Tuesday 10/14/2025
What a busy day. To start with, Joanne and I met on the roof at 9am to do a VO2 test. We’ve been reading about longevity and “health-span”, how long you remain in reasonable health. One important measure of general fitness is VO2 max (Wikipedia article), basically a measure of how much oxygen your body can process during sustained physical effort. Normally measured while wearing an oxygen mask and running on a treadmill, but it can be measured more casually using the Rockport Walking Test. Basically you walk a measured mile as fast as you can, and take your pulse rate at the end. Plug your age, gender, pulse rate, and the time to do a mile, into an equation, and read out approximate VO2 max.
I had set up a spreadsheet to do the calculations. What about the measured mile? Years ago residents had measured the walking path around the flat roof of Channing House, and found that six laps of the roof, plus another 200 feet, was a mile. So that’s what we did, walked that mile as fast as we could. Hard enough exercise that we couldn’t keep up a conversation. I kinda thought that I would pull away from Joanne but oh, no. She was maybe 15 feet behind me at the end, so our times were effectively the same. Here’s the result,
You can find many charts of “V02 max by decade” around the web, and no two are identical, plus I haven’t seen one that gave numbers for people over 80. Always the last column in the chart is “age 70-79”. However, for all of them, my 30.5 is at least 75th percentile for men, and her 26.4 is 75th or higher for women (95th percentile on one chart, “Oh, I like that one” she said).
Next was the writers group, supposed to be writing a review of an imaginary book you wish you had written. Prudence had the best one; she “reviewed” a murder mystery set in a senior residence, describing all the suspects and victims as recognizable CH residents.
Lunch. Then at 1:30 to the 8th floor lounge where Debbie’s Vision Support Group had a meeting to hear a speaker whose name I forget. I don’t normally attend this group but she had advertised it as having something to do with AI, so I was curious. That turned out to only be a recommendation to use Google Gemini for questions, ok. But he actually had a lot of interesting stuff about book readers. Did you know the Kindle app is able to read aloud? Its voice doesn’t have a lot of expression, but it will do it. Also Adobe Acrobat will read any PDF aloud.
Then I had an hour free until 3:30. I had committed to putting the Stanford Continuing Education web class “Reimagining Democracy” on the big TV on the 11th floor. So I did that. Originally this was going to be me and Joanne but a bunch of other people expressed an interest, and about 8 people showed up. And a nice little discussion after the class ended.
Then dinner and at 7:30, a jazz concert in the auditorium. Terrigal Burns piano, Tamara Dunn singing. They’ve been here before. Jazz standards well performed.
Can I go to bed now please?
Codgerville 