Pizza and heart rates

I have a wide variety of duties, and a couple of nights ago my duty was dumpster diving. We had an allegation of wrongdoing, the evidence of which was supposed to show up in the trash. It didn’t, but I was otherwise surprised by what I saw.

In two words, pizza boxes. We have a Pizza Hut outlet – a converted CHU, essentially – on the FOB, and it apparently does a land office business. Every dumpster I peered into had multiple pizza boxes. Way more than I had expected. Four, five, six, ten, more. The dumpsters are emptied almost daily, or no less than every other day, so the pizza boxes were all recent.. Apparently lots of soldiers are skipping the chow hall.

Also saw a shelf, about eight brand new steno notebooks, DVD cases, and lots of stuff that soldiers are tossing out in preparation to leave. I guess they’re getting skinny, notwithstanding the pizza.

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A friend of mine was showing off his fancy Polar heart monitor watch. The sensor straps to his chest when he works out, and talks to his watch for heart rate, lap times, and all sorts of stuff. He has a sensor in his shoe that tells his watch info about his stride.

He uploads his watch into his computer, and it makes charts and graphs, tells him what his fitness age is, and helps him plan his workout. He was showing me the graph of his heart rate from his 8 mile run the other day. Average mile time; 9 minutes, 32 second. The watch tracks temperature and altitude, and the graph showed the altitude of his run.

At several points, the graph showed his heart rate briefly dropping to near zero. I asked him if he has heart problems or something. He said no. He thinks the dip was when he ran near jammers, and his heart monitor couldn’t talk to his watch.