Anyone here old enough to remember
pondee629
Posts: 2,469 Member
running before there where personal tracking devices and Map my Run.? You'd just run around your neighborhood, park, trail or wherever, based on perceived exertion, and "timed " yourself based on start time and end time on your wrist watch, getting the distance off of your cars odometer driving the "course" several times? Maybe you carried a stop watch? Everything was approximate, guessed at, or just not known.
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Uphill both ways of course. 😋7
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I lived (and live) in area where main mile and 1/2 and 1/4 mile roads are laid out in squares almost everywhere, and you can get down to 1/8 easy enough.
I made routes of specific distances for training (hills, flat, sprints, ect) - since the races were per distance time based runs didn't matter. Plus getting back home. Since time was limited I could estimate how much distance for possible times available.
School tracks rarely used, just too boring without music, which is really the other advancement there to help. Running with Walkman didn't work so well. I guess hence the name, never saw a Runman model.
I still have my paper logs with distance, time, pace, calories.
And since I used map for longer runs into areas I didn't always know - I did give myself those routes with uphills both ways sometimes. Bummer selection doing 18 mile prep.
Thinking off all the car fumes at that time running next to major streets. So prefer the trails now. Which didn't exist as such back then, or not well marked anyway for distance.1 -
running before there where personal tracking devices and Map my Run.? You'd just run around your neighborhood, park, trail or wherever, based on perceived exertion, and "timed " yourself based on start time and end time on your wrist watch, getting the distance off of your cars odometer driving the "course" several times? Maybe you carried a stop watch? Everything was approximate, guessed at, or just not known.
This made me think of pocket watches 🤷🏾♀️ With the exception of high school track - where our coach timed runs - I don't recall doing most of this...and I'm ancient adjacent (aka pretty old)
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I also remember chest expanders (a.k.a. chest hair removers....), Bullworkers, Charles Atlas dynamic tension adverts in comics, clockwork stop watches and jumping forward into the electronic era - heart rate monitors that just counted your heart rate.
I even remember when people used to dress down to go to the gym or for a run rather than dress up.4 -
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I also remember chest expanders (a.k.a. chest hair removers....), Bullworkers, Charles Atlas dynamic tension adverts in comics, clockwork stop watches and jumping forward into the electronic era - heart rate monitors that just counted your heart rate.
I even remember when people used to dress down to go to the gym or for a run rather than dress up.
Yep remember all that stuff in addition to the manual tracking of runs.
I was just at the very end of the "water makes you weak" (think of Remember the Titans) school of thought. One water break in a 2.5 hour full pads football practice in 95 degree temps. Gatorade had been invented but it was a specialized drink sipped at the college level and above. Not something the small town HS kids got in the 1970's.2 -
I also remember chest expanders (a.k.a. chest hair removers....), Bullworkers, Charles Atlas dynamic tension adverts in comics, clockwork stop watches and jumping forward into the electronic era - heart rate monitors that just counted your heart rate.
I even remember when people used to dress down to go to the gym or for a run rather than dress up.
I still dress down to go to the gym. And am so much happier with my home gym than I ever was at a commercial gym. No waiting for equipment, no being annoyed with the people who dress up for social hour and hang out on equipment, getting migraines from people who drench themselves in perfume/cologne, etc. 😜1 -
I do remember the gyms with a focused aerobic class floor, centerpiece many times to everything else laid out around it.
And indeed the perfume wafting off the floor during classes while using the closest machines. I recall 2 gyms like that.
People talk about being uncomfortable in a gym now, because they think people are observing them too close (true or not), think if those days of gym layout with all eyes on the aerobics classes would be popular with a majority desiring to do them now.1 -
most of my running back then was on a track. I was a track and field sprinter and jumper with various clubs from about 3rd grade through middle school, and then ran track for my high school. Most I had to worry about was 1/4 mile being a sprinter. Other than that, it was in the military and we just ran whatever the prescribed route was.1
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I remember keeping a log of my resting heart rate every morning for 2 years when I raced bikes ... there was no such thing as heart rate monitors back then. or calorie counters, or step counters, or smart watches, or GPS. ... I remember getting my first GPS unit - a timex GPS ironman watch.... gave you distance, and speed and not much else. and batteries died in 2 hours. that's when cell phones were used to make phone calls too. They still do that don't they?0
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Chef_Barbell wrote: »Uphill both ways of course. 😋
Funny! Well done1 -
Yup. And, being female, I remember some pretty weird "exercise" trends for women, like the 1950s-style vibration thingies where you put a wide belt around your butt, clipped in, and got wiggled. (Different from the modern plate type vibration thingies.) Jack LaLanne on TV, in first-run episodes. High schools with literally no competitive sports (official or club) for girls, but many for boys. Times when pretty much only weight lifters lifted weights (and certainly not most women!), rather than most serious athletes using strength training to improve. When most everyday people's bikes had one speed, maaayyybe 3. When there were not gyms on every crossroads and in every shopping center complex (where I was, there weren't shopping centers).
