Exercise Barriers

I’m having a big problem breaking an average of a little under an hour
a day. I’ve succeeded in making it pretty rare that I miss my
20-minute “minimum”. And more and more often, I can exercise for 40
minutes, which makes for a decidedly nicer day still.

BUT. Getting above a 50-60 min/day average is hard for me. I’ve been
pretty much around this threshold for almost a year and a half, with
some breaks (see travel problems, below). I’ve tried thing after thing
after thing.

I’ve tried an exercise bike, making it easier to bike, making my own
hydration goop, biking twice/day, etc. No good.

My current theory is that I’m getting too physically battered and need
to wear more protection. Certainly, my legs look battered beyond
belief most weeks when the biking’s good. So next I’m trying doubling my
socks and wearing jeans.

NeuroExerciseMath 101

At first, I was going to get a huge post out the door on this subject,
including all my various calculations, but realized it’d take too long
and be too forbidding as a big chunk for reading, anyway. I’m just
going to start with the basics, and get more complicated later.

I’ve found it handy to think in a particular kind of unit for planning
purposes: time spent exercising.

The first thing I tried to do in neural exercise math was to decide
how much exercise I needed to roughly stay even. I found I was able
to decide whether or not I was positive or not by whether I felt
depressed and stupid. But it takes me a while after exercise to
decide. So I couldn’t just sit on the bike machine until a bell went
off, but had to try a bunch of different levels.

Every day, I do my best to get at least that amount of exercise,
though, of course, generally I try for alot more to move back toward
pre-disease neural levels.

More recently, using that as a base, I’ve used neural exercise math to
get a rough picture of how long it might take to get back my
pre-disease neuron levels. I’ll post on that later.

Starting

Starting is probably the hardest part, especially since enterprise is
one quality the disease robs us of.

I was able to use my stopping of driving as my driver to start. At
that point, to keep my job, I had to take some combination of bus,
bike, and foot to get places. My city’s Metro has a nice system that
lets you carry bikes on the fronts of buses, allowing for wide
flexibility and providing a solution to one intrinsic bus problem of
stops being not being close to most places.

I’ve since lost my job and gone on disability, hopefully temporarily
while I recover my neurons, but it was easy to stay with the pattern
of serious daily biking because I’d already started.

Another way that might help is if you announce your exercise plan to
some friend or family member, that may help tie the commitment to your
brain. Plus, it’ll probably help to to talk over the details of your
plan with somebody else. I did.

No matter how you start, you’ll have to start small and work up
annoyingly slowly from there. And prepare to start from near-scratch
again and again whenever you travel or the inevitable long-term
injuries to bike or human happen.

My plan involved a complicated combination of bus, bike, and walking.
The buses have a route that involves a single change of bus, have
a stop 1/8 mi away from home, and about 1.1 mi from where work was.
My plan was to start small and work up to biking to the closest bus
stops (“biking short”, I called that – it totalled to 20min, a bit
above what I feel to be my daily minimum to stay in rough place).
Then I worked slowly up to biking at least every once in a while the
whole distance to the spot where I changed buses – about halfway
(“biking long”). Then I did that more and more often. My hope was to
get to biking the whole distance, at least most days, but that turned
out to be impractical.

It turns out that almost as much naptime as biketime is needed
whenever I bike more than about twenty minutes (to absorb the
neurons somehow?). Thus, it was impractical to bike more than
halfway (biking and bus took the same amount of time). Unless I
wanted to spend even more than four hours a day effectively in
transit.

Even the short-term injuries and other problems will be annoying,
because it only takes one day of not exercising to start
establishing a brain cell deficit and starting to move toward
depression. I hate those days, but there’s no avoiding the occasional
one.

Trip Grumble And Suggestions

Trips are always annoying for me. I can never maintain any high
rate of exercise on them. In fact, there’s always at least one day
where I can’t even manage to get in even my minimum of 18ish aerobic
minutes. It takes some luck to be able to successfully exercise on
days when you travel.

Days like that are, as at home, somewhat depressing, and I tend to
lose things and generally feel stupider. But the impact is worse than
at home because you need to adapt more on trips and there are more new
things to appreciate.

