No time to worry about that today, though! It’s Halloween and my royale with cheese costume is calling…

I left in an incredibly good mood. While stopped in traffic I texted a friend to tell them the meeting went well, only see flashing lights in my rear view mirror. “Seriously? I’m getting pulled over for texting?” I thought. Actually, it turned out that I had run a stop sign - apparently I was in such a good mood and so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t even see it.

“Did you know that you just rolled right through a stop sign?” the police officer asked me. I wasn’t sure what to say. I remembered the advice from the videos in Why You Should Never Talk to the Cops but didn’t feel completely comfortable telling the officer that I was going to plead the fifth. In the end, I just stared confusedly for about fifteen seconds until he said, “ok,” and walked back to his cruiser.

Waiting in my car for the next ten minutes, I ran through all my options for fighting the ticket. Did I have any kind of plausible defense? But even with a ticket, I was still in a great mood, and when the officer came back to tell me he was letting me off with a warning, my day got even better.

A free lunch, an exciting job opportunity, an escaped traffic ticket, and a few other long time personal goals achieved all in one day. Very very satisfying.

I also just got back from my sister’s wedding in Maryland, which was fantastic. I doubt I’ll ever attend another wedding with sumo suits at the reception.

With regards to the sleep diet, I just cut down to 6.5 hours a night. I’m at the very beginning of the adjustment period, so I still feel pretty groggy in the morning, but not as bad as I would expect. Considering that I needed 8-8.5 every night as of just a few months ago, I consider this a successful experiment so far. If it ended right now, I think I would go back to 8 hours a night, but I’m going to push a little further and see what happens.

In other interesting news, I have moved away from sneakers as my main footwear and am now wearing Vibram’s Five Fingers almost everywhere:

The original motivation came from the article You Walk Wrong in NY Magazine. The author interviews a number of podiatrists who hypothesize that many of today’s foot and knee ailments stem from the fact that the thick padded soles of today’s shoes cause us to adopt a walking style very different from the gait our bodies evolved for over tens of thousands of years. The theory sounded reasonable to me, and as I’ve been dealing with running-induced knee injuries for the past 7 years, I thought I’d try out a more minimalist shoe to see if changing my running and walking form would help. (My roommate Craig has started doing the same thing, though he decided to pay somewhat more to get shoes that don’t make him look like a weirdo.)

What I didn’t anticipate was how incredibly satisfying I find it to be able to feel the ground through the shoes’ thin soles. Imagine you’d worn gloves for 25 years straight and now finally got to take them off and actually touch things. That’s how happy my feet feel.

The amazing thing is that, even a year after the study ended, all study participants were still sleeping 1-2 hours less a night than before the study!

So as of Monday, I will be sleeping no more than 7.5 hours a night for the next few weeks. The Sleepwarrior site also suggests waking up at the same time every day in order to train your body to release the “wake up” hormones at the same time each day, making it easier to drag yourself out of bed. I’ve always been really bad about this (morning workouts made it almost impossible) so I’ll be implementing this suggestion as well. 12:30 am to 8 am will be my standardized sleep schedule until the middle of September.

The one question is what do I do if I go to bed later on the weekend? Do I sleep in to get my 7.5 or wake up at 8 to keep my body clock? I’m leaning toward forcing myself out of bed in the morning, then taking a nap in the afternoon. I’ll log my ongoing experiences here.

What I find notable about this isn’t that some athlete lost his temper. I just want to point out the following:

1) The injury occurred because taekwondo teaches you to kick with the top of your foot. The top of your foot has all sorts of little, easily broken bones in it and is just a stupid thing to kick someone with. Sure enough, Matos’ injury came because he kicked his opponent in the knee and hurt his own foot. Styles that actually teach you to kick in a practical way strike with the shin.

2) Matos, an olympic caliber tae kwon do black belt, sucker-kicked a referee (not even another athlete) in the head and didn’t even knock him down. He punched an official in the gut and barely even slowed him down. Seriously, for someone who’s supposed to be an elite fighter, I would expect a lot more.

Any one enrolling their kids in tae kwon do (or really any martial art without a heavy emphasis on sparring) thinking they’re learning self-defense should watch this video and think twice.

