row.
And then today, I noticed I’ve been counting wrong.
Specifically, there isn’t much in life that I count. I don’t do a factory job, so I don’t count parts. I don’t do a sales job, so I don’t count inventory. The closest I get to counting, I guess, is counting files on my computer, but the computer does the counting.
The one thing I do count, though, is music. That is, when I’m listening to music with an unusual time signature, I count beats and measures. So if I’m listening to something in 5/4, I might count “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5”. Well, what about when I’m counting measures as well as beats? In that case, I substitute “1” with the measure number. So my counting goes like this:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
2, 2, 3, 4, 5
3, 2, 3, 4, 5
4, 2, 3, 4, 5
And that way I keep count of the number of measures as well as the number of beats.
The problem is, out of habit, that’s how I was counting my heart rate. So I’d count:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
4, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
And then after 30 seconds, I’d stop and double the number I reached. So if I ended on “8, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6”, I’d say “Ok, that’s 86, double that and I get 172”. Except, of course, that by starting with “1, 2, 3…”, I was skipping 0 through 10. I should have counted “0, 2, 3…” “1, 2, 3…” “2, 2, 3…” So I was skipping ten, and then doubling the result, so my heart rates were all off by 20.
So I’m still going over what I should for aerobic exercise, but I’m not in the “keel over from heart attack zone”, like I thought I was.
October 23rd, 2008 at 9:45 pm
そろばん最高！頭の中で珠弾き。