I find it invaluable to stay at a place that has an exercise room of
some sort. So far, every exercise room I’ve seen has included a
bike. Once, that was the only working equipment…. A few times I’ve
let a higher hotel cost deter me, and always regretted it. It’s worth
every penny to worry less about losing things, and be able to fully
appreciate what you paid so much to see.

To keep at exercise on travel, I always have to either plan to go at
the start of the day or some other recurring, plausible part of the day.
The experience and problems are different enough that it took me a few
trips before I started really getting down the habit of getting in
daily exercise.

Successes

I’ve been biking about two years, and I feel as though I’ve seen some
modest improvements to my condition. This should be taken with some
salt. I haven’t taken any set of multiple medical progress tests
yet, and I don’t believe I’m up to a normal standard yet.

I’ve come to think of the impact of my HD in terms of skills – at what
level I can and can’t do various things. For example, my programming
and computer software research skills used to be excellent, enough for
me to make a good living doing some pretty fun and helpful stuff. But it’s
since become clear that even my basic programming skills are no
longer good enough to command a salary. I can still program, just
slowly and with substandard tricks and innovation and enterprise.

Some skills have clearly improved since I started biking.

Tire Pumping: When I started, I couldn’t pump up a bike
tire that used a car-tire-style pump point. Fortunately for me, the
market’s been upgrading to a newfangled style of pump, easier for me.
BUT – out of stubbornness, recently, I tried to pump up one of my old
tires. I succeeded, for the first time in years. That skill still persists.

Civ: I play a complicated computer strategy game,
Civilization IV, at a higher level than when I started biking.
Before the disease got far, I could beat a series of its predecessors on their
highest levels. That’d stopped by the time I started biking, though;
then, the intermediate level was reliably beating me. I had both
forgotten and lacked the play skills to carry out a basic strategy
that had helped propel me to my early wins. That strategy is no
harder to carry out in the current versions than in its predecessors.
I just completed a victory on intermediate level. I’m working on two
new games now: a higher-level game and a kind of game that lots of
other people are posting their scores on for evaluation purposes.

Shirts: The frequency with which I put on shirts backward
has plunged from every day before I started, to weekly. Though this
week, after writing that part of the post, it’s gone back to being bad
after two months of being good (two steps forward, one step back is
the rule here).

Blogging: Though this is fuzzier to judge than the other
things, I’m pretty sure my blogging skills have gotten better. The
month before I started riding, I was starting to be concerned about my
blogging (I post to another blog) – I was posting less often, and
about less interesting topics. My posting has gone back up from once
to 2-3 times a week. Another good sign is that I’ve been planning this
blog for a year, and only now have finally done it. Something thing to
watch is how my posting intervals change on this blog. And I feel as
though my posts are better composed. They’re back on interesting topics
(I hope), and likelier, I think, to be interesting to a broader audience.

Money: It seems easier for me to think about money.
Certainly, I’m generally less annoyed when we talk about it. But I’m
still feeling no big call to go play with how we’re managing it.

Now it’s here, now it’s not: Some skills have returned and
gone away entirely. The one that comes to mind is giving coins as
change. I used to be stubborn about keeping lots of change in my
pocket and using it. Not any more, though the urge sporadically returns.

Problems: Welcome To The Cutting Edge

To set expectations appropriately, I want to explain problems and
possible or likely limitations of biking. After all, this amounts to
an experimental treatment, and you can count on that sort of thing
having plenty of problems and drawbacks.

The worse problem might be the vast numbers of falls at the start.

Statistics show that bikers have lots of falls when they start, and
that they tail off rapidly (exponentially, for the engineers). Well,
I’d done lots of biking in college, a decade and a half ago. Though I
could still balance a bike, time and HD combined to deny me the memories
of how to ride well. I had to start that curve from very near the
newbie part, meaning many crashes. Plus, the movement problems
inherent in HD made it even worse.

Fortunately, one fear did not come to pass – when I was still driving
cars, I crashed routinely into other cars because I wasn’t paying
attention, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem. The only time a car
has hit me was when I was going the opposite direction from traffic up
a sidewalk, where turning drivers often don’t look. I stopped doing
that, and it’s been over a year now. I believe that it’s because of
the flow of new neurons, because I’m much more vulnerable to falling
in the first five minutes of a ride.