The high point, though, was definitely watching one man fly three two-line sport kites at one time - one with each hand and one with his waist. The kites flew in perfect formation - like an airshow, with all three flying together, then splitting off and performing individual tricks, then rejoining again. It was beautiful.

I now own a blender that costs more than my car. What a glorious day.

This worked ok, except for two things: 1) I’d still start to feel drained at the end of a long workout because it just wasn’t enough food and 2) I got really really sick of vanilla PowerBars.

Fortunately, someone invented energy gels, which are gentle enough on my stomach that I can eat them without any problem, even while I’m working out. The downside is that I’d like to be eating one or two an hour while I’m exercising, and at $1-$2 a packet, that starts to add up.

So I looked into making my own, and it turns out it’s not hard.

Basically energy gels/bars/drinks are just a delivery system for sugar, which your body turns into glycogen to power your muscles. But it’s not quite as simple as just eating sugar, for two reasons.

First, if the sugar is absorbed too quickly, your body will produce an excess of insulin trying to balance it out. You get food comas after large meals for precisely this reason - the simple carbs and sugars in white bread/potatos/pasta/desserts get converted into sugars, leading to an insulin spike, leading to a sugar low, leading to you falling asleep at your desk. (See my post Food Comas and Second Winds for how I eliminated food comas from my life.)

Second, the stuff in your stomach must be absorbed at the right osmotic concentration. If there’s too much sugar and not enough water in your stomach, your body has to use its own water reserves to dilute the mixture so that it can process it. That’s why all gels and energy bars tell you to consume them with water. An excess of simple sugars like sucrose or fructose are often responsible for gastrointestinal (GI) distress during exercise.

Commercial energy gels/bars/drinks designed for consumption during exercise are generally based around maltodextrin, a complex carb that is rapidly converted to glucose. It is absorbed into the body very quickly (high glycemic index), which is good for quick energy. Many products include fructose as well, a sugar with a much lower glycemic index. The idea is that as a slower-absorbed sugar, fructose can balance out the insulin spike from the maltodextrin.

Clif Shots (from the makers of Clif Bars) are one exception. They pride themselves on using all natural ingredients, and so the shot is mainly brown rice syrup, which contains both low- and high- glycemic index sugars (about half maltose, which has a high glycemic index and is quickly converted into glucose, and half complex carbohydrates, which are processed more slowly).

So I went to my local natural organic supermarket and picked up a jar of brown rice syrup ($6, 1920 calories) and a bottle of agave nectar ($5, 2100 calories, 90% fructose). I also went by a home brewery supply store and bought a pound of maltodextrin ($3, roughly 1700 calories). Most gel packets cost $1-$2 for 100 calories, so it’s a significant savings (along with knowing exactly what I’m eating and why).

The proper proportions for mixing these together depends on who you ask. PowerBar says you should consume glucose and fructose in a 2:1 ratio, the logic being that your body has two different intestinal transporters for the two compounds, and so if both sugars are present you can absorb calories at a faster rate.

Hammer Nutrition, on the other hand, recommends consuming only maltodextrin with NO simple sugars added. Their argument is that complex carbs can be absorbed in a solution of 15-18% osmolality, vs. 6-8% for simple sugars like glucose or fructose. A solution of complex carbs is therefore superior because it can be more concentrated, allowing more rapid calorie consumption. Hammer Nutrition claims that adding simple sugars increases the solution osmolality to a point beyond where either compound is efficiently digested.

Who’s right? I don’t know. I’ll be experimenting over the next few weeks to see if I can actually tell the difference. I started today, eating just brown rice syrup on a 30-mile ride. (I added a dash of vanilla extract, it actually tasted pretty good.) I felt good for the whole ride with no GI problems at any point, though I did notice that I had to pee way more than usual. I don’t know if I can attribute it to the brown rice syrup, but I’m happy that I found something cheap I can eat without upsetting my stomach.

I’ll stick with the brown rice for a week, then try using just maltodextrin to see if I feel a difference. If I’m feeling adventurous, I might try fructose for a week after that, though that’s likely just asking for stomach issues. A 2:1 maltodextrin to fructose mixture would match PowerBar’s recommendation, so that’s on the horizon as well.