Sitting Kills: For Your Heart, There Is No Faking Fitness

In March, my life tally included a wife, a three-year old, and a condo. In two months, we sold our condo, moved into a rental place, had another kid, bought a house and moved in. During this time, I spent nearly 8 hours a day sitting at work, another few hours sitting at home (or packing boxes and lifting furniture), and the rest lying my back (sleeping). My exercise, other than walks to the park and wrangling kids, was running 3 miles or so every other day. I've been thin since birth, and my weight hasn't changed since 7th grade, so I consider myself reasonably healthy, even if I don't have the time I'd like to get more regular exercise.

So the article "The Men Who Stare at Screens" on NYTimes.com was disheartening and a little scary. To your heart, it doesn't really matter how much exercise you get if you spend most of your time on your butt.

"Men who spent more than 23 hours a week watching TV and sitting in their cars (as passengers or as drivers) had a 64 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than those who sat for 11 hours a week or less. What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised...Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting...Your muscles, unused for hours at a time, change in subtle fashion, and as a result, your risk for heart disease, diabetes and other diseases can rise."

If this seems alarming, you should read the rest of the article. Basically, the modern workplace forces the white-collared to sit all day. Modern home life allows us the free time to be entertained via screen. We've replaced the daily light-intensity activities of our grandparents with screen time. We've become "active couch potatoes."

The study in the article relies on a measure called metabolic equivalent of task (MET). One MET is the amount of energy you burn lying down for one minute; it ain't much. Two METs would be twice as much energy as you would spend lying on the couch. I've wondered before if METs might be useful as a way to compare apples to apples efforts in different endurance sports.

As is often the case with New York Times fitness coverage, the story merely criticizes, offering no remedy. It would be useful, for example, to suggest MET guidelines on an hourly basis, even if they are a "GuesstiMET" on behalf of one of the researchers. Surely there was some threshold of light exercise apparent in the survey results; people are not merely active or inactive and there must have been some correlation to their health.

Anyway, you can download a list of daily activities and their MET score to help you make your own GuesstiMET of how often to take the stairs.

The Compendium of Physical Activities Tracking Guide (pdf)

UPDATE 1/15/11: The New York Times reports that screen time kills. The Well blog describes mounting evidence that, regardless of your exercise time, too much sedentary "activity" is very bad for your health. This is scary stuff for the white-collar class of professional sitters.

How to Transpose Single-Cell Lists in Excel to Columns

By actually using my head to think instead of as a suitable desk-banging object, I've finally solved a data-reformatting problem that has plagued me for years: how to switch a single-cell list into a column of individual cells. In other words, how to make cell A1 in the above Excel screen shot look like range A3:A7 in the below Excel screen shot without re-keying it all.

The solution is a very easy find/replace, super-quick conversion to HTML, and then a copy/paste from a web browser back into Excel. 

Check it! (Just click the images to see them bigger. I had to make them small to fit into this Blogger template.)

Step 1: Copy the single-cell list (A1, in this case). Paste it into a notepad-like program. I prefer Notepad ++.

Step 2: Open the find/replace dialog and find ";" and replace it with HTML paragraph openers and closers, like this:

Finding and replacing all the semi-colons and replacing them with HTML paragraph tags will make the list look like this:

Step 3: Finish up the HTML code. Since the phrase "ice cream" did not have a semicolon preceding it in the original Excel list, we need to manually add a paragraph opener before "ice cream". Likewise, the word "cupcakes" had no semicolon after it so we need to add a paragraph closer after it. Then we need to add the html opener tag before the list and the html closer tag after the list. Like this:

Step 4: Save as a text file with the file extension ".htm" or ".html".

Step 5: Open that HTML file in any web browser and it will display, TA DA!, as a list in a column! Why? Well, we basically converted all the semicolons (or commas or whatever character was dividing up the list items in cell A1) into paragraph marks. Then we save the list as an HTML file. A web browser reads HTML code just like a human reading a book -- on a single line from left to right -- but renders paragraphs in a column. Basically we told the web browser to do the reformatting for us! Score!

Step 6: Copy and paste the list from your web browser into Excel, thank your browser for its hard work, then go take a coffee break -- you just saved yourself so much data-entry time that you deserve it!

Obviously, the longer the list, the more time you'll save. Short examples like above are easy to re-key quickly. I just used it on a 128-item list of email addresses that an author had simply copy/pasted into an email. Pesky authors! Why does it always fall to the publisher to handle the formatting?

You can combine the "text-to-columns" function with this technique to handle more complex lists. For example, if the list were person and title and separated by commas and semicolons like this:

You would find/replace the semicolons as above. Once converted to HTML, this would render the list like this:

 

You would copy/paste this into Excel, then highlight these cells and convert "text-to-columns" using commas as the delimiter. Voila!

Naturally, the only situation for which this technique wouldn't work is if the list items were divided using only commas, like: Dave T., CEO, Erin T. CFO, Jon H., Lead Engineer, etc. Then find/replace has no way of knowing which commas you really want to convert to paragraph marks.

Why Chrissie Wellington Did Not Start Kona (Warning: Contains Spoilers, Speculation)

Since this post was pure speculation and since Chrissie has since offered convincing explanation for her DNS at the 2010 Ironman World Championship, I've decided to delete this post.

Here are several updates that I posted after Kona that explain Chrissie's DNS.

UPDATE 10/14: Having read the official word from Chrissie on her blog, I suppose we can put an end to the wild speculation. It seems she was feeling pretty awful, though I must admit I've had identical symptoms before race day, and I always chalked them up to nerves.

UPDATE 10/21: Chrissie answered questions about her decision not to start Ironman Kona here on the Triathlete website. Read the whole interview or get the gist: "I do want to address some of the rumors that have been going around. I’ve deliberately not been reading the websites and the forums, but the rumors have come back to me. Some of them are laughable, like the fact that I’m pregnant. Others are more defamatory. That I was in someway avoiding the more stringent drug testing procedure is ludicrous to me. ... To suggest that I didn’t race because of a drug test is ludicrous and insulting."

UPDATE 10/29: Yikes! Chrissie was sick as a dog! Post-Kona blood tests revealed that the poor woman had strep, pneumonia, and West Nile--all at once! Here's Chrissie's blog post with the grisly details.

UPDATE 2/22/11: Chrissie has published all her drug test results since she turned pro. I believe this is a commendable gesture on her part, not because she has anything to prove (or disprove) but because she recognizes the importance of fair competition and the need to maintain the trust of fans of the sport.