I'll admit it...I'm a gear techie. When I took up snow skiing, I took the time to not only learn but to buy the appropriate tech for such a sport. Yes, I did look good in those stretch ski pants, But I also got pretty good skiing down "inclined elevator shafts."
When I resumed running, the gear had changed a great deal since I last ran for exercise. Yes, there are still shorts, shirt, socks and shoes, but the tech associated with them has changed a lot. Before running, though, I went back to walking and counting steps and that had me lose the weight I had put on after I changed jobs and my kids had graduated from high school and had moved on with their lives (since I wasn't running around to keep up with them). I started with a simple pedometer and eventually went high tech to advanced pedometers which connected to smartphone apps through Bluetooth.
When I started running again, I also had purchased a heart rate monitor (HRM). It had a chest strap for the sensor and also communicated with several GPS based running apps on my smartphone to give me real time feedback on the intensity of my running workouts and a record of those runs. However, when running 10-20 miles, the chest strap can chafe and cut or be an irritant to the skin at the sternum. Last year, I sprung for a new GPS watch with a built-in wrist-based HRM. After using both the chest strap and GPS watch together to see if I got the same readings (I did), I switched over to the GPS/HRM watch for my running data. I also kept a separate electronic pedometer to track overall step counts,calorie expenditure, etc. That sensor's battery eventually quit holding a charge and I replaced it with a newer, more-high tech model which incorporates an HRM but not GPS.
Unless I'm tracking an activity like running (where each sensor measures HR once per second), the monitor non-tracking periods differently. My GPS/HRM watch takes a reading once every 10 minutes. My new wrist-based sensor takes a reading every 5 seconds and computes a 5 minute average. What is interesting is that if the new sensor sees a heart rate pattern that looks similar to what is in its database, it will track the activity and make a suggestion as to how to record it.
Last Saturday night I chose to give myself a nice soapy enema with one of my long neglected longer tubes. As I have written elsewhere, getting the longer colon tubes around the hepatic flexure under the liver on the right side is my most challenging point. At somewhere between 42-44 inches in when I reach that point, it is a long ways in and a hard turn to make. I just don't push it if I get a lot of resistance. (Yes, I do have colon tubes that are longer than the ones in my galleries)
I dissolved grated Ivory soap in the enema solution and dropped a bar of soap into the bag for good measure. I figured that this soapy mixture would probably provoke a fairly fast reaction based upon previous experience. After mixing up a very soapy and sea salt enema solution, I settled in to gradually work my one-inch diameter tube. I started at about 11:00 PM and it took me quite a while to work the tube beyond the splenic flexure and then up to and past the hepatic flexure. The combination of lube and a near constant drip of the soapy solution provided enough lubrication for the tube to slide through and enter into the ascending colon (something I haven't been able to achieve since last September). There was no clean-out enema prior to this insertion so progress was probably a bit slower than it could have been.
I also had a retention ring on the retention ball to help hold the tube in. Getting the ball in on my shorter 36-inch tube is usually no problem but getting the combination of the ball and ring in provides a bit of a challenge to get by both the inner and outer sphincter muscles. It feels really good when the retention ring finally slides inside and the retention ball and ring "snap" into place. By about 11:40, the tube was all the way in. Although I had used a slow drip of the soapy solution to help with lubrication, only half a liter had been injected. When I stood up, it was a very weird feeling of the "rigidity" of this tube distributed through the length of my colon. I topped off the bag with hot water and got back down on the floor on my knees to start the real flow into me.
The tube must have been partially plugged in addition to the bends in the tube. The tube was clearly not folded back on itself but the with the valve wide open, the flow was pretty slow. As it turns out, this was a good thing because it took about 20 minutes for the first 3.0 liters. I was very comfortably filled and I was pretty hard and close to cumming. What was interesting was the closer I got to cumming, the faster the solution started to flow, I could feel my transverse colon filling and the flow back down towards my rectum which is a characteristic feeling with a top-down deep fill. I was on my back as I came. I left the valve open as I came. I looked up at the bag and the solution level was dropping fast with the wide open valve. There was half a liter left when I decided I needed to stop.
As the last contractions faded, the first contractions for the urge to expel the contents began. The tube was well-seated, but I made sure the pressure didn't push the tube out with all the contents. I rode out the initial waves and held the enema for another 10 minutes before releasing the tube and the contents. I hoped to just remove the retention ball and leave the tube inside me. The tube had different ideas and came sliding out rather rapidly because everything was so full and well-lubricated. I settled back and allowed each long contraction wave to expel the enema. It definitely did ;its job in cleaning me out.
As I prepared the first of two bags of a bicarbonate rinse, the app on my phone for my new tracker popped up a message. It indicated that it had tracked an activity over the past 90 minutes and had temporarily identified it as riding a bicycle outdoors. Did I want to keep it?
Okay, my heart rate had been elevated from the time I really started preparing the solution to the time I had expelled most of the enema and it peaked at 136-141 beats per minute as I came. And there were few steps to be recorded (consistent with bicycle riding). I chuckled at the thought of some programmer coming up with the metrics for a nice soapy enema and then disguising it as bicycle riding. The thought of "Yes, I am riding a bicycle naked at midnight with more than four feet of colon tube in my ass as a seat post and an enema bag hoisted as a safety flag." I chose "no" even though it kept the HR tracing.
So, I guess there is an app for that.
My two complete rinse outs didn't produce nearly the heart rate profile as the soapy clean out. It also didn't suggest that the next 2.5 hours looked like any of the exercise profile of the app.