The entire progression is in a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward
progression. I do feel like more of my skills have gotten better than
worse, but I’m always seeing some skills getting worse again. There
is an appearance to me that physical skills are likelier to fall back,
but I might just be looking harder at them.

The population of people who have reversed their neural losses via
exercise is entirely unstudied in any research literature. We are on
the cutting edge of research. Generally speaking, long-term practical
problems limitations are as yet unknown. Although my memory so far
seems to be getting better, I do still fear that, even if I make it
back to a more normal brain cell count, I will continue to see
noteworthy memory and skill degrations of the kind I see in my
inevitable step back from the two steps forward. After all, even if
I’m gaining more neurons than losing, there will always be serious
turnover in neurons until a true cure becomes available.

On the third hand, I might learn to better learn how to handle the
losses, especially with plenty of neurons. I’ve started using more
mnemonic devices in the past year, for example. That’s just
speculation, though – despite my efforts, so far I can’t remember many
friends’ personal situations and problems when talking to them.

What’s Working For Me?

Long, daily exercise, in the form of biking, is the biggest help for me.
My experience is that exercise must be significantly
aerobic to help. Long periods of weightlifting, walking,
or even dancing(!) do alot less. If I’m not breathing hard, it’s not
helping.

The biking isn’t easy – I get more than my share of bruises, since
of course, well, HD has its effects on physical skills. I’ve had to
make a conscious choice to put up with them in exchange for real hope
of cutting down on the disease’s worst bad effects.

I’m currently taking and have tried many other things, in the hopes
of getting other mechanisms on my side, but really, the biking seems
to me to have made by far the biggest difference. If I’d never taken
the other things, I suspect I’d only be modestly worse. If I hadn’t
biked, I’d be getting too stupid to blog effectively by now. I’d
spend alot more time depressed, and be falling more.

The neurogenerative effect of exercise is probably what makes
the biking work for me – exercise has been shown to result in neuron
creation. But it also helps with depression, both directly via a
regular stream of endomorphins, and indirectly because I feel my
situation is getting better rather than worse.

Why the bike in particular? Well, it’s aerobic exercise. It
serves as transport, which is helpful, since like many others with
neurodegenerative diseases, I can’t safely drive; I can safely
bike, though. Finally, the bike gives more physical support than
running; I believe I’d have even more bruises if I ran instead.

Biking appears to me to be safer than driving for me because it
generates new neurons as I go, making up for lost ones, and letting me
adapt quickly to biking and to lost neurons. Most of my falls have
been just starting out. Interestingly, one skill I feel I’ve acquired
has been learning to use those new neurons as quickly as possible to
make my ride safe. I really had many more falls before that.

I’m wondering if I might eventually be able to drive safely again if I
make a practice of never driving unless I’ve biked enough that day to
remediate the previous day’s brain cell loss. But I’m not inclined
to even try until I get rather closer to my starting neuronal levels.

Daily Race With Death

Every day, I try and outrace Death. Every day, Death takes some
of my brain cells away. My effort is about winning a race with
Death almost every day to at least replace my dead brain cells,
and especially over time. Death has a huge headstart on me, and
took alot of cells before I got in the race, so I have to race
hard to get them back in reasonable time.

In the early days of this race, I used to think alot about scenes
from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a film that featured
racing scenes with an elaborately costumed Death. After finishing
my biking for the day, I’d take off my bike helmet, think of
pulling ahead of that black, skeletal figure, and think, “Nyah,
nyah!”.

So why the race? Well, my daily dose of dead brain cells comes
from Huntington’s Disease, which is a kind of disease called
neurodegenerative. That means lots of my brain cells die
every day; one WAG on the web somewhere placed the daily neuron
death level in the millions.

So what can I do about this? Well, I get on my bike every day and
stay there a while. At least 17-20 minutes, preferably over an hour.
Recent research has shown that exercise can lead to neural growth.
Neurodegenerative diseases were thought to be hopeless until
recently because neurons were thought not to ever grow, but in fact
exercise and certain substances (highly present in blueberries!)
have been shown to cause neurons to grow.

Mind you, using this to help with damage from neurodegenerative
diseases is very much experimental. You can think of this as
a lab rat’s blog. I’m going to give the lab rat’s point-of-view
of using exercise for neurodegenerative therapy.