…beats per minute. That’s the very tight targeted heart rate zone that I work out in. I’m sweating at this heart rate, but it’s easy for me to carry on a conversation and, if I’ve eaten correctly and well, then I feel like I could go all day. This is my base zone, and Nordic athletes have been training this way for years. Building a big base, it’s called, and one of the reasons that Nordic athletes are so successful is that they have a huge level of base fitness and they supplement it with a couple of high-intensity interval workouts each week. The latter helps build VO2 and cardio capacity, as well as stamina.

But this isn’t really a piece about my training methods. It’s about my determination not to decline into inactivity and death. Oh, I know the theory of entropy and all that. It’s just that I don’t want to wind down too soon.

I had this stunning revelation in May that everything — everything! — physically wrong with my parents was preventable. High cholesterol, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Even my father’s cancer might have been preventable. He had esophageal cancer which occurs predominantly in male smokers who were heavy drinkers. My father smoked Pall Malls and drank scotch for 20 years. Scotch is a known carcinogen.

It’s easy, when you’re scared and angry and hurting, to want to blame something, someone.  Why couldn’t they take better care of themselves?  Why didn’t my father get an esophageal scope every two years?  Why didn’t they change their diets, lose weight, and eliminate the Type 2 diabetes?

But what I’ve learned from my own struggles with fitness and health is that it isn’t so simple.  Each time I take a bite of food I make a choice.  And during the four weeks leading up to my father’s death, I ate McDonald’s four times, once each week.  I ate a Big Mac meal with medium fries and a medium soda, and I ate it because I was frantically busy trying to manage all the details of my dad’s medical care, my parent’s finances, care for my mother, my own paid work, finishing my thesis.  You name it and I can give you a reason (or rationalization) why I ate this food. 

But the truth is that mostly I ate it because it was easy, it tasted good, and it offered me some degree of comfort.

On a typical day, when I’m being careful and mindful, I eat four 375 calorie meals.  This adds up to 1500 calories or 30 weight watchers points.  Each meal is broken down into 19g of protein (about 100 calories), 9g of fat (81 calories), and the reminder of calories to a mix of whole grain simple carbs and complex carbs from fruits and vegetables. 

Each Big Mac meal totals 1060 calories, 414 of which come from fat.  The meal has 46 grams of fat — almost two days’ worth for me — 134g of carbs, and 27g of protein.  That’s a shit pile of badness that adds up.  For me it added up to 8 extra pounds of weight.

Oh, it wasn’t just the food.  It was also that I felt unable to drag myself to the gym, or out for a bike ride, or to even walk the dog one block to the park.  I was doing well if I worked out three times a week for 30 minutes.  I felt stopped in my tracks by life.

Which would be okay except for that entropy fear.  And the disease fear.  And the determination not to need joint replacement surgery at 65, a bypass at 70, or be dead at 73.  It’s enough to make me run frantically around like a gerbil in a Habitrail

 What I instead must remind myself is that it is one meal at a time, one workout at a time.  That’s they way to fight entropy and disease.  It’s a long slow adjustment to our nutritional navigation and,  just like dying, this is one we pretty much have to do alone.

I write about technology for a living. And it used to be that I was so good at it, that I actually wanted to buy the products I was writing about. I wanted a laptop with WiFi. I wanted a wireless jukebox to stream my MP3s from the office to the living room. I wanted an Xbox, a Kindle, a watch with an altimeter and GPS built in.

However, I never wanted a smart phone. I said I didn’t want to be that connected. I said nothing I did was life and death and my clients could just wait. Then in June, 2008, I bought a Blackberry. And much to my surprise, it actually mitigated my anxiety because I could see the emails coming (and going), I could reassure myself that nothing crucial was happening while I was out of the office. So even though I could read my emails and respond with lightning speed, my Blackberry still was little more than a phone with email access.

That was before I installed the Google, Facebook, and Dictionary.com apps. Now my phone is like a magic box, full of knowledge that I MUST KNOW RIGHT AWAY! The temperature in St Johns? Google it. The definition of “philogyny?” Go to the dictionary.com app. What my ex-wife is doing (I swear I’m not stalking you, Sap)? Go to the Facebook app and check out the status updates. What Terri Gross talked about last night? Go to the folder where your podcasts are stored after your phone automatically downloads them each morning.

For a woman who loves knowledge, the magic Blackberry box seems like the greatest toy in the world. But I noticed something was happening to me. Because I could immediately get the definition of a word, I stopped making lists of words that I wanted to look up. And because I didn’t write those words down, I didn’t remember them as well. “Philogyny” was sitting in my email inbox yesterday morning (because you can have words delivered to you, as well) but I couldn’t remember it this morning when I sat down to write this blog post.

My attention span has shortened, too. When I see the blinking red light on the top of the Blackberry that indicates a new email, text, or Facebook update, I am compelled to check it, even if I am busy with other things — say, writing. The magic Blackberry box is keeping me, I think, from the stillness necessary for deeper thought. It’s my own version of Pandora’s jar (because I haven’t had all my memory erased by technology and forgotten that it was a jar and not really a box), but rather than releasing evil into the world and trapping hope inside, I’ve unleashed the evil of busy-ness and trapped the stillness necessary for sanity and art inside my Blackberry 9000.

My ideas around busy-ness aren’t new. I’ve been struggling with busy-ness for 15 years. We live in a culture that values this. There is an unassailable right to say, “I’m working. I’m busy.” It dates back to that city on a hill so favored by our forebears. What is new is that technology makes it even easier to be busy and not even realize it. It’s fun to check the weather on your phone. It’s cool to use the GPS feature and plot your bike route. It’s interesting to be able to find a restaurant in a new city just by punching a few buttons and letting the “location-aware” features tell you what’s near by (Never mind that ten, twenty, thirty years ago I’d have told you that was Big Brother in action).

But all of these things pull our attention away from the present moment. Which is why I am going to kiss more and Facebook less.

I will leave you with one example of my tech dependent ridiculousness. My mother and I were driving from her house down into town to meet with an attorney. She asked the specific address of said attorney. “I don’t know,” I said. “The computer was already shut down when we were getting ready to leave, but once we’re back in range and I have a signal, I’ll Google him on the Cracky.”

My mother’s jaw dropped. Then she dropped her already bass-low voice another half octave and said, “Have you ever heard of a phone book, Kathleen?”

Oh, how quaint. I believe I’ll go acquaint myself with this tangible object.