Completely off topic, but one of my 20-something friends was going on about the primitive calculators he used in school. I showed him a picture of what we used in high school to speed up computations that were beyond our mental manipulations. He didn't have the slightest idea what it was. (Slide rule, of course.) That's math uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow. 😉
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I didn't start running consistently until a few years ago. I did try a plan many many years ago I found in a magazine that was similar to C25k. I didn't have a track or a watch with a second hand, so I would count steps (1 step per meter for 200, 400 or 800 meters) and use pebbles to count my "laps". That running attempt ended when summer came, since I lived in Arizona at the time.
When I started running in 2011, I didn't get a fitness watch for a long time. I would run for an hour or so, noting starting and ending times, then trace out the route on mapmyrun to see what the distance was. That worked fine for my needs at the time. It wasn't until I had been racing for a few years and was doing longer races that I got one, since I was interested in how I was pacing myself during the race and not just the final result.0 -
Completely off topic, but one of my 20-something friends was going on about the primitive calculators he used in school. I showed him a picture of what we used in high school to speed up computations that were beyond our mental manipulations. He didn't have the slightest idea what it was. (Slide rule, of course.) That's math uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow. 😉
Still have 4-5 slide rules (including a circular one) that I used in HS and college. I think I can still figure out how to use one. Not worth much on eBay. Just $10-$30.
I guess I'll just keep them for old time's sake to use in case the power goes out on my laptop or phone and I need to solve any complex math problems (involving such things as roots/powers (beyond 2), triginometrym logrithims or exponentials) that I've never had to solve again after I graduated college over 45 years ago.
LOL!
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Theoldguy1 wrote: »I also remember chest expanders (a.k.a. chest hair removers....), Bullworkers, Charles Atlas dynamic tension adverts in comics, clockwork stop watches and jumping forward into the electronic era - heart rate monitors that just counted your heart rate.
I even remember when people used to dress down to go to the gym or for a run rather than dress up.
Yep remember all that stuff in addition to the manual tracking of runs.
I was just at the very end of the "water makes you weak" (think of Remember the Titans) school of thought. One water break in a 2.5 hour full pads football practice in 95 degree temps. Gatorade had been invented but it was a specialized drink sipped at the college level and above. Not something the small town HS kids got in the 1970's.
Freshman year High School, Cross Country, fall season, no water until after showers. Sophomore year, water breaks became mandatory during the workout. Along the same lines, I saw a "right and wrong" way to stretch flier at a local gym. Wouldn't you know each and every "wrong way" was the way I was taught in High School. Surprised I survived.3 -
Completely off topic, but one of my 20-something friends was going on about the primitive calculators he used in school. I showed him a picture of what we used in high school to speed up computations that were beyond our mental manipulations. He didn't have the slightest idea what it was. (Slide rule, of course.) That's math uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow. 😉
Being in HS in the 1970's one of the kids in chemistry class showed up with a calculator that did the basic functions plus squares and square roots. His parents were big farmers and we all knew the family had money. He said the calculator cost $100.
Today got a solicitation from the VFW for a donation. Include with the solicitation as a "free gift" was a calculator with the same functions except instead of needing batteries it is solar powered.0 -
I lived (and live) in area where main mile and 1/2 and 1/4 mile roads are laid out in squares almost everywhere, and you can get down to 1/8 easy enough.
Yeah, before I had any kind of GPS device, that is what I would do -- a full block here is 1/8 mile (and if you know the city you know what a full block is), so I would count the blocks as I ran and usually avoid the diagonal streets that messed things up.
My dad was a runner in a city that wasn't so logically planned out, though, so he would do the odometer thing, although by the time I was a teen and running off and on there were tons of paths with mile markers on them. (This was the '80s, so not recent at all.)0 -
Btw, before opening it, I guessed the thread would be about Richard Simmons. My mom loved Richard Simmons, and also was into jazzercise.
I've told this story before, but this was also the era of Jane Fonda workouts (and Olivia Newton-John's Let's Get Physical, with a video indicating that it was really all about exercising). A high school friend found her mom's Jane Fonda's Pregnancy Workout video (VHS, you know) and was absolutely horrified that her mom was pregnant at her age (which of course at that time seemed comically old), but her mom explained that she just figured it would be the easiest one to start with.1 -
My running watch broke a bit, enough that I can't see the display, but it still works. So all my runs are done by a "go frolic around the woods for a while" approach, but I can see how far I ran after I'm finished. I kind of love it, won't be getting my watch fixed any time soon
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Running in winter, with long sleeves and a light jacket, is pretty much the same thing. I don't look at my watch until I turn it off, and don't see my laps until I upload the run on the computer. I usually end up running faster rather than slower when I don't monitor my speed, especially when it's cold and I'm pushing to get warm or to get home again.2
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